In Which We Still Feel Philip Johnson Had Much To Learn

His Glass House

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Philip Johnson's estate in New Canaan, Connecticut features eight buildings:

1) his house
2) a guest house
3) a gallery devoted to paintings
4) a gallery devoted to sculpture
5) a library
6) a folie
7) a ghost house
8) a tower

Thirty-three acres surround these structures, all as meticulously put together as the buildings themselves.

with his mother and sisters, 1917

Philip Johnson's mother Louise took a lot of staged photos of her children. She was relatively late to motherhood, and had not entered it lightly. She parented her only son with great purpose, pushing him towards academic achievement. She did not wish to be his friend. When he felt his first stirrings of attraction towards other boys in his class, he asked his mother what these feelings meant. "Philip, how should I know?" she replied.

with his sister

When Philip was a teenager his father was appointed by the government to investigate reports of pogroms in Poland during the first World War. The family sailed for Paris on the Aquatania. When they returned to Cleveland a few months later it was hard not to find it a disappointment.

He made few friends at boarding school — he was more concerned with winning the respect of his classmates. After being voted "Most Likely To Succeed," he entered Harvard, where he had none of the status of his more bourgeois friends, but all of the money. Finances were never a concern for young Philip: his father had purchased Alcoa stock i(n Philip's name) before the company became a behemoth. He bought a car and began amassing a library to his tastes. Philip tried kissing a few of his classmates with varying degrees of success. His father told him to forget about wanting to fuck men.

in Cairo 1928

Philip was depressed throughout his time at Harvard. A visit to Egypt claimed his virginity — he mated with a guard inside the Cairo Museum. Because of his numerous absences, he found himself a semester short of a bachelor's degree. Instead of finishing, he put his car on a boat crossing the Atlantic and arrived in Berlin. It was 1929.

Men of his particular predilection were numerous. The city thrived around him. "The Americans were the conquerors of Germany," he said later, "and the young Germans were eager to accomodate them. Paris was never that gastfreundlich." He observed the Bauhaus with wonder, making his first acquaintance with the artists there as a patron. The first painting he bought was a Klee.

PJ in Berlin, 1930

Other members of the group impressed him less. "Kandinsky is a little fool who is completely dominated by his swell Russian Grande Dame of a wife," he wrote. "He has millions of his sometimes painful abstractions sitting around the house and thinks he is still the leader of a new movement. It is sometimes pathetic, sometimes amusing."

Two months after the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, Philip was back in America, finishing his degree so he could relocate himself in the institution's shadow. He became infatuated with a boyfriend named Cary Ross. In a letter to a female friend, he wrote that "You are the only one who knows about Cary and me, and to whom I can talk now. As you know the only reason it came about was because he is good-looking and identified with that group down there in my emotional life. Well it seems now that it was merely a passing whim with him, and he was too weak to tell me, and let me go on thinking more. He came up the other day, and naturally I soon found out where the land lay, and am now in a species of hell which I heartily dislike."

with Mies Van Der Rohe and Phyllis Lambert

Philip worked at the MoMA for no salary; he did not require any money from them and even paid for his own secretary. He travelled to Berlin often in order to indulge himself. The art dealer Julien Levy later said, "He showed me a Berlin night life such as few could have imagined. The grotesque decadence I was to discover over and over again in Berlin those few short weeks could only be compared, one might suppose, to Paris during the last days of Louis XVI."

Unlike in his youth, depression passed through Philip like a whim. He enlisted Mies Van der Rohe and his associate Lilly Reich to design a New York apartment he had purchased on a lark. He wanted the place to eschew the contemporary urge towards art deco.

Philip busied himself by preparing a massive event designed to feature modern architecture, the first in the MoMA's history. Despite or perhaps because of his experience with the artists of the Bauhaus, the final exhibition diminished Gropius, Le Corbusier (Philip was not a fan) and Van der Rohe quite significantly, placing their American peers on at least the same level. The arrangement satisfied no one, and Frank Lloyd Wright was also made furious by his depiction in the catalogue.

Philip replied,

I feel more than badly that you have misunderstood my intentions and actions to such an extent, and I am writing in the hope of clearing up as much as possible the reasons for your complaints. Please believe that I have appreciated your efforts to remain friends despite the many misunderstandings which I sincerely regret.

I feel as strongly as ever that I have a great deal to learn, much more so after the the experience of trying to make an exhibition. I still hope that we can have a good visit when I come West this spring...

