The young Harvard student had barely read half way through the article he had casually picked up one day in 1928 when he realized that his whole life would have to change. The son of a wealthy Cleveland corporation lawyer, Philip Johnson was majoring in Greek and philosophy, but the piece on modern architecture came as a revelation. It had been written by a young Vassar professor named Henry-Russell Hitchcock—a man who was to become famous as an art scholar, and who inadvertently put Johnson on the path of becoming one of the most unusual architects in the U.S.
In 1930 the two men met for the first time in Paris, and promptly set out on an architectural tour of Europe. They swept through Holland, then went to Berlin, where Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were working. To this day, Mies refers to 1930 as “the year of the American invasion,” for the enthusiasm of the young visitors was almost overwhelming. Two years later, with the blessings of Director Alfred Barr Jr. of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, they organized an exhibition of modern architecture that in its way was as important as the Armory Show had been 19 years earlier. Thereafter the phrase “International Style” became the standard term for the austere functionalism that had emerged after World War I.
Casualness & Ceremony. Johnson, a wiry, intense man with enough money to do as he pleased, was now a name in architecture, but he longed to be an architect himself. In 1940 he went back to Harvard, whose Graduate School of Design boasted not only Gropius but also Marcel Breuer. Finally, after a stint in the Army as private first class No. 31-303-426 and three more years as “a self-employed designer,” Johnson got his New York State license to practice. At 42, his career began in earnest.
His first houses proved beyond a doubt that he was indeed the devoted disciple of Mies van der Rohe. But for all their austerity of line, there was a special elegance that was Johnson’s own. His famous private houses, like the Rockefeller guest house in Manhattan and his own glass house in New Canaan, Conn., were graced with pavilions, pools and inner courts. Simplicity and luxury went together, and the houses lent themselves to both casualness and ceremony.
But Johnson had come to believe that “the duty of the artist is to strain against existing style.” Goethe’s stern commandment—”the pilaster is a lie”—was no longer a sufficient rallying cry as it had been for Mies’s generation, and the man who had done so much in the cause of the International Style now began to rebel against it. “I became bored with glass boxes. Of course, I love my own house, but I no longer find it interesting to draw straight lines.” Johnson began to look for inspiration anywhere—the ancient Greeks, the baroque masters, the Orient, the peasant cottages of Europe. “We are all rebelling,” says he, “but we have all picked different ways to rebel against the International Style. I think I am the only one who is history-oriented.”
Stave & Stupa. Johnson’s recent work (see color) shows how far he has gone in breaking new ground while finding imaginative uses for old forms. The haystack-shaped shrine, set in a Grecian court in New Harmony, Ind., was built as a memorial to the Harmonists, a German Separatist sect that assured its own extinction by faithfully practicing celibacy. But to Johnson it suggests the stave churches of Norway and the stupa forms of India. Without its name, the Nuclear Reactor Building in Israel could be a medieval cloister, topped by a huge, 20-sided tower that seems to change its shape with the movement of the sun. In the Four Seasons Restaurant—as hedonistic as a Caesar’s court—light ripples up and down aluminum loop window shades, plays upon the slender rods of the stair rails. Johnson calls his 1957 Boisson-nas house “my first non-Miesian house.” Gone is the “flowing space” that made one room run into another: “Here you go from room to room with doors that close.” While the International Stylists tried to make everything as light as possible, Johnson put up solid rectangular piers inspired by the pergolas of Amain.
High up in his office in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, which he helped Mies build. Johnson is apt to feel a bit wistful about the old days. “Of course I’m nostalgic for the old period of battle when we all fought for the International Style. Everyone hates labels, but that’s what we were—there was a style, a movement, a discipline.” Now, says Johnson, architecture is moving not in one direction but many. The result may be chaos, but there could also be even more excitement.
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