Philip Johnson

The money came first. Homer Johnson, a Cleveland lawyer, gave his son stock in the Aluminum Company of America, and it made Philip rich before he had done anything at all. What he had otherwise was a stutter, a diagnosis of cyclothymia that flattened him for months at a stretch, and a Harvard degree in Greek and philosophy he did not finish until 1930, the year he turned 24. He had already met the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and, in 1928, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Then he did the thing the money made possible: he paid for the Museum of Modern Art to open an architecture department, and put himself in charge of it.

He was a curator before he was an architect. The 1932 MoMA exhibition he mounted with Henry-Russell Hitchcock gave the International Style its name and delivered European modernism to America. He negotiated Mies van der Rohe's first American commission and helped get him and Marcel Breuer out of Germany. Architecture school came in 1941. Then the buildings: the Glass House, the Seagram Building with Mies, the Crystal Cathedral, and in 1982 the AT&T Building, whose broken pediment repudiated the modernism he had personally imported. For 50 years he decided, more than anyone, who got shown and who got hired.

In December 1934 he walked out of the museum he had funded and spent six years in far-right politics. He organized rallies for Huey Long and founded a National Party he could not persuade Long to lead. After Long was shot he wrote for Father Coughlin's Social Justice, an openly antisemitic paper, and printed antisemitic lines of his own in it. He started a group he called the Gray Shirts. He went to a Nuremberg rally and was thrilled by it. In 1939 he rode into Poland on a German press tour and filed copy calling the burning of Warsaw a stirring spectacle. William Shirer, traveling beside him, called him the American fascist. The FBI investigated him. He was never charged. In 1943 the Army sent him to Fort Ritchie to interrogate German prisoners of war.

He apologized for the rest of his life. "It was the stupidest thing I ever did," he told Charlie Rose in 1996, "and I never can atone for it." In 1956 he designed a synagogue in Port Chester, New York, and took no fee. He came out publicly in 1993, after decades in which everyone already knew, and lived with David Whitney for 45 years. He died in his sleep at the Glass House in 2005. In 2020 Harvard stripped his name from the house he built as a student and 40 architects asked MoMA to drop his from its curatorship. MoMA kept it. Historians still divide over whether the buildings can be read apart from the man.

Philip Johnson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Modern Architecture: International Exhibition other
  Mounted at MoMA with Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr — it gave the International Style its name 1932
• The Glass House building
  His own house in New Canaan, Connecticut, and the one he died in 1949
• Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel building
  A synagogue in Port Chester, New York, designed without a fee 1956
• Seagram Building building
  Architect of record with Mies van der Rohe, and designer of the Four Seasons interior 1958
• Crystal Cathedral building
  More than 10,000 panes of glass in Garden Grove, California, for Robert H. Schuller 1980
• AT&T Building building
  Now 550 Madison Avenue — the broken pediment that carried postmodernism into the skyline 1982

• 1930 aged ~24 Pays for the Museum of Modern Art to open an architecture department and runs it He was 23 and had never built anything.
• February 9, 1932 aged 25 Opens the exhibition that names the International Style Modern Architecture: International Exhibition ran to March 23 and then toured the country for six years.
• December 1934 aged 28 Quits MoMA for politics He backed Huey Long, founded the National Party and ran unsuccessfully for office.
• 1939 aged ~33 Enters Poland with the German army as a correspondent for Social Justice He called the burning of Warsaw a stirring spectacle. William Shirer, on the same press tour, called him the American fascist.
• 1941 aged ~35 Enrolls at the Harvard Graduate School of Design at 35 His teachers included Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, both refugees from the Germany he had admired.
• March 12, 1943 aged 36 Inducted into the U.S. Army and posted to interrogate German prisoners of war The FBI had investigated him and cleared him for service.
• 1949 aged ~43 Finishes the Glass House and moves in He kept adding buildings to the estate for the next 46 years.
• 1979 aged ~73 Becomes the first winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize He had taken the AIA Gold Medal the year before.
• January 25, 2005 aged 98 Dies in his sleep at the Glass House at 98 David Whitney, his partner of 45 years, died five months later.

• Huey Long 1893–1935
  Louisiana governor and senator whose Share Our Wealth program pressured New Deal policy before his assassination. organized rallies for
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. exhibited
• Frank Gehry 1929–2025
  Developed a sculptural architectural language seen in the Walt Disney Concert Hall and other landmarks. championed
• Louis Kahn 1901–1974
  The Salk Institute, the Kimbell and the National Assembly at Dhaka, from an architect who began at 50. rival
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. competed with for commissions