In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later (1978), as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979. He was a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
"He was an eighteen-year-old or something. He was a student up at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]…. We met because of [Jasper] Johns’ flag painting. He said, 'Why did you buy that flag?' It was his first question to me in the world. He just came up to me after a lecture [at Brown University] and said, 'Why did you buy the flag?' I said, 'Because Alfred Barr told me to.' I told the truth too soon, as usual. So then we got started." --Philip Johnson on meeting David Whitney, The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern, Edited by Kazys Varnelis, The Monacelli Press, New York 2008
David Johnson died in his sleep while at the Glass House retreat. He was survived by his life partner of 45 years, David Whitney, who died later that year at age 66. "He was an eighteen-year-old or something. He was a student up at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]…. We met because of [Jasper] Johns’ flag painting. He said, 'Why did you buy that flag?' It was his first question to me in the world. He just came up to me after a lecture [at Brown University] and said, 'Why did you buy the flag?' I said, 'Because Alfred Barr told me to.' I told the truth too soon, as usual. So then we got started."
Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was descended from the Jansen (a.k.a. Johnson) family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he focused on history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Johnson interrupted his education with several extended trips to Europe. These trips became the pivotal moment of his education; he visited Chartres, the Parthenon, and many other ancient monuments, becoming increasingly fascinated with architecture.
In 1928 Johnson met with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting was a revelation for Johnson and formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition.
Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytizer for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine firsthand recent trends in architecture, the three assembled their discoveries as the landmark show "The International Style: Architecture Since 1922" at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. The show was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public. It introduced such pivotal architects as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.
As critic Peter Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated." In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration. The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.
Johnson continued to work as a proponent of modern architecture, using the Museum of Modern Art as a bully pulpit. He arranged for Le Corbusier's first visit to the United States in 1935, then worked to bring Mies and Marcel Breuer to the US as emigres.
In the 1930s Johnson sympathized with Nazism, and expressed antisemitic ideas. Regarding this period in his life, he later said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity... I don't know how you expiate guilt."
During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930s. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson's interest in journalism or politics – he returned to enlist in the US Army. After a couple of self-admittedly undistinguished years in uniform, Johnson returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to finally pursue his ultimate career of architect.
Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work. The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.
Glass House
The house sits at the edge of a crest on Johnson’s estate overlooking a pond. The building's sides are glass and charcoal-painted steel; the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground but sits 10 inches above. The interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.
Johnson continued to build structures on his estate as architectural essays. Offset obliquely fifty feet from the Glass House is a guest house, echoing the proportions of the Glass House and completely enclosed in brick (except for three large circular windows at the rear, set in wooden frames, 5 feet in diameter, which reveal the interior of the building that was originally designed with a window in each of three rooms, two guest bedrooms at each end and a study in the middle). It now contains a bathroom, library, and single bedroom with a vaulted ceiling and shag carpet. It was built at the same time as the Glass House and can be seen as its formal counterpart. Johnson stated that he deliberately designed it to be less than perfectly comfortable, as "guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most".
Later, Johnson added a painting gallery with an innovative viewing mechanism of rotating walls to hold paintings (influenced by the Hogarth displays at Sir John Soane's house), followed by a sky-lit sculpture gallery. The last structures Johnson built on the estate were a library and a reception building, the latter, red and black in color and of curving walls. Johnson viewed the ensemble of one-room buildings as a total work of art, claiming that it was his best and only "landscape project."
Gate House
The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours.
After completing several houses in the idiom of Mies and Breuer, Johnson joined Mies van der Rohe as the New York associate architect for the 39-story Seagram Building (1956). Johnson was pivotal in steering the commission towards Mies, working with Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of the CEO of Seagram. This collaboration of architects and client resulted in the bronze-and-glass tower on Park Avenue.
Completing the Seagram Building with Mies also decisively marked a shift in Johnson's career. After this accomplishment, Johnson's practice grew as projects came in from the public realm, including coordinating the master plan of Lincoln Center and designing that complex's New York State Theater. Meanwhile, Johnson began to grow bored with the orthodoxies of the International Style he had championed.
