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.

Involvement with Fascism

One controversial aspect of Johnson's career was his active promotion of fascism for eight years beginning in 1932. Johnson walked away from the success of his MOMA exhibition and, in a move described by the contemporary newspapers as 'surreal', attempted to join forces with Louisiana governor Huey Long. After Long's 1935 assassination, Johnson wrote a series of plainly anti-Semitic articles for the Detroit broadcaster Father Coughlin, ran for public office in Ohio, and tried to start an American fascist party himself. He traveled to Nuremberg for Adolf Hitler's 1938 rally, and to Poland after Germany invaded it in 1939, where he wrote:

Related Topics:
Fascism - Huey Long - Father Coughlin - Nuremberg - Adolf Hitler - 1938 - Poland - 1939

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:The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.

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After an FBI investigation and the pending involvement of the United States in World War II, Johnson abandoned his support of Nazis in mid-1940, and returned to Harvard. Years later he renounced fascism and designed a synagogue with no fee as a form of apology. A focus on the aesthetic to the exclusion of all other concerns became a characteristic of his philosophy; in a 1973 interview, he said:

Related Topics:
FBI - World War II - 1973

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:The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn't the dictatorship, because I recognize that in Julius's time and in Justinian's time and Caesar's time they had to have dictators. I mean I'm not interested in politics at all. I don't see any sense to it. About Hitler—if he'd only been a good architect!

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