The architect Philip Johnson died Tuesday night at New Canaan, Conn., in the glass house he designed as his first broadside of the International Style of architecture. He was 98, and had announced his retirement only last October.

His career included such highlights as founding the architectural division at the Museum of Modern Art; naming and codifying the “International Style,” the austere look that dominated major architecture for much of the 20th century; designing with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, an epitome of International Style, and designing the AT&T Building, whose Chippendale pediment and cavernous street-level arcade made postmodernism a business friendly style.

There were other major buildings as well, most notably the glass and steel Crystal Cathedral, the Garden Grove, Calif., home to televangelist Robert Schuller. “Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space,” Johnson said in a 1965 interview. The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center was a particularly successful interior, as was the Four Seasons restaurant, located within the Seagram Building.

In a career of more than 70 years, there were low points as well, including a years-long flirtation with fascism in the 1930s, as well as gaudy postmodern buildings that resembled wedding cakes in their profusion of decoration and device. It was as if, after finding his true vocation as architect relatively late in life, Johnson sublimated the manic depression that had circumscribed his first 40 years. His early devotion to severe modernism was replaced by its polar opposite.

Yet such a schematic formulation neglects the intellectual vitality of Johnson’s career, the way in which he led, or at least stayed current with, the leading edge of his profession for more than a half-century.

A flamboyant aesthete as noted for his open homosexuality as for his ardent table talk, Johnson was especially notorious for an interview he gave to Esquire in 1983 in which he said: “I’ve always thought of myself more as a populist than as an elitist, not that an elite isn’t a necessary part of any society. Architects are pretty much high-class whores. We can turn down some projects the way they can turn down some

clients, but finally we’ve both got to say yes to someone if we want to stay in business.”

Johnson was born in Cleveland in 1906, the son of sophisticated, older parents. His father, a lawyer, settled a large chunk of preferred stock on Johnson, which relieved him of the financial necessity to work for a living. Johnson’s mother showed Philip and his two sisters lantern slides of Italian paintings and took them on a European tour in 1919, during which the 13-year-old Philip was moved to tears by the sight of Chartres.

In 1923, Johnson enrolled in Harvard University, where he studied Greek and majored in philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead. His studies were interrupted by periodic bouts of depression, during which he “went home to Ohio and cried every day and read two detective stories every day,” he told the New Yorker in 1977.

During one of his absences from Harvard, Johnson visited Italy, Greece, and Egypt. He said he was transformed by viewing the Parthenon. “After the Parthenon I had a call, as religious people might put it, and I’ve never changed,” he told Esquire. Soon, Johnson was visiting the Bauhaus school of design in Dessau, Germany. He met the school’s founder, Walter Gropius, as well as Le Corbusier and van der Rohe, and was deeply impressed with the revolution in architecture emanating from Germany. He also took full advantage of the aesthetic and physical pleasures offered by Weimar Germany. If he had left America in a funk, Johnson returned with a mission.

In 1930, shortly after graduating from Harvard, Johnson was named the first director of the architecture and design department of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, in 1932, he presented an exhibit of modern architecture that coincided with the publication of his influential book “The International Style; Architecture since 1922,” written with his friend, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. In 1934, he presented the exhibition “Machine Art,” which treated for perhaps the first time as museum-worthy such objects as household appliances, tools, dinnerware, and other common machine-made items.

Late in 1934, Johnson and another MoMA colleague, Alan Blackburn, abruptly resigned their positions and dedicated themselves to fascist politics. Johnson was evidently impressed by the economic strides in Hitler’s Germany, and traveled to New Orleans to see how that government’s American counterpart functioned under Huey Long. In a 1935 interview with the Washington Post, Johnson and Blackburn plumped for the Kingfish and demonstrated a kind of multimedia slide-viewer and record player they called the “Visomatic,” in which they seemed to grasp the propagandistic possibilities of television. The demonstration, however, was what we would today call an industrial video about peanut butter production.

Johnson and Blackburn attempted to form a political party, and after Long’s assassination they joined the vaguely anti-Semitic Union party. Johnson then succumbed to a new bout of depression and retreated once again to his parents’ farm. He re-emerged in 1939 as a correspondent for Social Justice, a right-wing magazine edited by Father Charles Coughlin. Johnson sent dispatches from the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, including one subtitled “Jews Dominate Polish Scene.” William Shirer, who briefly shared a hotel room with Johnson, branded him “an American fascist” and suspected him of spying for the Nazis.

Johnson many times expressed regret for his political activities before and during the war. “I was a damned fool,” he told Esquire.

In 1940, Johnson returned to Harvard to attend the Graduate School of Design. He studied under Gropius – an anti-fascist whom Johnson disliked – and Marcel Breuer. For his thesis, Johnson built a controversial Mies-inspired house with a full-glass wall. A neighbor sued, unsuccessfully. After graduating in 1943, Johnson somewhat improbably enlisted in the Army and spent the remainder of the war at Fort Belvior in Virginia.

Back in New York after being demobilized, Johnson failed the state architecture licensing exam several times, then passed it and went into business designing homes. He also returned to the architecture and design department at MoMA, where he remained until 1954.

In 1949, Johnson produced his Glass House in New Canaan, which, despite its small size, is generally accepted as one of his most important contributions to American architecture. It is a triangular structure built entirely of glass and contains no interior walls. The following year, Johnson designed the Rockefeller Town House, which was adjacent to MoMA and later became its guesthouse.

At the Schlumberger administration building (1952) at Ridgefield, Conn., Johnson innovated by incorporating air conditioning into the design. Johnson was also responsible for much of the architecture at MoMA, including the sculpture garden (1953), and he oversaw the 1964 renovation that added two wings.

In 1958, Johnson teamed with Mies van der Rohe to produce the Seagram Building, an elegant 38-story structure that was a classic of the International Style. Johnson’s main contribution was the building’s interiors; he maintained an office for many years on the penultimate floor.

Johnson broke with Mies not long after, and from 1960 began designing in a more eclectic mode. Having never been much of a businessman, Johnson in 1967 teamed with the young Chicago architect John Burgee. Together they produced major corporate commissions during the 1970s, such as the IDS Center in Minneapolis and Penzoil Place in Houston. One of their most dramatic buildings, the Crystal Cathedral, was completed in 1980.

A slew of other buildings followed. The AT&T Building, located on Madison Avenue, was completed in 1984. Shortly before that, Johnson had made his infamous “whore” comment, and he seemed determined to follow through on it. Johnson/Burgee produced dozens of corporate buildings in the years to come, but critics grew increasingly dubious.

“The people with money to build today are corporations – they are our popes and Medicis,” Johnson said. “The sense of pride is why they build.”

For at least the last decade, Johnson was hailed as the eminence grise of architecture, the most famous, the most honored, even the most amusing exemplar of his craft. Especially if one counted his writings – including a monograph on Mies – he was among the most influential. And he remained active in his craft, working right up until last October, when he finally threw in the towel.

In 1979, Johnson won the first Pritzker Architecture Prize, and he was also the recipient of the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, among many other awards.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson

Born July 8, 1906, at Cleveland; died January 25 at New Canaan, Conn.; survived by a sister, Jeannette Dempsey.