Although startling when constructed, the glass and steel tower (indeed many idioms of the modern movement) had by the 1960s become commonplace the world over. He eventually rejected much of the metallic appearance of earlier International Style buildings, and began designing spectacular, crystalline structures uniformly sheathed in glass. Many of these became instant icons, such as PPG Place in Pittsburgh and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
PPG Place
Crystal Cathedral
Johnson's architectural work is a balancing act between two dominant trends in post-war American art: the more "serious" movement of Minimalism, and the more populist movement of Pop Art. His best work has aspects of both movements. Johnson's personal art collection reflected this dichotomy, as he introduced artists such as Mark Rothko to the Museum of Modern Art as well as Andy Warhol. Straddling between these two camps, his work was seen by purists of either side as always too contaminated or influenced by the other. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades. As an art collector Johnson's eclectic eye supported avant-garde movements and young artists often before they became widely known. His collection of American art was strong in Abstract expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Neo-Dada, Color Field, Lyrical Abstraction, and Neo-Expressionism and he often donated important works from his collection to institutions like MoMA, and other important private museums and University collections like the Norton Simon Museum, the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University among many others.
From 1967 to 1991 Johnson collaborated with John Burgee. This was by far Johnson's most productive period — certainly by the measure of scale — he became known at this time as builder of iconic office towers, including Minneapolis's IDS Tower. That building's distinctive stepbacks (called "zogs" by the architect) created an appearance that has since become one of Minneapolis's trademarks and the crown jewel of its skyline. In 1980, the Crystal Cathedral was completed for Rev. Robert H. Schuller's famed megachurch, which became a Southern California landmark.
The AT&T Building in Manhattan, now the Sony Building, was completed in 1984 and was immediately controversial for its neo-Georgian pediment (Chippendale top). At the time, it was seen as provocation on a grand scale: crowning a Manhattan skyscraper with a shape echoing a historical wardrobe top defied every precept of the modernist aesthetic: historical pattern had been effectively outlawed among 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. In 1987, Johnson was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Houston. The institution's Hines College of Architecture is also housed in one of Johnson's buildings.
AT&T Building
Johnson's publicly held archive, including architectural drawings, project records, and other papers up until 1964 are held by the Drawings and Archives Department of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Getty, and the Museum of Modern Art.
He is mentioned in the song "Thru These Architect's Eyes" on the album Outside (1995) by David Bowie.
Philip Johnson's Glass House, along with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, was the subject of Sarah Morris's film 'Points on a Line' (2010). Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant, the Seagrams Building, Mies van der Roheʼs infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicagoʼs Newberry Library. Morris utilized The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. The restaurant remains a site of projection and desire – active as a site of negotiation and display. Morrisʼs film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
Burial: Cremated, Location of ashes is unknown.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Johnson
When Calvin Tomkins profiled Philip Johnson in The New Yorker in 1977, the architect pleaded with the author not to identify him as a gay man. Johnson was negotiating with AT&T executives for the commission to design the company's new headquarters on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and he thought the disclosure might jeopardize his employment. "This was in the early stages, when I wasn't sure I had the job," Johnson said. Tomkins was "furious, but he complied with Johnson's request. The architect's lover, David Whitney, was discreetly identified in the article as "his friend."
Johnson was of a class and a generation who were routinely invited to the fanciest dinner parties, but who almost never brought along a male companion. On the other hand, single gay men were most welcome: "Mrs. (Vincent) Astor said she always had a homosexual to dinner" because they were "the only people who could talk," the architect remembered.
After Johnson had been living with David Whitney for more than fifteen years (they first met in 1960), Barbara Walters interrogated Johnson during a dinner party at the home of Kitty Carlisle Hart. "Why don't you ever bring your boyfriend to these events?" Walters demanded.
"I said, "By God, you're right, Barbara." Got up from the table and went home," Johnson recalled. "She was a very great help. I was so mean and selfish: "I'll be home late tonight," that kind of thing." --The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser
Cathedral of Hope
Chainlink Garden Pavilion
Chrysler Center Addition and Renovation
Ernst & Young
Habitable Sculpture
Kline Biology Tower & Library
Nations Bank
One Detroit Center
Puerta de Europa
Lipstick Building
The Metropolitan
Trump International Hotel & Tower
Urban Glass House
Whitney, the son of a banker, was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts and studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. While a student, he attended a lecture by Johnson and approached the architect afterwards, asking for a tour of the Glass House.
