Always Working, Always Relevant

It seemed as though we’d never see the day when Philip Johnson passed away. Over the years we had heard recurring rumors that he was at death’s door, only to learn that he had rallied yet again. Now the fatal day has arrived, leaving us to wonder which aspect of his 75 years in architecture was more extraordinary: his extreme precocity or his talent for retaining an aura of utmost relevance into patriarchal old age.Last October I wrote in these pages about Max Abramovitz when he died at 96. In his day, he was about as well known as Johnson. Yet he outlived his period by so long that the most surprising thing about his obituary was that – contrary to all I had assumed – he hadn’t died decades earlier.No one would ever make that mistake about Phillip Johnson, who, even at 98, succeeded in seeming eternally vigorous and spry.The very name of the movement with which Abramovitz would become identified, the International Style, was coined by Johnson (together with Henry Russell Hitchcock) in 1932, before Eisenmann, Meier, Gwathmey, and most of the other elder statesmen of our architecture were even born! The occasion for the coinage was the show of that name at the Museum of Modern Art, where Johnson was the first curator of architecture and design – very likely the most influential show ever consecrated to architecture.More than half a century later, in 1989, Johnson mounted another, scarcely less important, in the same museum: “Deconstructivism” was largely responsible for consolidating and bringing to public awareness what has become the dominant style of the latest generation. Even then, Johnson had almost two more decades of writing, lecturing, and building in front of him!But if Johnson was well known as a theoretician, he was best known as a practicing and prolific architect. It is at this point in the article that one is expected to recall his famous or infamous comment that architects are whores – a comment almost as corrosive to his reputation as his early, and often repudiated, flirtation with fascism.Whether he was advocating or merely describing is a vexed question, but to all appearances he had no problem with applying the epithet to himself. And his point – that the architect works for the developer and thus should obey the latter’s wishes, rather than his own – has always seemed to me to be a better and more honorable point than many in the field are willing to avow.Not all of his buildings – and there were many – were artistic successes, but some of them surely were. The thing to remember about the International Style is that a hair’s breadth separates artistic vigor from abject banality. And in works like the famous glass house that Johnson built for himself in Connecticut (he was born into very affluent circumstances) and the building on East 64th Street that currently houses the Russell Sage Foundation, he proved himself to possess a formal refinement that, at its best, was scarcely inferior to that of Mies, who was his main inspiration.The whore comment seemed most relevant, however, when Johnson became a vocal exponent of Postmodernism. That one of the main ideologues and evangelists of the International Style should have created something like the so-called Lipstick Building on 53rd and Third (with John Burgee), or the AT&T Building on 56th and Madison, with is Neoclassical details and Chippendale top, seemed like an apostasy and an abomination.But it deserves to be pointed out that these buildings, especially the latter, used Classical details with greater refinement and sensitivity than the general run of journeyman architects could ever manage – just as, a generation earlier, Johnson’s Modernist works far surpassed what most of his colleagues (including Abramovitz) were doing. Even a cubic monster like the much-reviled Bobst Library at New York University has at least the virtue of being original and prepossessing, which is far more than can be said for most of its neighbors on campus.Johnson was quite vigorous to the end, and it is only a matter of months since the completion of one of his last works, the Metropolitan, a residential high-rise on Third Avenue and 89th Street. I reviewed this building almost a year ago, as it was still going up, and I was not too well disposed to it, with its heavy debt to Erich Mendelssohn and Frank Lloyd Wright. Though I continue to stand by that assessment, let me take this occasion to say what I have often felt as I passed the now-completed form, that it is rather better than I first supposed.

Always Working, Always Relevant

More from the New York Sun

President Xi, Courting North Korea’s Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang, Is Likely To Play Moscow Against Washington

A New Museum Hidden Beneath the Lincoln Memorial Opens June 25

Noël Coward, Back in Fashion on Stage

More from the New York Sun

President Xi, Courting North Korea’s Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang, Is Likely To Play Moscow Against Washington

A New Museum Hidden Beneath the Lincoln Memorial Opens June 25

Noël Coward, Back in Fashion on Stage

Do the Democrats Want the Iranian Dictatorship To Win?

Lamar Alexander Offers a Welcome Break From Today’s Glue-Factory Politics

Scientists Unveil New Rules for Announcing Alien Contact — Including a Strict ‘No Reply’ Order

USDA Rushes Experts to Texas Following Second Confirmed Screwworm Case

Bot Traffic Surpasses Human Activity Online for the First Time