• Index • Essay by Franz Schulze • Essay by Robert A.M. Stern • Essay by Michael Sorkin • Interview from 2001

While working on his biography, I was able to form a considered opinion of Philip Johnson as a person and a professional, and was inclined to believe the majority of his obituaries would be fairly positive. He spent seven decades at the center of the architectural universe—as designer, critic, historian, museum curator, and promoter of younger architects.

Johnson was also a wizard at working the media. In view of that, I am surprised by much of what I have read since his passing in January. More than a few well-informed contrary views have surfaced, notably in articles by Mark Stevens in The New York Times (January 31, 2005), Roger Kimball in The New Criterion's Weblog Armavirumque (January 31, 2005), and by Andrew Saint in The Guardian (January 29, 2005). Each drew attention in some detail to Johnson's commitment to the Nazi cause, which was rooted in his privileged family life, his dismissal of the "lower orders" based largely on his worship of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a consequent love of power he saw manifest in the charismatic figure of Adolf Hitler.

In 1934, Johnson gave up a promising position as chair of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art and spent most of the next six years in pursuit of political goals that varied from following the bandwagon of the demagogic Louisiana politician Huey Long to running for office in his native Ohio on a populist, anticapitalist agenda to writing attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt for Social Justice, a periodical sponsored by the anti-Semitic "radio priest" Francis Coughlin, and eagerly following Hitler's Wehrmacht when it invaded Poland at the beginning of World War II. Though he shifted from one political objective to another during this period, he remained true to his belief in power, especially if manifest in someone—like Hitler or Long (or Mies van der Rohe, for that matter)—who seemed to Johnson a prophetic figure in the Nietzschean mold. He did not overtly surrender his political orientation until he was identified as a "fascist" in a best-selling book Berlin Diary: The Journal of A Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941, by William L. Shirer, published in 1941. By then, Johnson had withdrawn from politics to enroll as an architecture student at Harvard in the fall of 1940. Even then, the exercise of power, now returned to the aesthetic realm, remained a central motivation.

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Many of the obituaries, commenting on the body of his architectural work, have leveled tougher and more unsparing criticism than I anticipated. There has been little praise for the big corporate buildings, like the AT&T Building, now Sony Plaza, that brought him such a flood of publicity. The two works that have been remembered most affirmatively are small in size: the exquisite Museum for Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and his own purist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. And even the latter would not have been designed as it is without the model of Mies's Farnsworth House (1951). The obituaries have left the impression that many critics regard him primarily as a pasticheur.

Probably that is what Johnson was—a "flibbertigibbet," as he called himself. His mercurial intelligence combined with a ravenous ambition defeated the self-discipline necessary to explore a stylistic approach in depth and thereby to master it. Sometimes he seized upon impressive forms, such as the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, Pennzoil Place in Houston, or the space frame of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. Then, virtually as soon as such concepts struck him, he would abandon them, turning away like an undiscriminating child and delivering himself of bizarre mutations like the Bank of America Center (formerly Republic Bank) of Houston (1984), or that ultimate vulgarity, the multi-use Crescent in Dallas (1985).

Curiously, Johnson's almost involuntary flitting from style to style does not address the one overarching consistency in his approach to the profession—more exactly, to the art. He never stopped believing that the aesthetic dimension was the only admissible measure by which architectural quality could be judged; social, economic, political, and moral values mattered not at all. In fact, to some extent his passion for how things look rather than what they stand for accounts for the fascination he found in the pageantry—the leather jackets, the parades of goose-stepping soldiers, the nocturnal rallies with search lights scanning the skies—at which the Nazis were so skilled.

When playwright Arthur Miller died just a few weeks after Johnson, it was impossible not to notice the enormous difference in motives for creative expression between two of the most famous people in the American arts of the 20th century. Miller was guided—driven—by social and moral issues that he insisted required taking sides. By contrast, Johnson, the cynic, explained: "I don't believe in the good, the true, or the absolute, or in justice or mercy." Instead, he took his cue from the Sophists of ancient Greece, who understood truth in a relative and contingent manner and advocated persuasion in lieu of "proof," thus elevating rhetoric to the highest place in human communication. Surely, he was a master of self-promotion, evident in the exceptional wit he brought to bear when speaking extempore. Well into his 80s, he could hold an audience in the palm of his hand: the architect as standup comedian.

That showmanship points to another, superficially related but ultimately profounder effect, in which his gift for words was employed to an end not merely cynical but worthy of being taken seriously even by his harshest critics. In the years he spent as the on-and-off head of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art, he did more than anyone to make the study of architecture a museological discipline of the highest order. He was the catalyst behind the historic Modern Architecture: International Exhibition of 1932 that introduced America to the great European Modernists, chiefly Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, who set the course for world architecture for generations. He followed that success in 1934 with Machine Art, in which he convincingly demonstrated the beauty and elegance of ordinary manufactured tools. And he organized MoMA's 1947 retrospective of Mies's work, for which he wrote a monograph that remained for decades the prime source of information about one of the greatest architects of modern times.

He was responsible for other shows and other prose, most of it worthy of engaged study. His Philip Johnson: Writings, published in 1979, reveals an acute critical and historiographic mind—a figure far more admirable than the self-serving image dished up in 1994 in Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, where interviewers Hilary Lewis and John O'Connor gave him plenty of room to try to show the world what a wonderful designer he was.

The lasting legacy? It probably is too early to say for sure, but from this biographer's corner, history will remember Johnson the curator, critic, and historian longer and with greater respect than it will Johnson the architect.

Franz Schulze, the author of Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994), is Betty Jane Schultz Hollender Professor of Art, Emeritus at Lake Forest College.

Essay by Franz Schulze | Essay by Robert A.M. Stern | Essay by Michael Sorkin