During the early to mid-1960s Whitney had a variety of roles in the contemporary art world. Early jobs at the Museum of Modern Art and several art galleries, including the Green Gallery and the Leo Castelli Gallery, led to him opening his own gallery in 1969. Some of the artists that exhibited at the David Whitney Gallery from September 1969 through March 1972 (when the gallery closed) included Neil Jenney, Jasper Johns, Ronnie Landfield, Ken Price, Kenneth Showell, William Pettet, and Phillip Wofford, amongst others. The David Whitney Gallery featured Lyrical Abstraction, Post-minimalism, and other current movements of the period.
David Whitney and Philip Johnson (Photo: Mariana Cook)
by David McCabe
in front of the Glass House
Philip Johnson (L), Jasper Johns and David Whitney in front of the Glass House (Photo: Mark Lancaster)
Later, he organized exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and elsewhere for well-known artists such as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Andy Warhol.
Later, he focused on younger artists such as Michael Heizer, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, and David Salle.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Whitney
"He was an eighteen-year-old or something. He was a student up at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]…. We met because of [Jasper] Johns’ flag painting. He said, 'Why did you buy that flag?' It was his first question to me in the world. He just came up to me after a lecture [at Brown University] and said, 'Why did you buy the flag?' I said, 'Because Alfred Barr told me to.' I told the truth too soon, as usual. So then we got started." --Philip Johnson on meeting David Whitney, The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern, Edited by Kazys Varnelis, The Monacelli Press, New York 2008
"I’ll make decisions about our daily life. It could look like I was pushing him around, but in fact he wants to be pushed around. …I like everything about Philip. Einstein once said, 'My wife takes care of all the little things and I take care of all the big things.' I think I take care of all the little things." --David Whitney on his relationship with Philip Johnson, Couples: Speaking from the Heart by Mariana Cook, Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2000
"David has been a mainstay of my life since 1960…. It’s hard to imagine a life alone…. It’s a very happy life…. He takes the lead a good deal. It’s a wonderful feeling." --Philip Johnson on David Whitney, Couples: Speaking from the Heart
When Calvin Tomkins profiled Philip Johnson in The New Yorker in 1977, the architect pleaded with the author not to identify him as a gay man. Johnson was negotiating with AT&T executives for the commission to design the company's new headquarters on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and he thought the disclosure might jeopardize his employment. "This was in the early stages, when I wasn't sure I had the job," Johnson said. Tomkins was "furious, but he complied with Johnson's request. The architect's lover, David Whitney, was discreetly identified in the article as "his friend." Johnson was of a class and a generation who were routinely invited to the fanciest dinner parties, but who almost never brought along a male companion. On the other hand, single gay men were most welcome: "Mrs. [Vincent) Astor said she always had a homosexual to dinner" because they were "the only people who could talk," the architect remembered. After Johnson had been living with David Whitney for more than fifteen years (they first met in 1960), Barbara Walters interrogated Johnson during a dinner party at the home of Kitty Carlisle Hart. "Why don't you ever bring your boyfriend to these events?" Walters demanded. "I said, `By God, you're right, Barbara.' Got up from the table and went home," Johnson recalled. "She was a very great help. I was so mean and selfish: `I'll be home late tonight,' that kind of thing." --Charles Kaiser. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (Kindle Locations 3058-3066). Kindle Edition.
Paperback: 760 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (July 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500563323
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
Amazon: Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time
Days of Love chronicles more than 700 LGBT couples throughout history, spanning 2000 years from Alexander the Great to the most recent winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Many of the contemporary couples share their stories on how they met and fell in love, as well as photos from when they married or of their families. Included are professional portraits by Robert Giard and Stathis Orphanos, paintings by John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, and photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson, Arnold Genthe, and Carl Van Vechten among others. “It's wonderful. Laying it out chronologically is inspired, offering a solid GLBT history. I kept learning things. I love the decision to include couples broken by death. It makes clear how important love is, as well as showing what people have been through. The layout and photos look terrific.” Christopher Bram “I couldn’t resist clicking through every page. I never realized the scope of the book would cover centuries! I know that it will be hugely validating to young, newly-emerging LGBT kids and be reassured that they really can have a secure, respected place in the world as their futures unfold.” Howard Cruse “This international history-and-photo book, featuring 100s of detailed bios of some of the most forward-moving gay persons in history, is sure to be one of those bestsellers that gay folk will enjoy for years to come as reference and research that is filled with facts and fun.” Jack Fritscher
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