For Philip Johnson toadying was itself an art of the highest order.

philip in NYC 1933

The moment Hitler emerged on the world political scene, Philip Johnson heard of him from his German-American supporters. Philip knew very little of world politics when he attended his first Nazi event in Potsdam, NY; his life in the city among gays and Jews effectively constituted Hitler's worst nightmare. Philip had even recently jumped into a relationship with a jazz singer named Jimmy Daniels. After all, Harlem was only a short trip up from his Upper East Side stomping grounds.

Jimmy Daniels perhaps a decade later

When Hitler came to power in January of 1933, Philip defended the man to anyone who would listen. He wrote an article for his Jewish friend Lincoln Kirstein's magazine entitled "Architecture in the Third Reich." Although he had not grown up hating Jews, he was receptive to Hitler's views of them. When Hitler ordered the murder of gay Nazi Ernst Rohm because of his homosexuality and potential challenge to the dictatorship, Johnson presciently left Germany.

Sony sold the building Johnson designed in New York to AT&T this year. I walk past it all the time — it seems to me it would be wholly at home in Nazi Germany. It is not surprising that Philip found something to admire in Hitler — many gentile intellectuals of the period did, just as many are attracted to the charisma of contemporary dictators now. But it is disgusting to be attracted to the Nazi aesthetic itself.

Johnson left his position at the MoMA in order to join up with Huey Long, the "left-wing" populist whose plans to redistribute wealth were ironic considering Philip's position. The MoMA board was completely embarrassed when Philip informed them that he was leaving to become Long's "Minister of Fine Arts." When he arrived in Louisiana, Long refused to see Philip.

After Long's death later that year, Philip attempted to join the cause of the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, another populist whose anti-Semitic radio addresses were familiar rhetoric across the Midwest. Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice, an organization based on the man's plan to attack banks and the country's wealthiest citizens. Philip's biographer Franz Schulze rationalizes Philip's dabbling into politics thusly: "He could, when so inclined, impose an immense concentration on whatever concept seized him."

philip and jeannette in Nice

Because he was gay, Philip Johnson knew he could never properly be a Nazi.  Among his friends were those loyal to Germany, and this put him in the government's crosshairs. The FBI began assembling a dossier on Philip. He complained of Jews trying to buy a magazine he was interested in, and was disgusted by his experience observing a Polish ghetto. He was ever more convinced of the superiority of his mother country, and planned to celebrate when Hitler conquered England.

He took a position for the German propaganda ministry and dispatched reports in English favorable to Germany from the "front lines." Reading his reports, bile rises in every mouth. Such indiscretions are routinely tossed aside by those who wanted to embrace Johnson fully as an architect. I can't myself look at any of his buildings without remembering the things he said, even if he was a young man.

his later attempt at a synagogue

During the war, Philip was admitted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He had co-written one of the books assigned for his class in the history of architecture. One of his projects at Harvard was to build his own house, a lot he purchased at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge. He tried to put his Nazi past behind him by joining the Harvard Defense Group, but he was eventually dismissed after complaints. He tried to apply for a position with U.S. Naval Intelligence but was rejected for obvious reasons. The FBI continued to follow his activities.

Most people at Harvard actively avoided the young Nazi, but occasionally some found his personality charming. After sitting next to him at a socialist dinner party, Betrand Russell commented to the host that "your friend Philip is a diabolist, which is a strange thing for a friend of yours to be, but how much pleasanter it is to spend an evening with a gentleman you disagree with than with a cad you agree with." After his first year there, he moved into a room in the Hotel Continental, hiring an English butler and a Filipino houseboy to keep the place familiar while his new home was constructed.

On March 12, 1943, Philip Johnson was drafted into the army. He never left the U.S., or even advanced beyond the rank of private. His fellow soldiers called him "Pop" because of his age and general ineptness.

with Frank Lloyd Wright after the war

Through the influence of his friend Alfred Barr, Philip returned to the MoMA after his discharge from the army in 1944. Shortly thereafter, he bought his estate in New Canaan and began construction on what would be known as The Glass House. The irony was lost on him, and in fact irony itself did not emigrate to America until a decade later.

The Glass House was Philip's primary residence on the estate. It was first and foremost a bachelor pad except to the extent that it did not afford a measure of privacy, kind of like a closet that wasn't. Since such a structure could only be realistic on an estate that allowed total isolation from passersby, The Glass House is of course impossible except for the very rich, who tend to value their privacy more than most.

By 1949 he had completed the Guest House, opaque where his own residence was open. He moved in and immediately set to work on an article documenting the construction of both buildings. He invited the editors of every architectural publication he knew to come visit. In the meantime his attempts to pass the licensing exam in his field failed again and again. In order to continue practicing what was now his trade, he relocated his office to New Canaan and began teaching part-time at Yale.

