12

Philip Johnson

Between 1947 and 1949, the architect Philip Johnson built himself a house on Ponus Ridge Road in tony, conservative New Canaan, Connecticut. The house was reduced to its simplest possible state: four walls of clear glass, a brick floor set just ten inches above the ground, with one brick cylinder, containing a bathroom, rising to gently puncture the flat metal roof. A stage set for a life set free of conventional walls. The gesture seemed extraordinarily radical.

The traditional house – a home for a traditionally conceived bourgeois family, in which a strong patriarch brought home a family wage to a mother who controlled the territory of the home and children who knew their place – was conceived of as a domain of zones carefully graded from semi-public to private life. After the front door, perhaps with a large bay window onto the street, you found a living room and dining room for formal entertaining. Further back, facing the rear, a kitchen and perhaps a family room for casual home life. And finally, up a flight of stairs, as if to signal to outsiders, No further, the bedrooms, in which the mysteries of sex and sleep, newly linked by the vulgar Freudianism possessing American culture, were lived out in discreet privacy behind curtains and shutters.

In the Glass House, a homosexual architect flipped the script. As the essayist Mark Joseph Stern has written, the Glass House ‘represented … a parodic paradox of closeted homosexual life in the mid-twentieth century’.¹ The living space and sleeping space were melded into one, a raised eyebrow or hand placed on a new friend’s knee at cocktail hour could transform into a bedroom romp without even needing to pass through a door. What went on inside – the homosexual buttercream in the social gâteau of the mid-century elite, with strapping young men joining for a cocktail party and discreetly retiring to a bedroom with the host after several drinks and the departure of some of the guests – had usually taken place on the upper floors of country houses or in penthouse apartments higher than the windows of prying neighbours. Here these events were staged with no interior walls, only exterior walls of plate glass, in the middle of a conservative suburb in the heart of a homophobic society, just as the twinned Red and Lavender scares began purging homosexuals and suspected homosexuals from public and civic life.² As a final gesture combining the subversion and the architectural expression of the closet, Stern points out, the Guest House, located some distance across the lawn, was entirely made of brick, an inversion of the playful exhibitionism of the main house.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the fairy godmother of queer theory, named the closet and its attendant epistemology an ‘endemic crisis’ of male identification. Without a deep understanding of this, any comprehension of modern Western culture was ‘not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance’.³ This did not, she emphasized, mean that the binary between homosexual and heterosexual should be assumed to explain everything. Rather, her deceptively simple sentence reads, ‘People are different from one another.’⁴ Within classes, races, and sexualities there exist multitudes of difference; and the ways in which that difference accumulates, and the relative importance people so grouped give to those kinds of difference, and how outsiders understand those differences as we create narratives about them makes all the difference in how we understand our present and past.

On the one hand, we could end this chapter before it even began and merely understand the Glass House as the architectural enfleshment of the paradox of the closet. Or we could go further, and think about the structural realities, material and racial, needed to hide this Glass House in plain sight on Ponus Ridge Road. If the Glass House was queer space, it was also a wealthy, even aristocratic space. If the Glass House was a glass closet, it was also a ‘closet of power’, to quote the AIDS activist Michelangelo Signorile.⁵ Any untoward or unseeable behaviour between the men that Johnson always referred to as his ‘companions’ could take place behind the blank walls of the Guest House.

If the Glass House is remembered today as an icon of modernism, in its time it was more a popular success than a critical one, at least at first. The house bears a somewhat striking resemblance to a country house outside Chicago started two years earlier for the progressive and unmarried Dr Edith Farnsworth. This, too, has walls of glass framed in simple steel beams: but in comparison with Johnson’s, its corner detailing is more finely resolved and architectural critics praised its simplicity and execution. The architect of this house was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, then the elderly statesman of international modernism. Mies, as he was known, had cut his teeth working in Europe on the Weissenhof Estate, a modernist social housing project built for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927, a showpiece of the new ‘International Style’ of architecture bringing simple, clean, modern, light-and-air-filled housing to Europe’s urban proletariat.

While the Farnsworth House was a luxury villa for an upper-class client, the news hullabaloo around its design and construction (one which led crowds to storm the villa en masse to see this new provocation for themselves and which led to Farnsworth’s suing Mies) included an accusation in the pages of the magazine House Beautiful, and supported by the American modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright, that it was a ‘communist-inspired effort’ to destroy vernacular American architecture and the American way of life. With this style of architecture, the magazine wrote, Americans would ‘set ourselves up for total and authoritarian control’, for a replica of European tower blocks; as an antithesis, the magazine promoted the traditional American way of life, in ‘homes where the spirit of man can grow and flower, where each can develop in his own peculiar way’.⁶ Johnson meant his Glass House as a response to Mies’s work, but Mies threw a fit when he first saw the house, which he considered an inferior copy.⁷

But if the conservative grandees of Hearst Publications were worried that the popularity of modernism in elite houses might destroy American capitalism, Johnson’s career can be understood as an answer to that charge. Today, we are used to the spectacle of elite architects talking out of the side of their mouths about social change and green development while working with dictators and corporate leaders to help foreclose possible futures for the planet. Modernism began at the turn of the twentieth century as the idea that an entire new way of living could be designed along with a reformation of human nature, as the creation in steel and concrete and glass of the new proletarian whose age had come. By the mid-1950s, it had become an elite bauble, and today its starchitects actively express Marie Antoinette–like disdain for the migrant workers who die en masse while constructing their fantasy forms. Philip Cortelyou Johnson’s career in architecture – spanning from his work as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art interpreting the new International Style of architecture and bringing it to the United States, to his post-war reinvention as the architect of choice for several generations of corporate elites – stands as a metonym for the severing of the bonds between modernist aesthetics and progressive politics. That this career was punctuated by dedicated work promoting fascism and racist eugenics at home and abroad demonstrates the extent to which work in the service of American capitalism is also work in the service of racial capitalism.

