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Saturday, October 11th, 2008

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Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the only son of lawyer Homer H. Johnson and his wife, Louise. He graduated from Harvard in 1927 with a degree in philosophy, then toured Europe and became interested in new styles of architecture.

His friend Alfred Barr named Johnson curator of the architecture department at the new Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan [MoMA] in the 1930s. With Hitchcock, Johnson toured Europe, studying modernist architecture. In 1932, Johnson coordinated ``Modern Architecture,'' probably the most influential 20th century architecture exhibit. The exhibit and the subsequent book "The International Style,'' introduced simple European avant-garde modern architecture to the U.S. and influenced the construction of tall, boxy glass and steel buildings. In 1940, Johnson returned to Harvard for graduate school, studying under Marcel Breuer. He returned to MoMA, then left in 1955 to open his own design office.
In 1949, Johnson designed his first great modern work, the Glass House, on his New Canaan property. The rectangular structure with no interior walls has a brick cylinder with a fireplace in the house's center. The Financial Times' Edwin Heathcote said Johnson developed the glass box as the solution to every architectural problem.
"You had the feeling you were outside. It was just the most beautiful building." Janet Lindstrom, executive director of the New Canaan Historical Society

Johnson made Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's minimalist, classical steel and glass buildings a norm for offices through a 1947 exhibition he sponsored. He subsequently collaborated in 1958 with his mentor on a modernist masterpiece, the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, completing the building's Four Seasons Restaurant the following year.
Other designs from this era include Lincoln Plaza's Central Fountain, Central Plaza and New York State Theater (1964), the MOMA sculpture garden (1953) and East Wing (1964) and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1961).
The Style, which Johnson adopted later in his own work, would dominate the urban skyline for fifty years and continues to influence contemporary design. Characterized by materials like glass and steel, it emphasized function and structure over ornamental decoration.

In 1967, Johnson and Chicago architect John Burgee formed a 20-year partnership. They designed many noted skyscrapers, including the Investors Diversified Services Center in Minneapolis (1973), the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Building (1984) and Pennzoil Place (1976) and the Transco (now Williams) Tower in Houston (1985).
Other projects included the Garden Grove Crystal Cathedral in California and the distinctive stacked ovals of the "Lipstick Building" in New York.
The new style attained its full prominence in Johnson's unorthodox design for the AT&T building in New York.
The "Chippendale Building" was hailed as a monument to post-modernism. But it was criticized not only for its unlikely top but for its lobby that features a heroic gilded statue likened by some to a Fascist monument.
In 1979 Johnson won the first Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Accepting the prize, he said: "The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions."
In 1989, Johnson's partnership with Burgee ended and he later founded a new firm.
He retired in October. Johnson was at home in New Canaan, Connecticut, when he died on Tuesday evening, according to attorney Joel Ehrenkranz's office. The cause of death was not immediately available