Arbiter of taste, enfant terrible: The best and worst of Philip Johnson
The prolific 20th-century American architect?s work, ranked by the author of Johnson?s mega-biography If there is anything to be gleaned from Mark Lamster?s new biography of Philip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century, it?s that Johnson was a walking contradiction.
That applied to his personality (he could be both magnanimous and cruel), his politics (an anti-Semite who counted Jews among his closest friends), and above all his architecture, which ranged from the zenith of civic and aesthetic achievement to the nadir of opportunistic cynicism.
Courtesy of Little, Brown
In this spirit, we asked Lamster (who should know: He worked on this book for nine years) to consider the output, listing what he considers to be Johnson?s most successful buildings, and the ones that haven?t exactly held up under the 21st century?s exacting lens. The best
The Glass House, New Canaan, CT, 1949
Johnson?s home, and the New Canaan estate on which it sits, is a unique and uncompromising exercise in modern design executed over more than half a century. Like much of Johnson?s work and life, it is polarizing: Mies van der Rohe, in particular, detested it, thinking it a poor derivation of his own Farnsworth House. (In a particularly PJ maneuver, Johnson managed to complete the Glass House before Mies could get the Farnsworth built.) Either way, you cannot understand Johnson without understanding this place apart from the wo...
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