Born into immense power and privilege, Johnson used his money and connections to whitewash his past (and ongoing) embrace of Hitler in specific and far-right politics in general. As a key curator and preacher of the Modernist gospel in the United States, he was central in divorcing the style from its egalitarian political aspirations. He partnered with architects greater than himself to bring the International Style to the United States, and then helped to explode that style’s popularity, ending his career with a parade of glitzy, shiny, corporate office towers perfect for the brash, ‘greed is good’ era of Reagan and Bush and Clinton. As a curator and mentor, he systematically ignored and suppressed Black and brown architects and designers. Over a remarkably long career – he was building more in his eighties than most people do in their fifties – he was one of America’s most successful architects.

The young Philip was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, Ohio, to one of those impeccably pedigreed WASP families whose many-named children helped construct the US empire in the early decades of the twentieth century. He was descended from a family that enjoyed prominence in seventeenth-century Dutch New Amsterdam, the settler colony that became New York. He and his sister Theodate were raised, as was their class’s custom, mostly by multilingual governesses. Homer Hosea Johnson, his father, and the former Louisa Osborn Pope, his mother, both believed that fresh air had healing powers, and so they sent their children to sleep outside on screened porches, including in the frigid Cleveland winter months. Even after their younger brother Alfred died, at five, of an infection probably exacerbated by the freezing cold, Philip and Theodate were sent by their parents to sleep outdoors, leading both of them to develop mastoid infections that plagued both for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Philip did not remember his parents fondly, thinking of his mother as a ‘cold fish’ and his father as ‘her distracted and seldom-accessible consort’.⁸ Starting at five, the young Philip was installed in a series of elite schools: first, the Laurel School, an exclusive local kindergarten at which Philip was the sole exception to the usual girls-only rule; then the University School for Boys, where Philip’s academic achievements were hindered by his hatred for athletics and manual labour, until eventually his parents removed him to the elite public schools of Shaker Heights, in a wealthy Cleveland suburb. Because the school was far from the Johnsons’ home, their chauffeur drove Philip and Theodate to school every day. By Philip’s early teen years, the family was spending winters in North Carolina, meaning that he and Theodate were continually switching schools. By twelve, he was having feelings about his male classmates.

When Philip was thirteen, the family was called to Paris. In the aftermath of the First World War, American munitions were strewn all over European battlefields, and his connected businessman father was named to the Liquidation Committee organized to arrange for their disposal. This was the beginning of the young Philip’s solo travels and exploration of the world; he spent the summer doing his best to escape his family and explore the city. After a brief stint in a boarding school in Geneva, Philip returned to the US and completed his primary education at the exclusive Hackley School in the Hudson River Valley in New York. Like most elite boarding schools then and now, Hackley existed mainly to reproduce class distinctions. When Philip attended, only white Anglo-Saxon protestants from prominent families were enrolled. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a boy who had constantly switched schools, he connected far more with his teachers than his classmates, especially the school’s English instructor, a confirmed bachelor known by all the students as ‘Daddy’.⁹ All joking aside, it is not clear whether their relationship was ever sexual. Voted ‘most likely to succeed’ by his classmates and graduating near the top of his class, Philip took one of the school’s pre-arranged admissions places at Harvard University and went off to Cambridge in the fall of 1923.

Some people are given teddy bears by their parents when they begin university, or a bit of spending money; many people’s parents cannot afford to give them anything other than love and support, or even to send them to university at all. Philip’s parents gave him a matriculation gift of stock in the aluminium firm Alcoa, which soared along with the stock market, and a specially arranged trip to Europe – after which he used some of his income from the stock to set himself up in a luxurious private apartment and buy himself an expensive sports car.

He had fun in 1920s Boston, a city experiencing a bit of a cultural renaissance. The European emigré conductor Serge Koussevitzky took over the leadership of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1924 and began commissioning music by modernist composers including Prokofiev, Copland, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Ravel; Philip enjoyed these concerts, which expanded buttoned-up Boston’s usually rather conservative cultural landscape. Yet the problem of liking boys seemed to come back to him over and again, and his grades dropped.

He felt torn between his sexuality and his responsibilities to his class position. A neurologist told him that his condition was common among people with an artistic temperament and sent him off to a rest cure; his father, on the other hand, told him, ‘Boys don’t fall in love with boys. Do something to get your mind off it. Forget about it. You’ll be all right.’¹⁰ After a brief break, he returned to Harvard but could not find his subject, trying first Greek, then philosophy. In 1928 he took another break from his studies, during which he travelled to Egypt and went through a bit of a T. E. Lawrence phase, dressing like the native Arab population and feeling almost overwhelmingly attracted to them, it seems. His first sexual experience was in a dark corner of an antiquities gallery at the Cairo Museum, with a museum guard.

After returning to the United States and fighting off another bout of depression with a stay at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health resort managed by Dr John Harvey Kellogg of cereal fame, who believed that cold baths and cornflakes could combat evils like masturbation and homosexuality, Johnson discovered the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the burgeoning modernist aesthetic movement. His guide to these two terrors was a bisexual man named Alfred Barr, who was only twenty-seven but already lecturing on modernist art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where he had begun teaching long before he finished his PhD at Harvard. At Wellesley, Barr had his students read the society and culture magazine Vanity Fair and the Communist weekly the New Masses instead of textbooks, and the students toured factories instead of art museums. Barr also founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art with three undergraduates, Edward Warburg, John Walker, and Lincoln Kirstein; Kirstein was bisexual and would go on to co-found the New York City Ballet, keep an infamous and gossip-laden diary, and write a wide variety of books on art, dance, and poetry.¹¹

Johnson attended a lecture series Barr gave at Harvard and fell under the man’s spell, eventually cornering him at the opening of a design exhibition on contemporary typography in the Bauhaus style and at a party after a student performance of Antony and Cleopatra at Wellesley College starring Theodate as Cleopatra.¹² Barr had just been appointed the director of a new Museum of Modern Art that was to be built in New York, founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (of the Standard Oil Rockefellers) and two high-societyfriends.

