The Architect Who Couldn't Draw

by Franz Schulze.

Knopf, 465 pages, $30.00.

Johnson may or may not be a great designer, but he’s an undoubted master of cultural politics. Since the 1930s he has been a major force as architect, critic, curator, teacher, historian, and patron. For decades he virtually dictated the architectural taste of the Museum of Modern Art. He did as much as anyone to bring the modern movement to America, and then, fifty years later, abandoned that movement with his design of the Chippendaletopped AT&T tower in New York, which put him on the cover of Time magazine as the guru of postmodernism. As controversial as ever, he is now offering a scheme for a family of high-rise towers in Times Square—a modish family, which seems to adopt a new fashion in architectural clothes every time its picture appears in public.

Johnson’s life story is a melodrama, and Franz Schulze, who previously wrote a biography of the German modernist Mies van der Rohe, tells it ably. Schulze is fair in his judgments and diligent in his research. He isn’t a lively critic of Johnson’s architecture, but there’s no shortage of those. His only real fault is a tone-deaf flatting of language, which fails to capture the grace and wit of his subject. (For example: “History provided the best salve for the contextual sores the 1960s were beginning to blame on the bad medicine of modernism.”)

Johnson, a rich kid from Cleveland, majored in philosophy at Harvard, where he abandoned an early love for the moral absolutism of Plato and turned instead to Nietzsche. The gods were gone, leaving a void filled only by the sacredness of art. “We have art that we may not perish from the truth”—it’s a maxim Johnson still quotes. At Harvard he suffered manic-depressive cycles and two breakdowns, and took seven years to graduate. Yet within months, at the age of twenty-four, despite never having formally studied the subject, he was, through his friendship with Alfred Barr, put in charge of the architecture program at the new Museum of Modem Art in New York. There, in 1932, with the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he staged a fateful exhibition, “The Internationa] Style,” which introduced European modernism to America.

Two years after that triumph the mercurial Johnson quit MOMA and architecture to spend the rest of the decade thrashing haplessly in fringe-group politics. In 1932 he had attended a Nazi rally in Potsdam, where he was enthralled by Hitler and, as he told Schulze, “all those blond boys in black leather.” He did volunteer work for Huey Long, who ignored him, ran an abortive campaign for the Ohio legislature, and championed the anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Schulze chooses not to quote the most repugnant of Johnson’s writings from this period, but what he does print is damning enough. For example:

Reduced to plain terms, Hitler’s “racism” is a perfectly simple though far-reaching idea. It is the myth of “we, the best,” which we find, more or less fully developed, in all vigorous cultures.

When Hitler invaded Poland, in September of 1939, Johnson camp-followed the panzers as a correspondent for Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice. By chance the journalist William Shirer shared a Polish hotel room with the future architect. Shirer later wrote, in his best seller Berlin Diary, “None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis”—words that haunted Johnson’s career for years to come.

As Schulze points out, Johnson was not the only intellectual of his time who read Nietzsche, identified himself as an Ubermensch, and dreaded the rise of mass culture. Brilliant but quickly bored, intellectually rudderless, he has been a pushover all his life for any new idea. It’s a trait that keeps him safely in the vanguard of architectural fashion.

When America entered the war, Johnson swerved again. He enrolled as a student at the Harvard architecture school, which was then headed by such former Bauhaus modernists as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Although he never really learned to draw, he graduated at the top of his class in 1943.

That was the year, as it happens, of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, and it’s possible to view Johnson—ever the cultural tuning fork—as the double image of Rand’s hero and villain: as the Nietzschean Gary Cooper figure, self-willed, arrogant, contemptuous, for whom art comes before all else; but also as the welltailored, crowd-pleasing, handshaking society architect, the favorite of wealthy hostesses.

After the war Johnson regained his old friendships and patrons and his old job as the head of the architecture department at MOMA, and he began a career as a practicing architect which went into orbit almost at once. His vehicle, made possible by his private wealth, was a house he designed for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, with walls made entirely of glass: the Glass House, a modem classic. It derived from the ideas of Mies, but it was a distinguished work nonetheless, and it proved to be only the first in a series of oneand two-room pavilions Johnson would build, and is still building, for himself on his ever-growing property. After Johnson’s death his estate is to be opened to the public by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Johnson’s practice grew from houses to museums to office buildings. By the 1980s his name was so big that an American city that lacked a tower by Johnson and his partner, John Burgee, felt that its skyline was incomplete. Every corporate client wanted something that looked a little different, a sort of architectural logo. Johnson responded by milking history for a zany variety of styles. His buildings seemed to be random spinoffs from whatever image happened to be floating through his mind or library at the moment of design. But he is never less than witty, and at times all through his career he has been superb. One thinks, among other things, of the half-transparent mirror of the Glass House in an autumn landscape; the Zen-like calm of the sculpture garden at MOMA (now marred by alterations); the glittering presence of the Transco Tower, in Houston; the matchless elegance of the Museum for Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C.; the urbanity of the IDS Center, in Minneapolis; and the astonishing interior of the Crystal Cathedral, in California.

Johnson designed the cathedral for the egregious media hound Robert Schuller; it was completed in 1980. Speaking to Schuller’s congregation in 1990, at the dedication of a bell tower for the cathedral, Johnson, a lifelong atheist, his voice breaking, said he couldn’t have done it without help from above.

One caveat: Prospective buyers should not confuse this excellent book with one called Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, a handsome but featherweight hagiography.