Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 (Cleveland, Ohio) – January 25, 2005 (New Canaan, Connecticut)) was an influential American architect. The first director of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1946, and later a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1978 and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979.

Buildings

Johnson's most famous work is the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, a transparent open-plan frame structure initially designed as his own home for his Harvard master's thesis in 1949, and in which he resided until his death. The Glass House is remarkably similar to Mies' Farnsworth House. The New Canaan estate continued to grow and now boasts a number of unique designs, including a building made out of chain-link fencing, a sculpture gallery with a glass ceiling, a house of brick mirroring his glass house, and a building with no conventionally shaped walls (having only two corners).

Related Topics:
Glass House - New Canaan, Connecticut - Harvard - 1949 - Farnsworth House

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Johnson produced most of his work in collaboration. As the New Canaan estate demonstrates, his work is not conspicuous for its stylistic consistency or practicality. From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee, his most productive period.

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The AT&T Building in Manhattan, now the Sony Building, was completed in 1984 and was immediately controversial for its outrageous pink granite neo-Georgian pediment (Chippendale top). This was provocation on a grand scale. At the time, crowning a Manhattan skyscraper with an outsized chair-top defied every precept of the modernist aesthetic: ornament had been effectively outlawed among serious architects for years. In retrospect other critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist statement, necessary in the context of modernism's aesthetic cul-de-sac.

Related Topics:
AT&T Building - Chippendale - Modernist - Postmodernist

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Johnson's other notable works include:

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• John de Menil House, Houston (1950)
• Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, New York City (1959),
• New York State Theater (home of the New York City Opera and New York City Ballet) at Lincoln Center (with Richard Foster; 1964),
• Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University (1967-1972)
• the IDS Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1972)
• South Texas Art Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas (1972)
• Boston Public Library (1973)
• Evangelist Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980)
• Williams Tower, Houston, (1983)
• the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase College,
• Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, Texas,
• the main campus mall at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, Texas
• the RepublicBank building in Houston, Texas
• the Cleveland Playhouse in Cleveland, Ohio
• the Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.
• 191 Peachtree Tower, Atlanta, Georgia
• One Atlantic Center (formerly called the IBM Tower). Atlanta, Georgia
• Puerta de Europa, Madrid, Spain
• Fort Worth Water Gardens
• PPG Place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (with John Burgee; 1984)