From the beginning, then, modernist art as institutionalized in the United States was an elitist project, one pursued by the bohemian children of the patrician patrons and patronesses who had built the Beaux Arts temples of figurative art in the centre of most Eastern American cities. Johnson later claimed that Barr had offered him a job on the spot if he could educate himself quickly about contemporary architecture in Europe. Barr, on the other hand, recalled giving no firm job offer but did recall encouraging Johnson to learn German. In either case, Johnson made plans to set off for Europe and Barr gave him a plan for what to see.

‘I would rather be connected with that Museum and especially with Barr than anything I could think of,’ Johnson wrote his mother. ‘I will have to hump myself and learn something in a hurry though.’¹³ Johnson’s letters to his mother were, his biographer Franz Schulze writes, full of both ‘knowledge and sophistication’ and also ‘an infantile self-indulgence … He was forever the dutiful Johnson boy child, reporting not only on his lessons but on his ailments.’ ‘She was my invention,’ he would later say. ‘I invented her to write my letters to.’¹⁴

Barr’s concept for ‘learning something’ meant a grand tour through the European continent, with specific instructions as to what Johnson was to look at, whom he was to meet, and what ideas he should expose himself to. Johnson, in his typically grand style, sailed to Europe in August of 1929 travelling first class on the Bremen, a brand-new luxury ocean liner on which he had loaded a brand-new sports car purchased for the occasion of the trip. ‘My final judgement of the decoration is not so favorable,’ he said of the ship, which was modern, but not modern enough for him. Besides, his biographer Mark Lamster writes, ‘the food was awful and there were too many Jews’.¹⁵

After the boat docked in Germany and he set up a home base in Heidelberg, where he toured local cathedrals and modernist housing projects on Barr’s list, Philip fell in with a man named John McAndrew, whom he met in a museum in Mannheim. McAndrew was also a Harvard graduate and a Barr disciple, doing fieldwork for a dissertation in architecture. ‘He hates the people I hate,’ Johnson reported, and that was enough grounds for attraction to send the two off on a lovers’ romp through European modernist architecture.¹⁶ Johnson told his mother they were going to report on the new constructions for popular magazines, but no such writing ever appeared.

The men visited the Weissenhof Estate, that showpiece of modernist social housing on which architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius were proposing radically new and radically egalitarian ways of living. After a brief jaunt to Geneva and London – Johnson’s trunks, full of newly purchased British fashions, were heavy enough to almost cause his plane back to Germany to crash – he went to Holland with McAndrew to visit the residential complex at the Hook of Holland, also on Barr’s list, designed by J. J. P Oud. Oud’s brother Pieter was then mayor of Rotterdam and leader of the left-liberal Free-Thinking Democratic League, and had commissioned Oud to design radically rational and unornamented social housing that Johnson and McAndrew described as ‘the Parthenon of modern Europe’.¹⁷

Like all gays making their way through 1920s Europe, the two eventually wound their way to Berlin, where Johnson soaked himself in architecture, art, opera, cabaret, and gay sex, all things for which Berlin remains world-renowned. He took a late-summer trip to the Bayreuth Festival where, like so many fags before him, he was captivated by the music of Wagner; seated at a dinner next to the composer’s gay son Siegfried, a composer who also conducted at the festival, he reported feeling the master’s hand stroking his thigh under the table.¹⁸

Johnson visited the Bauhaus in Dessau near Berlin, also on Barr’s list, and greatly admired it. He broke with his anti-ornament orthodoxy to admire the luxurious Baroque palaces of the Prussian monarchs outside Berlin – especially admiring the pink palace at Sanssouci where Frederick the Great had relaxed with Voltaire and played his flute in between wars. In the evenings Johnson drowned these aesthetic contradictions in cocaine and champagne.

On one such evening, he met Jan Ruhtenberg, a descendent of Swedish nobility. Attracted by his connections and striking looks, Johnson dropped McAndrew like a hot potato and began to visit some of the most important modernist artists’ ateliers with his new friend. This included Paul Klee, from whom he bought a drawing, alongside works by Picasso and Aristide Maillol. Ruhtenberg also took him to visit the studio of the great Wassily Kandinsky, about whom Johnson wrote dismissively to Barr, ‘Kandinsky is a little fool who is completely dominated by his swell Russian Grande Dame of a wife. He has millions of his sometimes painful abstractions sitting around the house and thinks he is still the leader of a new movement. It is sometimes pathetic, sometimes amusing.’¹⁹

As summer turned to fall, world events began to pick up speed – on 29 October 1929, ‘Black Tuesday’ hit Wall Street: defying common predictions that the markets would rise forever, billions of dollars of stock were sold off as the mass speculative bubble of the 1920s burst. The seeming economic growth of the previous decade had been driven by speculation and debt, and the gains had concentrated at the very top. When the bottom fell out, banks failed, confidence collapsed, investors were wiped out, people lost their savings and millions their jobs, and the Great Depression began in the United States and Europe. Johnson himself seemed to barely notice, instead busying himself with designs for renovations at his parents’ country home. ‘I heard something disquieting about a new bottom or something,’ he wrote his mother discussing the crash. ‘I hope it isn’t true.’²⁰

The Museum of Modern Art opened in November of 1929, and in January of 1930 Philip returned to the United States to finish school. He received his degree that spring, seven years after starting, and began commuting to New York to work at the museum. The position he was given, at least to start, was as one of a group of young patrons. The chair of this group at the time was Nelson Rockefeller, who would later become governor of New York State. Johnson was given an office and a secretary, but no salary – he hardly needed one. Here, Johnson, Barr, and the architectural historian Henry- Russell Hitchcock, who had written a monograph on modernist architecture in 1929, began collaborating more and more, as Barr worked to convince supporters of the museum that it should exhibit architecture and design alongside painting and sculpture.