One of his commissions in the years that followed was the design of a synagogue in Port Chester, New York. He had won the job by promising to deliver his design at zero cost. The resulting structure is among the most revolting of Johnson's designs — the wholly uninspired, predictable interior clashing with an exterior that was nothing short of repulsive. Years later Philip would continue his half-hearted desire to atone for his Nazi past by designing an Israeli nuclear reactor.

Sorek Nuclear Research Center

In 1954 Philip finally passed the architectural exam and relocated his practice to Manhattan, where he shared space with Van der Rohe. Together they collaborated on the legendarily bad Seagram building, although the vast majority of the responsibility for the building's dullness fell on Van der Rohe alone. He would make his own name during the ensuing decades, falling in and out of the zeitgeist depending on the various whims of the media and his peers.

Philip was forever wanting to add structures to his New Canaan parcel, and the pavilion he added to the lagoon was the worst of his ideas. Aesthetically, it was a hodgepodge, and its intrusion on nature — in effect, in created a small island where there was nothing — made it not only objectionable but dangerous. "There is something attractive about making some part of a building precarious," Philip would later claim airily. "It is titillating. I sometimes get an erection when I jump over that little stretch of water."

Philip fared better in the museums he designed in the 1950s as his star rose. He had already had good practice when he fashioned an extension of the MoMA, and his work on the fantastic Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Nebraska and an art museum in Fort Worth emboldened his confidence. His proposals for Lincoln Center were not well-regarded among his peers, but his early designs for it have aged better than many of his more celebrated structures.

one of his unbuilt plans for Lincoln Center

In his personal life, Philip had dumped his serious boyfriend for a gorgeous Yugoslavian immigrant named Peter Vranic. They kept each other supplied with what the other lacked; as Philip would later put it, things were "very violent, very sexual, very physical, and very short." When Vranic found out he wasn't in the now 50-year old Johnson's will, however, he bailed. In the chaos of this turmoil Philip met the man he would spend the rest of his life with: then-RISD student David Whitney.

Early in their relationship, Philip had treated David like a fawning admirer, installing him in a Manhattan apartment. There David established friendships with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns to satisfy him whenever Philip ignored him. Whitney used Philip's money to great effect, and soon buildings had to be constructed to accomodate the paintings his lover desired. Before David's arrival, Philip had only installed an oval-shaped swimming pool near The Glass House, but with David's input he designed a large art gallery, completed in 1965. A sculpture gallery followed by 1970.

david whitney in 1975

David Whitney died in 2005, five months after Philip. Tours now run through The Glass House from May to November. An extended survey of the place runs about $100 and should be booked in advance. Taking a virtual tour on the website is far more cost-effective. If you did not take care to remember, you would think that The Glass House had suddenly popped into reality to serve some new master — it is no good as a museum. This place sheds history, now rendered invisible among the structures Philip imagined.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Vuillard. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

photo: Richard Payne

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In Which We Get High And Ascend Into Nothingness

Babel's Babies

by PAUL JOHNSON

It can be argued that there was always an element of the fantastic in American architecture, even at its most (apparently) utilitarian. Nothing brings this out more clearly than the story of the skyscraper. Here is another deep and ancient human instinct: to build houses of many storeys. Some of the biggest Chinese pagodas, from the early medieval period, had ten or more levels. In fifteenth-century Italy it was the fashion, in certain cities like Bologna, to build tower-houses to celebrate family pride and overtop rivals, with the equivalent of twelve storeys.

sana'a tower houseThat was also the fashion in southern Arabia, though somewhat later. In Sana in northern Yemen, nine-storey houses were built in the seventeenth century; in Shibam there are, even today, over five hundred such tower-houses, though the highest has no more than eight storeys. The Potala Palace in Tibet has twelve storeys in some places, though they exist within the entrails of a gigantic building.

potala palaceThe term 'skyscraper' was a late-eighteenth century invention applied both to the high triangular sails on ships and to high-standing horses — Skyscraper won the Epsom Derby in 1789. Its first recorded application to a building was in 1880, when Queen Anne's Mansions were built in Westminster, ten storeys high, with perky roofs and spires, using traditional technology.

carson mansion in eureka, CAReally tall buildings, however, required three things: steel-frame construction; powered elevators and strong financial pressure to concentrate office blocks in city quarters with high rentals. That meant Chicago was, almost inevitably, the first skyscraper city, especially since, unlike its main rival for the position, St. Louis, it was outside of the swath of the Civil War. Here we come to another example, and a brilliant one, of technology creating art. The rise of Chicago was exceptional even by American standards, and right from the start, was the result of using the latest technology. In 1830 it was a fort with a few farmhouses, and a population of two hundred. At the head of Lake Michigan it was the natural entry point for the great Midwest plains, but a half-mile sandbank blocked access. Army engineers, using new digging equipment and explosives, blasted a canal through.

