The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century by Mark Lamster
Little Brown, 2018
Hardcover, 528 pages

Mark Lamster had me in the Prologue. The Dallas Morning News architecture critic begins his biography of Philip Johnson on the famous architect's death bed. Like his iconic Glass House from 1949, Johnson's life was full of myth, arising from his architecture, his words, and his actions ? all of them controversial throughout his many decades. But Lamster opens The Man in the Glass House by focusing on Johnson's humanity: his ill health, his difficulty in eating, the list of drugs he took to prolong his life, the tai chi master that came to the house a few days a week. When Johnson dies on the last page of the Prologue, I actually shed a tear; not out of sadness for Johnson's passing, which happened in January 2005 just shy of his 99th birthday, but because of Lamster's sensitive and eloquent portrayal of it. The Prologue's seven pages were enough to draw me into Lamster's telling of Johnson's life over the next 528 pages.
The Man in the Glass House is not the first biography on Philip Johnson (1906-2005). That honor goes to Franz Schulze, whose Philip Johnson: Life and Work came out in 1994. A decade before his authorized biography of Johnson, Schulze wrote "a critical biography" of Mies van der Rohe, one that was updated (with Edward Windhorst) in 2013. No update of his biography of Johnson occurred, though if ...