Hitchcock was also gay, and for a while he and Johnson were both pursuing another member of the Barr clique, Cary Ross. Johnson and Hitchcock began working together on a new project: the idea was to write an illustrated book about the new modern style of architecture. The two travelled to Europe together in the summer of 1930, and Philip bought yet another new sports car to drive them around Europe visiting architects and sites and planning the book project. There, he became close to Mies van der Rohe, whom he hired to design him a luxurious interior for his apartment in New York.

Upon returning, Johnson proposed to the MoMA board that the book he was working on with Hitchcock also become an exhibition. This was a major move: architecture was, at the time, not typically exhibited alongside fine art. But, inspired by the convergence of various design forms at the Bauhaus, Johnson proposed to present an exhibit on ‘a marked activity in architecture’ in which ‘technical advances, new methods, and fresh thoughts are solving contemporary building problems’.²¹ His family wealth was to finance the exhibit, and he offered to curate it himself, with no salary. With the exhibit approved, he set out curating, with an expected opening date in early 1932.

The exhibit was a major success, with visitors seeing in models and photographs works by Le Corbusier, Mies, and other pioneering European modernists. Frank Lloyd Wright was invited to participate; while his style differentiated greatly from the curatorial regime and from the other architects, his domestic fame meant he had to be included.

Most of the projects Johnson had lauded on his European travels had to do with social housing, which seemed to be the great political, social, and architectural question of the time. Mass urbanization led to the creation of enormous and profitable slums in cities across the United States and Europe, where workers lived in cramped, dark, and crowded conditions. The Depression only exacerbated this problem: indeed, as Johnson was planning his exhibit hundreds of thousands of poor Americans were living in self-built urban shanties called Hoovervilles, victims of the spiking unemployment rate and of the doctrinaire laissez-faire economic policies of then president Herbert Hoover.

In this context, one might assume that a major exhibition on the modernist architecture of Europe intending to promote that style in the United States might focus on the question of social housing, and on the potential of architectural modernism to create light-filled, clean, safe, and affordable housing for the masses. Attracted to these architects’ work by its aesthetics and not its intellectual roots, Johnson took forceful action to push social housing, possibly the main concern of the founders of architectural modernism, to the sidelines of the show. He turned down an invitation to a national conference on the housing crisis and placed the essay on social housing at the very back of the exhibition catalogue.²² The exhibition was a major success, and Johnson was named the curator of the museum’s department of arts and design.

The summer after, in 1932, Johnson returned to Berlin and began his long, dedicated, and shockingly unrepentant love affair with Nazis and Nazism. He was first encouraged to go see a Nazi rally by his friend Helen Appleton Read, an art critic from a prominent Brooklyn family working for Vogue magazine and a private art gallery. Like Johnson, who imagined himself a kind of Übermensch, she was a devotee of Nietzschean philosophy and recommended that Johnson, at that point relatively apolitical, visit a Nazi rally held on a field in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. That July, the Nazis had won 37 percent of the vote and become the largest political party in Germany. On that windy field in October, Johnson was transfixed and transformed. ‘You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd,’ he told Franz Schulze.²³

This was, for Johnson, a sexual thrill as well as a political and aesthetic one, with ‘all those blond boys in black leather’ marching around. Eighty thousand young men and women showed up. Hitler railed against the Jews, echoing Johnson’s existing prejudices. While there was a sexual thrill – and Johnson did, apparently, like them blonde and twinkish – his biographer Mark Lamster, who alongside the Johnson Study Group did much to uncover the depth of Johnson’s ideological commitment to and material support for fascism and racism, is unconvinced by Johnson’s attempt to reduce ‘his attraction to the Nazis in sexual terms … It was easier to whitewash sexual desire’, Lamster writes, especially in conversations with biographers in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘than the egregious social and political ideas that truly captivated him.’²⁴

Johnson travelled to see the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, created by modern architects in Italy to commemorate the anniversary of the fascist takeover there, and wrote an approving article for a small magazine in October of 1933 attempting to reconcile his love of the Bauhaus with the school’s having been closed, and its teachers scattered into imprisonment and exile by the Nazis: he suggested that the school had been ‘irretrievably’ damaged by the influence of communism, but hoped that some German architects and artists could unify fascism and Johnson’s beloved modernist aesthetics.²⁵

Throughout the 1930s, Johnson devotedly advocated for fascism at home and abroad. He wrote once that ‘we seem to forget … we live in a community of people to whom we are bound by the ties of existence, to some of whom we owe allegiance and obedience and to others of whom we owe leadership and instruction’.²⁶ In his modernist New York apartment, alongside social evenings designed to show, as Lamster writes, that ‘the International style … was not some socialist aesthetic for the working classes, but the new style for a discerning taste-maker of social standing’, and where Theodate, who considered herself a singer, would often perform modernist music, Johnson hosted fascist gatherings and shared lists of Nazi sympathizers with German diplomats.²⁷ Travelling to Germany throughout the 1930s, Johnson toured Hitler Youth camps. He called the Nazis ‘daylight into the ever-darkening atmosphere of contemporary America’, attended Nazi rallies at Madison Square Garden, and gave financial support to an anti-Semitic street militia called the Christian Mobilizers.²⁸