Two years later, a Chicagoan called George Snow invented the balloon frame. This was a house-construction system using milled lumber, quickly nailed together without need for mortice and tenon, which halved the time taken to build a house. The balloon frame plus railroads explains why, by 1848, Chicago was a first-class port handling the biggest inland-water ships in the world, with a hundred trains a day arriving on eleven different railroads. In 1856, it decided to jack itself out of the mud. Again using the latest equipment, the entire built-up town was raised 4 feet, by means of giant jacks. Briggs' hotel, made of brick, five storeys high and weighing 22,000 tons, was jacked up while continuing to function. The jacking finished, the spaces were infilled and new roads and sidewalks laid down.

The appalling Chicago fire of 1871 helped matters. Lasting 27 hours, it destroyed 17,000 buildings, a third of the total, and made 100,000 homeless. The city was then invaded by architects and engineers, who set about devising fireproof building systems. By 1874, Peter B. Wight and Sanford Loring had combined steel framing, brick flooring and cladding of terra-cotta and ceramic to make their buildings virtually proof against flames. Chicago had limitless access to land and shortage of space was never a factor in the skyscraper boom there. But accountants calculated that very tall buildings, erected in the financial-business sector of the city, could generate rents ten times higher per square foot of office space than low buildings only a few hundred yards away.

upper michigan avenue 1925Moreover, caissons developed during the national bridge-building phase of the 1860s and 1870s were discovered to be perfect for laying the foundations of immensely heavy buildings on Chicago's muddy surface. Chicago also seized eagerly on the new elevator, run first by steam, then much more efficiently by electricity. New York's Haughwout Building had put in a steam elevator in 1857, and it had come to Chicago in 1864, before the fire, in a store owned by Charles B. Farewell. By 1870 there was a hydraulic elevator, and in 1887 the first electric one. By that date Chicago had 800,000 citizens. Eight years later it had over a million, and 3,000 electric elevators, with elaborate safety devices — and in many cases with beautiful wrought-iron and brass gates, mainly in the French Second Empire mode — had been installed.

Whether New York or Chicago built the first true skyscraper need not concern us, though the title probably belongs to New York's equitable Life Assurance Company Building of 1868-70 by Arthur Delevan Gilman. It combined steel frame, the new kinds of cladding and lifts, thought it was only five storeys high (and has long since been pulled down). Far more important was the fact that Chicago produced the first skyscraper architect in Louis Sullivan. Chicago was a utilitarian city which had to make every dollar pay and looked to a 9 percent return on capital. New York was a headquarters city where prestige and self-advertisement were factors in buildings. The first Chicago building with iron pilasters, large windows and a proper skeleton facade was the Leiter Building by William Le Baron Jenney, but it was only five storeys, like the Equitable. Jenney built a ten-storey building in 1884-85 for Home Insurance, with reinforced iron frames on two facades.

Leiter buildingBuildings are not luxuries, like paintings and sculpture. They are necessities. They have to work. One of the characters of the International Modern Style was that, being highly ideological and rigid, it was also inefficient. Its buildings, conceived on the principle of functionalism, were actually dysfunctional in many cases. High-rises created crime and other social problems. Brutalist hospitals killed their patients. Such buildings also disgusted younger architects with their lack of opportunities, choice and inspiration. In 1966, Robert Venturi published an important book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which called for multiplicity and variety in the style of new buildings and answered Mies van der Rohe's fatous 'Less is more' with 'Less is bore.'

Sony Building (formerly AT & T building)In paintings, such an attack would have been severely punished; indeed, the book would have been reviewed. But Venturi's onslaught brought commissions. Clients were as bored as he was. Individuals wanted homes, not units. Corporations wanted images they could be proud of like the Chrysler or the Empire State buildings, not glass boxes. When Philip Johnson and John Burgee produced their design for AT&T's corporate headquarters in New York in 1979, its flashy classicism surmounted by a broken pediment acted like a slogan, and for the first time in the century, anti-Modernists got the publicity on their side. It would not be true to say that Modernism in architecture collapsed like a pack of cards, though some of its buildings came close to it before they were demolished. But by the 1980s it was dead.

