Johnson sold the International Style—then built a glass house
Philip Cortelyou Johnson, 8 July 1906 to 25 January 2005, curated MoMA's 1932 International Style show, later designed the New Canaan Glass House and postmodern AT&T tower at 550 Madison Avenue. First Pritzker winner in 1979, he also spent the 1930s praising Hitler before an abrupt wartime renunciation.
Johnson came from Cleveland money and old New York roots; an ancestor, the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, mapped New Amsterdam's earliest street layout at Peter Stuyvesant's request. He grew up with a stutter and a diagnosis of cyclothymia, and his father's investment in the Aluminum Company of America made him rich. Trips to Europe after college brought him together with the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and, in 1928, with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the start of a lifelong mix of collaboration and rivalry. With his own fortune he funded the Museum of Modern Art's new architecture department in 1930, and the 1932 show he staged with Hitchcock and Alfred Barr gave the International Style its name.
He then turned to politics. Leaving the museum in December 1934, he backed Huey Long, founded a failed National Party, lost a race for the Connecticut legislature, and wrote for Father Charles Coughlin's antisemitic paper Social Justice. He had attended a Nuremberg rally in 1932 and later described being swept up in the spectacle, and he even formed a small group called the Gray Shirts in imitation of the Nazi Brownshirts.
In 1941, at 35, he abruptly dropped all of it and enrolled at Harvard's Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. His first building, a Miesian house at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge with a wall that merges into the structure, served as his thesis; Harvard bought and restored it by 2016. Drafted in 1943, he interrogated German prisoners at Fort Ritchie until an FBI inquiry into his fascist ties cleared him. Back at MoMA in 1946, he wrote the first English monograph on Mies in 1947 and went on to the Glass House, the AT&T tower and the first Pritzker Prize in 1979.
Source: Philip Johnson