He aimed to create a fascist militia modelled off the Black-shirts, except their shirts would be grey. With the fascist propagandist Lawrence Dennis, he worried about the death of the white race and the threats that Jews posed to society. He plotted a political career, planning to start in the Ohio legislature, and then walked away when he realized he’d actually have to spend time campaigning with the unwashed masses. For Charles Coughlin, a fascist radio preacher who sermonized weekly against the dangers of Jews and Bolsheviks, he designed a custom modernist grandstand intended to bring some of the visual spectacle of European fascism to American shores. For Coughlin’s fascist newspaper, Social Justice, he reported from Jewish Socialist prime minister Léon Blum’s France, writing that ‘lack of leadership and direction … has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation’s time of weakness – the Jews’.²⁹

When Coughlin’s political ambitions were crushed by the defeat of the fascist Union Party in 1936 (its nominee got only 2 percent of the vote to Roosevelt’s 60 percent), Johnson kept alight the flame, using his personal wealth to sponsor radio broadcasts in which he argued that Bolsheviks and bankers threatened American patriotism; he started a Young Nationalist party composed, per Lamster, ‘of hard-core reactionaries, pro-Nazi German-American Bundists, and Klansmen’, whom he invited to dinners at his country home.³⁰ He published articles in the fascist journal The Examiner arguing that America was committing ‘race suicide’ through a degenerate lack of national values. In 1938 he took courses in Nazi ideology in schools run by Hitler’s government, and helped top Nazi diplomats distribute propaganda to fascist circles in the United States. He published a favourable review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; writing that the book was ‘an extraordinary document … Hitler has shown himself to be one of Goethe’s “doers”.’³¹

When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Johnson embedded himself in a group of friendly journalists and reported that ‘the German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.’³² In letters, he called the Poles ‘a subhuman Slavic racial type’; the journalist William Shirer reported that Johnson was pretending to be anti-Nazi and gathering information on other American reporters.³³ He did lecture tours in the early 1940s claiming to debunk anti-Nazi propaganda in the United States. As Lamster writes, Johnson ‘was the ideal vehicle for the Nazis, a man willing and able to finance their interests out of his own pocket’.³⁴

Initially, none of this seemed to impede Johnson’s rise in the tiny avant-gardist social circles of 1930s New York. His money and connections helped, as did his charm. Like many elite white New Yorkers, Johnson enjoyed trips to Harlem to experience Black nightlife, where he found a kind of shadow gay life. For a time, he even dated a Black man, Jimmie Daniels, whom he met through an English pimp. Daniels was a sex worker and a struggling actor and singer trying to make it in New York. For Johnson, he was, Mark Lamster writes, ‘the ultimate act of transgression … a love affair and an act of modernity at once’.³⁵

‘I was naughty,’ Johnson reflected later in life when discussing the relationship and reflecting on why it had failed, and claimed he ‘didn’t realize’ how it might have ‘galled’ Daniels to not be ‘included’ in Johnson’s whites-only circles.³⁶ Johnson also briefly dated the composer John Cage (in the same year that Cage had a brief affair with Harry Hay, who would go on to co-found the gay rights movement in the United States in 1950).

As politics began to take up more and more of Johnson’s life in the early 1940s, he drifted away from the Museum of Modern Art, even as it moved into tony newbuild digs on Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan. He eventually decided to enrol as a student at Harvard University’s new graduate school of architecture, setting himself up in a large townhouse with a maid and slowly beginning to cover his political tracks as the public mood shifted against the Nazis. When he attempted to enlist in the US Army, he was rejected by intelligence services because of his Nazi connections. He even formed an anti-fascist committee there, for what we can all presume were entirely honest ideological commitments free from concerns about his career or professional reputation.

When in 1942 he was investigated by the FBI for possible disloyalty, his former secretary reported that Johnson had ambitions to be America’s Hitler. His good friends the Rockefellers helped protect him from prosecution, and his new friends and teachers at Harvard, many of whom were Germans who had fled the Nazis, were willing to be bought off by this rich and charming colleague. After all, Philip could afford not only to hire people to do his draughting and model-making for him, but also, as his thesis project, to construct a house on a plot of land next to Harvard.

After graduating and building the Glass House as an attention-seeking way of starting his own practice, Johnson became an enthusiastic, if dilettantish, corporate architect, in addition to continuing his work running the architecture and design department at the Museum of Modern Art. A series of small buildings around the United States cemented his growing reputation, including a synagogue project that some interpreted as an apology for his Nazi collaboration. Describing himself as ‘a violent philo- Semite’, he refused to take a fee for the project, although, as the critic Joan Ockman points out, he did reuse an existing design for a church building project that had fallen through.³⁷

In 1956 Johnson partnered with Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building, an icon of mid-century Manhattan business power. He helped steer the commission to Mies van der Rohe through Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, a MoMA patron and the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Seagram’s CEO. Mies took the broad design lead, changing the fashion for office building construction – instead of walling New York’s tight streets and stepping back on upper levels like the pre-war Art Deco skyscrapers, this skyscraper and its many future imitators would be set back from the street with a wide plaza. The building was clad in glass and steel tinted a luxurious bronze.

Johnson took the lead in designing the Four Seasons restaurant, a swanky power-lunch destination made up of two enormous square dining rooms with twenty-foot ceilings, walnut panelling, marble pools, palm trees, and artworks by Picasso and Richard Lippold. Mark Rothko was initially supposed to create murals for the restaurant, intending to create something that would shock complacent diners out of their martini-fuelled swing, but decided that the space Johnson had designed was so totalizing and resistant to intervention that he withdrew his works.

In the restaurant, metal curtains shimmered in a breeze piped in through special-purpose ducts. The building’s structural supports employed a similar kind of artifice: the steel I-beams designed to look as if they were holding the building up were in fact decorative stick-ons hiding the fireproofed load-bearing beams inside. Here was the apotheosis of modernism as ornament, as decadent and frivolous as the frippery on the walls of the Prussian palaces at Sanssouci: if Mies van der Rohe had begun his career designing social housing for the proletariat in which form followed function, now, he and Johnson had converted this into an applied style for the corporate elite of a new American century.