Neuen Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart Post-Modernism in architecture took many forms. Michael Graves reintroduced colour contrasts in the Portland Building. In the Republican Bank, Johnson and Burgee reintroduced the Gothic with Baltic stepped-gables and spires in an immense tower. In the Neue Staatsgalerie, James Stirling and Michael Wilford experimented in what might be called New Mycenaean. Venturi's Sainsbury Wing for the London National Gallery was Baroque Pastiche.

Sainsbury wingSpanish architects were particularly forward in producing new stylistic exercises. At Marne-la-Vallee near Paris, Ricardo Bofill combined classicism with varieties of Baroque and even pseudo-Rococo. In the same vast development, Manuel Nunez produced immense circles, curves and arches. Santiago Calatrava reintroduced spectacular vaulting for a variety of internal purposes. Another huge 1980s-90s development, Canary Wharf in London Docklands, was predominantly Romanesque. The architects of classical Greece, ancient Egypt of the New Kingdom, Neo-Babylonia, Paleteresque and Sondergotik, Palladio and Piranesi all arose from their graves to haunt the fleeing Modernists.

Colour returned - gleaming classical white, blood-red from the hetacombs, pale green from Art Deco, the orange of the Pueblo Indians, shocking pink from the heyday of Schiaparelli and Raoul Dufy, yellows and browns of desert Islam. Much of the new architecture was silly and meretricious; much was the architectural equivalent of Pop art or Op art. But it created a multilingual hubbub — very different from the strident authoritarian monoglot monotone of International Modernism — in which creative architects of genius could find their individual voices, as they were beginning to do, in increasing numbers, by the early 21st century.

Hong Kong Shanghai BankWith the return of exuberance in building, the skyscraper tower made a dramatic comeback, not only in the United States but all over the world especially in the new economies of the Far East. Hong Kong, like Manhattan Island, was a natural skyscraper city. It grew to the skies, in the 1950s and 1960s, in the unfeatured block style of International Modernism. The seventies introduced colour and variety. In the 1980s there came revolutionary changes with the introduction not so much of Entrail architecture as of Meccano towers, in which huge steel beams on the outside provide the patterning and decoration and appear to constitute the structure — thus the 1986 Hong Kong Shanghai Bank of Norman Foster jostles for attention with its immense neighbor, the Bank of China Tower by I.M. Pei.

Meccano architecture, both in its hard-edge and rounded-edge versions, became a particular favorite in East and Southeast Asia. It was used for the immense twin towers of the Tokyo City Hall, 1992, by Kenzo Tange, a late convert to Post-Modernism, who causes a sensation when he produced his plan for what looks like an 800 foot-high metallic west front of a late-twentieth century cathedral, with square girder frames instead of spires. Nearly twice as tall were the twin Petronas Towers at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, 1,480 feet high when completed in 1996. Their Meccano serrations are rounded and there is a whiff of the pagoda about their spires.

site of Park Hyatt GuangzhouBut one of the objects in building them was to produce for Asia in general, and mighty little Malaysia in particular, the title of the world's tallest building, at least for a time. This had been held by the Sears Tower in Chicago. It is worth reminding those who think it odd that Communism should produce the world's tallest building that for decades the record for the tallest building in Europe was held by a Wedding Cake tower built in Warsaw in the 1950s. It was beaten by Norman Foster's Kommerzbank headquarters building in Frankfurt, thought its 1300 feet is comparatively low by world standards.

the never built tour sans fin in ParisGreat skyscraper towers are never built for purely commercial reasons. They advertisements, self-advertisements, corporate, personal or even national: in short, their motivation is akin to artistic; to use the current 21st century jargon, they are 'statements.' Skyscrapers are still built with essentially the same technology used in the Empire State at the end of the 1920s. But increased knowledge of how they and their materials behave, when built, enables them to creep higher and higher. As long ago as 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high skyscraper. Present towers are still less than a third that height. There is a proposal to build a Millennium Tower of ninety storeys and over 1,000 feet in London; for a Tour Sans Fin in Paris, for a Nina Tower in Hong Kong (called after the billionairess Nina Wang); and a tower in Melbourne which will be 2,250 feet high.

Planning is going ahead on buildings of up to 2,600 feet, including a tower in Tokyo in the Entrail style. These projects depend on the economic climate; the Empire State, planned just before Wall Street crash of 1929, was the last big skyscraper to be built for nearly two decades. But there can be little doubt that the mile-high skyscraper will be built during the 21st century. As is shown repeatedly in the cities of America, which has always built the best skyscrapers and grouped them profusely, a grove of varied tall buildings is one of the most exciting sights on earth. These airy and glittering city centres are perhaps the greatest achievement of twentieth-century art.

Paul Johnson is a British historian and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. You can purchase Art: A New History here.

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