In 1960, Johnson met David Whitney, who became his life partner. ‘He was an eighteen-year-old or something,’ Johnson later recalled in an interview. Whitney, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, came up to Johnson after a lecture and asked why he had purchased a flag painting by Jasper Johns. ‘I said, “Because Alfred Barr told me to.” I told the truth too soon, as usual. So then we got started.’³⁸ Johnson had been living a sexual gay life for years now, but as Charles Kaiser writes in his book The Gay Metropolis, gay men of his ‘class and generation’ could attend high-society dinner parties but were not invited to bring a boyfriend along. ‘Mrs. Vincent Astor said she always had a homosexual to dinner’, Kaiser recalls Johnson saying, ‘because they were the only people who could talk.’³⁹

Johnson and Whitney, who were primary partners from 1963 until Johnson’s death but who maintained active sexual lives of their own, began building a regular gay circle at the Glass House, including artists like Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, John Cage, and his partner Merce Cunningham, whose homosexuality was also somewhat of an open secret. Nonetheless, it took years for Johnson to begin bringing Whitney around to see his other friends. It was, Charles Kaiser recalls, the tele vision newscaster Barbara Walters who, at a dinner party in 1975, point-blank asked Johnson why he did not bring his boyfriend to any of the social events at which he was a regular. ‘I said, “By God, you’re right Barbara,” ‘ Johnson later remembered. ‘Got up from the table and went home. She was a very great help. I was so mean and selfish.’⁴⁰

It was not just Barbara Walters’s frankness, apparently a hallmark of her social as well as her professional style, that spurred Johnson to begin bringing Whitney around to the straighter parts of high society. By the mid-1970s, things were changing. The 1969 Stonewall Rebellion of drag queens, trans women, and street kids was less the spark of a new movement than the reflection of a growing confidence and political consciousness among some queer people. While it was received with horror by even the more conservative homophile rights groups – never mind the gay elite like Johnson, who lived in closets of power in which their homosexuality could be an open secret, trapped in their privilege like bugs in amber – the effects of this political movement rippled outwards and upwards.

By the mid-1970s, then, it was possible for Johnson to openly dine with corporate executives’ wives with his boyfriend by his side. What was not acceptable was the possibility that this might become public knowledge. When critic Calvin Tomkins profiled Johnson for the New Yorker in 1977, Johnson got word that the profile planned to mention Whitney as his boyfriend. He was, at that time, up for a major commission, the design of a new corporate headquarters for AT&T in Manhattan, and reacted to the possible disclosure with horror, calling up the magazine and begging them to refrain from outing him. Whitney appeared in the article as his ‘friend’.⁴¹

Writing in the introduction to a collection of critical responses to Johnson’s work, the critic Emmanuel Petit describes him as having a ‘nonchalant approach … at times tainted with brattish and posh cynicism’, and as being an architect ‘in search of the strong characters in architecture … mostly to be found in the Greco-German classical tradition’, created for ‘the judgement of the select few … an art for the eyes’.⁴² Setting aside for the moment Petit’s decision to minimize Johnson’s political beliefs, beliefs that one might associate rather uncomfortably with an aesthetic interest in elite-oriented Greco-Germanism, this emphasis on form, classicism, and richness of material begins to explain Johnson’s increasing departure, as the 1960s dawned, from the orthodoxies of the International Style.

Architects were moving on: brutalists were aiming to remake public space and design public housing, a topic Johnson found boring and pointless. Instead, he found himself beginning to experiment with ornamentation, arching, and travertine marble: a series of buildings in Texas, art galleries and private homes for the newly rich oil barons, began evincing a kind of gas-station classicism. He joined the team of architects working on the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a palace of high culture intended to replace several cleared-out slum blocks on New York’s Upper West Side.

This was 1960s ‘urban renewal’ in extremis. Black and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods, designated as slums, were to be cleared of their residents. The resulting land would be used for a temple of high art designed primarily with the car in mind. Ramps led from garages directly to the highway, allowing white patrons to return to their homes in the suburbs without setting foot on a city street. It was as anti-urban as an urban architectural project could be. The team of architects included many of the favoured designers of the mid-century corporate elite.

Johnson contributed two things to the Lincoln Center’s design: first, the idea to coat all of the buildings in travertine marble; and second, the design of the New York State Theater for ballet and the City Opera, a thousand-ton bomb of marble, jewelled chandeliers, red velvet, gilding, and everything else expensive and tacky, with horrid acoustics, an Albert Speer building wearing too much jewellery and lipstick. As he participated in urban renewal’s expulsion and displacement of the urban poor, his political imagination continued to run wild and far to the right. In lectures at the time, Johnson dreamed of levying national taxes to create dream cities under the control of local dictatorial philosopher-kings. In 1964, he referred, in a private letter, to Hitler as having been ‘better than Roosevelt’.⁴³

In 1967, Johnson founded a new architectural office, partnering with the architect John Burgee to design a series of buildings that began pushing the boundaries of modernism even further. Petit refers to this as reflecting Johnson’s desire to constantly destroy the new forms he had proposed to create. Johnson, he writes, was a media-driven architect: ‘The “significance” of his architecture was ultimately defined through the mechanisms of his media appearance and publicity.’⁴⁴ Johnson conceived of himself as an intuitive aesthete, for whom architecture was a medium for the promotion of beautiful objects for the elite and for showy spectacles for the masses.

Into the latter category fell his Crystal Cathedral, a vast glass palace of evangelical splendour in the right-wing reactionary hotspot of Orange County, California. Here the pioneering televangelist Robert Schuller, who had first come on the scene preaching from the snack bar at the Orange Drive-In Theater near Disneyland, stripped the dour elements from Calvinism to create a happy, middle-class megachurch. The cathedral, made entirely of glass, seated thousands of people, was outfitted for TV cameras to broadcast Schuller’s nationally syndicated religious television program Hour of Power, and was surrounded by strip malls and parking lots. In interviews from his New Canaan modernist mansion, Johnson would decry mass culture and car-centred sprawl, but he certainly was instrumental in creating a lot of it. The building was impressive, but its elaborate cooling system often failed when temperatures soared above 26°C (80°F), a problem in southern California. Interior temperatures were sometimes measured at above 44°C (110°F), and sunglasses were needed for early morning or late evening services. When Schuller’s church went bankrupt in 2010, the building was extensively modified (including with interior shades) to serve as a Roman Catholic cathedral.

As Reaganism and the ‘greed is good’ 1980s dawned, Johnson and Burgee began designing a series of skyscrapers that departed even more obviously from the unadorned glass-and-steel aesthetic he had done so much to champion. The AT&T tower in New York rises thirty-seven stories in fairly sober granite and glass, with its windows set back in vertical strips that recall Art Deco, before meeting the sky with an enormous, exuberant broken pediment, as though the whole building were an enormous Chippendale chair. When the design was unveiled it immediately became the symbol of a new ‘postmodern’ movement in architecture. The New York Times’s architecture critic Paul Goldberger referred to the unveiled design as ‘postmodernism’s major monument’, a ‘daring – if disconcerting’ design that ‘suggests a joke may be played with scale that may not be quite so funny when the building, all 660 feet of it, is complete’.⁴⁵

This controversy led Johnson to write an op-ed in the Times of his own, laying out the argument for a postmodern aesthetic as seamlessly as he had laid out the argument for a modern one. Suddenly, Johnson was eager to admit that there was an alliance between modernism and progressivism, an alliance he had done so much to deny and destroy: ‘ “Modern” … taught us that men would live better, cheaper, more moral lives surrounded by such abstract, functional, simple shapes. Today we no longer feel this way.’⁴⁶ Appealing to a mass audience that felt threatened by modernism’s challenge to traditional forms, exactly the same kind of reactionary position that House Beautiful took when it called Mies’s Farnsworth House in Illinois a Communist plot, Johnson suddenly included himself in a ‘we’ who ‘want churches once more to look like churches … houses once more to look like houses’.⁴⁷ Suddenly the ‘two great periods’ in New York City architecture that he wanted to respect in ‘the spirit of Historic New York’ were the Beaux Arts period and the Art Deco 1920s, whose architects he had once excluded from MoMA shows on the grounds that their work was too traditional.

The AT&T tower, when completed, was a hit – and was followed by a series of increasingly eye-searing corporate office parks and towers. Johnson and Burgee built skyscrapers that had Gothic points, or leaned in towards one another menacingly over a public plaza; they built skyscrapers like PPG Place in Pittsburgh (mirrored-glass-clad crenellations) and International Place in Boston (pink granite and covered, incongruously, in Palladian windows). In New York City, on Third Avenue, they built a pink granite tower shaped like a stick of lipstick, where they located their new corporate office. This building was also the headquarters of Bernie Madoff’s years-long Ponzi scheme. Throughout this entire money-drenched parade of ugliness, Johnson retained his artistic credentials with the same strategy he had used to cover up his Nazism. He used his money and social connections to buy off any potential critics, and his continued association with the Museum of Modern Art, including the design of two additions and a sculpture garden and his remaining a major presence in the architecture department until the mid-1990s, meant he could always influence elite critical opinion.

This focus on style as opposed to any social or functional aspect of design separated him from many other modernists, and also enabled him to spin each new style to which he was attracted as a new advance. In a 1973 book of interviews with architects, Johnson told the interviewers, ‘What we’re talking about is the way a building finally looks … To talk about architecture as a technical matter, or a social matter, or a participatory democracy matter, is not the point to me.’⁴⁸ He illustrated his frustration with the expectation that architects pursue social responsibility with the brilliantly chosen example of ‘one of the Negro architects who was here the other day’ complaining about going to too many meetings during the design process, as though he and a Black architect had anything in common with one another other than their job title.

This may have been an attempt to insulate himself against charges of open racism or lack of care for others: like Reaganite conservatives, Johnson always couched his attacks on the public sphere and on collective action as concern for the little guy overwhelmed by elite moralists. Later in the interview he laughed off architecture students’ organizing against collaboration with the apartheid regime in South Africa: ‘Oh, the kids. Very simple: do away with architectural schools.’⁴⁹ Hitler, Johnson said in that interview, ‘was unfortunately an extremely bad architect … The only thing I really regret about dictatorships isn’t the dictatorship, because I recognize that [in Roman times] they had to have dictators. I mean, I’m not interested in politics at all. I don’t see any sense to it.’⁵⁰ That same year, after a project in Harlem fell through, Johnson said, ‘I don’t care who builds a monument for blacks. Who cares?’⁵¹ That someone so fundamentally shallow, callous, and racist was praised in his time as an intellectual is a discredit to the profession of architecture.

When Johnson’s firm with Burgee went belly-up in the late 1980s, he created a new practice, Philip Johnson / Alan Ritchie Architects. It was also around this time that Johnson began actively promoting a new series of young architects, whom he called ‘The Kids’ – this group included Frank Gehry, Rem Kool-haas, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, and many other prominent ‘deconstructionists’. In 1988 Johnson curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring this generation.

Disenchanted with the redux of historical forms, these architects began to pioneer the concept of building as sculpture, with swooping forms seeming to defy gravity and traditional engineering – think of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, for one famous example. Johnson adeptly stepped into this new space, designing some follies for his Glass House estate, including a Gehry-like metal gatehouse he called Da Monsta. In the meantime, he maintained his corporate practice designing increasingly uninspired buildings, including an ‘Urban Glass House’ in Lower Manhattan that aimed to ape the famous residence but ended up looking pretty much like any other glass-and-metal condominium building, and his final building, a bland suburban performing arts centre in Pennsylvania.

Johnson’s promotion of architects like Eisenman meant that they were often willing to defend him both as a designer and as a man. Eisenman, who was eventually commissioned to design the craggy, powerful Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and Gehry, also Jewish, both maintained long associations and friendships with Johnson. When Johnson was finally convinced to allow Franz Schulze to publish his biography in 1995, and the extent of his fascist politics was revealed, it led to some uncomfortable conversations. Johnson deftly connected his fascism to his homosexuality as the two great shames of his life, excusing his fascism as though it had been an inevitable side effect of being gay, as though he were simply transfixed by all those pretty boys in leather pants. ‘We forgave, but we didn’t forget,’ Frank Gehry said in 2005. ‘He was so powerful a force for the good in our profession that it overwhelmed all negatives.’⁵²

Throughout all this Johnson was a near-daily luncher at the Four Seasons restaurant he had designed; his final office with Ritchie was located upstairs, on the thirty-ninth floor. There, now in his late eighties, trying to re-start his career, he worked on some projects for a brash New York developer named Donald Trump, who wanted some casino projects in Atlantic City to get a little bit of extra class. Johnson was all too happy to oblige. He would also later reskin a 1960s skyscraper in golden glass, a project that became the Trump International Hotel and Tower.

The bookish aesthete and splashy power broker sides of Johnson came together for his ninetieth birthday party, celebrated a year after the publication of his biography, Nazi past on at least partial display and partner by his side (who even made a joke about how Johnson was still ‘great in the sack’). Johnson dined at the Museum of Modern Art with a birthday cake featuring a frosted glass house on top, and the guests, numbering about two hundred, wore pairs of his signature glasses.⁵³ The museum honoured him by naming its design galleries after him, and showing works that had been donated to the museum both by him and in his honour. The New York Times’s new architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, wrote paeans to the master in the newspaper, including fawning reviews of Johnson’s gatehouse, Da Monsta; in one article, Muschamp wrote, ‘No architect alive is as thrillingly attuned as Philip Johnson to promotion’s sordid glories.’⁵⁴ It was the 1990s; time had collapsed on itself, and history had ended. Gays were now welcome to joke about their sex lives at receptions at the Museum of Modern Art (as long as they were white and appropriately dressed), and Philip Johnson was ninety and still on top of the field.

Since his death, his association with the MoMA has come under increasing scrutiny. Lamster’s biography, from which we have been quoting extensively here, created a scandal when it appeared in 2018. Lamster was the first to reveal publicly the extent and depth of Johnson’s fascist collaboration – not merely the youthful fascination with strapping young soldiers Johnson had palmed it off as to his official biographer. Lamster’s research also revealed that Johnson’s commitment to reactionary and white-supremacist politics had extended long after the Second World War. A collective of Black architects and researchers, the Johnson Study Group, formed and began to agitate for the removal of plaques and job titles honouring Johnson from the Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. ‘Johnson’s commitment to white supremacy was significant and consequential,’ their letter reads; they point out that ‘under his leadership, not a single work by any Black architect or designer was included’ in MoMA’s collection. ‘He not only acquiesced but added to the persistent practice of racism in the field of architecture.’⁵⁵

While Harvard reacted only a week after the letter, eventually removing Johnson’s name from its Thesis House, which the university used as an event and program space for the design school, the Museum of Modern Art has still not removed Johnson’s name from the galleries dedicated to his honour or from the honorary title of its curator of architecture and design. In March of 2021 the Black Reconstruction Collective, a group of architects participating in an exhibit at the museum called ‘Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America’, temporarily covered the sign titling the Philip Johnson Galleries with a tapestry bearing its manifesto. A spokesperson for the museum told ARTNews that ‘the Museum currently has underway a rigorous research initiative to explore in full the allegations against Johnson and gather all available information. This work is ongoing.’⁵⁶ The Johnson Study Group continues to organize to address Johnson’s legacy of white supremacy and study the ways in which it affected the institutions he helped build.

Just after that splashy ninetieth birthday, Johnson had open heart surgery and disappeared from public life for a year to recover. His return in 1997 was enthusiastically covered by the Times and the New Yorker, but his public appearances and office works became ever more infrequent. He began to slowly retreat from public life, and his memory began to fail. In August of 2003, he made his last appearance in the office. ‘I don’t know where I am’, he told an assistant, ‘and I never want to come back here again.’⁵⁷

Living in his Glass House, his life increasingly restricted to the boundaries of his estate, he ate less and less. Whitney, many years younger, began spending more and more time in California after his own diagnosis with terminal lung cancer. Alone except for his staff, Philip Johnson died early in 2005 at the age of ninety-eight, on a snowy day, lying in bed in the Glass House. Describing the inspirations that produced that house, he had once suggested that the first idea, of an illuminated house glowing at night, came from ‘a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick’.⁵⁸ Lamster wonders if this image may have been a burning Jewish village, destroyed by the advancing Wehrmacht, and notes that Johnson used that brick fireplace at the Glass House to try to burn away the evidence, in notes and letters and articles he had written, of the death of his fascist involvements.

Ultimately Johnson died alone in his luxury glass closet, an enactment of queer space but also an enactment of the divorce of American modernism from socialist or even social democratic politics and its ascension to the pinnacle of elite style, and potentially a monument to the aestheticization of genocide. His New York Times obituary described him as ‘at once the elder statesman and enfant terrible of American architecture’, and did not mention the Nazis, fascism, racism, or politics.⁵⁹