Facts panel
- Full name: Philip Cortelyou Johnson
- Born: 8 July 1906, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
- Died: 25 January 2005, at the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, USA (aged 98)
- Nationality: American
- Training: Harvard University — BA Philosophy (1930); Architecture degree, Harvard Graduate School of Design (1943)
- Key academic roles: Founding director, Department of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York (from 1930)
- Practice: Philip Johnson Architect (from 1949); Johnson/Burgee Architects (established 1967, with John Burgee)
- Major awards: AIA Gold Medal (1978); first Pritzker Architecture Prize (1979)
- Best known for: Glass House (1949), Seagram Building with Mies (1958), Pennzoil Place (1976), 550 Madison Avenue (1984)
- Associated movements: International Style modernism; Postmodernism; later Deconstructivism
From philosophy to architecture
Johnson did not begin with architecture. He studied classics and then philosophy at Harvard, graduating in 1930, and his first sustained engagement with buildings was as a reader, traveller, and critic. In the late 1920s he made repeated trips to Europe, visiting the new modernist buildings being built in Germany — the Bauhaus in Dessau, Mies's work in Berlin — and returning convinced that something historically significant was happening. He went back to Harvard, this time to the Graduate School of Design, and completed his architecture degree in 1943.
In the years between, he had already done some of his most consequential work — not as a designer but as a curator and writer.
The International Style
In 1932, Johnson co-organised the "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and co-authored its accompanying book, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, with the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The exhibition and the book introduced the work of Mies, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Oud to an American audience — and in doing so, named a movement. "International Style" was the label Johnson and Hitchcock gave to a body of work that had been developing independently across Europe, and it stuck.
The exhibition's influence was immense. It helped establish MoMA as a credible voice on architecture, shaped American architectural education for a generation, and gave Mies van der Rohe — whom Johnson personally championed, organised his first American visit for, and later worked alongside — the platform from which he would spend his career.
The Glass House and the move to practice
In 1949, Johnson completed his own home in New Canaan, Connecticut — the building he had designed as his Harvard thesis — and opened his architectural practice. The Glass House is a single rectangular room of steel and glass, sitting in an open landscape: an idea reduced to its most essential expression. It was immediately recognised as one of the most complete realisations of modernist spatial thinking in domestic architecture.
Johnson was open about its intellectual debts — to Mies, to the Russian Suprematists, to the German neoclassicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and to the French visionary Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. That combination of acknowledgement and assimilation is characteristically Johnsonian: he never pretended to originality; he understood synthesis as a form of intelligence.
Mies, the Seagram Building, and the modernist years
Through the 1950s Johnson worked within the modernist tradition he had done so much to establish. The collaboration with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building (1956–58) on Park Avenue, New York, was the most significant relationship of his early practice: Johnson designed the Four Seasons restaurant and the lobby interiors. The Seagram remains one of the great bronze-and-glass towers of the twentieth century.
He continued to design in a broadly modernist idiom through the 1960s — the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska (1963), the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964), and various religious and institutional buildings across America — while his critical writing suggested a growing restlessness with modernism's prohibitions.
The complicated years
Any honest account of Philip Johnson must address a chapter he later described with shame. In the late 1930s, Johnson was a fascist sympathiser and anti-Semite. He attended the Nuremberg rally in 1938, wrote articles sympathetic to Hitler and Mussolini, contributed pieces to Father Charles Coughlin's far-right publication Social Justice, and travelled to Poland in 1939 shortly after the German invasion. He was investigated by the FBI. He was not prosecuted.
After the war, Johnson renounced these positions entirely, expressed regret publicly and privately, and spent the rest of his career partly in the shadow of what he had done. The question of whether his subsequent career redeems or merely complicates this period is one each visitor to his buildings must answer for themselves. The buildings are documented here because they are buildings worth understanding; the history is noted here because it is history worth knowing.
The standard reference is Franz Schulze's biography Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994).
The turn to postmodernism
By the early 1970s, Johnson's disenchantment with modernist orthodoxy had become a defining creative position. With his partner John Burgee he began designing buildings that reintroduced symbolism, historical reference, and figural form — the very things modernism had expelled.
Pennzoil Place in Houston (1975–76) was the breakthrough: twin trapezoidal towers with their tops sliced at an angle, creating a profile entirely unlike any corporate tower that had preceded it. The building was widely praised as marking a turning point. 550 Madison Avenue (1984) made the turn irreversible: the building's broken-pediment crown — Chippendale-esque, monumental, impossible to mistake — became the emblem of postmodern architecture in America and beyond.
Legacy
Johnson's influence on twentieth-century American architecture is difficult to overstate, though its nature is unusual. He was not a singular formal genius in the manner of Mies or Le Corbusier. He was something rarer: a man of enormous cultural intelligence who understood where architecture was, where it was going, and how to connect those two points — and then built accordingly.
He received the Pritzker Prize in 1979, the first time it was awarded. He continued to design into the 1990s and remained a presence in architectural culture into his final years. He died at the Glass House, the building he had built for himself more than half a century earlier, in January 2005.
Frequently asked questions about Philip Johnson
Who was Philip Johnson?
Philip Johnson (1906–2005) was an American architect whose career shaped the course of twentieth-century architecture in the United States. As the founding director of the architecture department at MoMA and co-author of The International Style (1932), he introduced European modernism to American audiences. As a practitioner, he moved from modernism through postmodernism over a career lasting nearly 75 years. He was the first recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1979.
What buildings did Philip Johnson design?
His best-known buildings include the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949, his own home), Pennzoil Place in Houston (1975–76, with John Burgee), 550 Madison Avenue in New York (1984, with Burgee, formerly the AT&T Building), the Seagram Building in New York (1956–58, with Mies van der Rohe), IDS Center in Minneapolis, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
What is the Glass House?
The Glass House is a single-room steel-and-glass pavilion that Philip Johnson designed as his own home and Harvard master's thesis, completed in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut. It is one of the most important works of domestic modernism in the United States and is now a National Historic Landmark managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and open to the public.
What was Philip Johnson's architectural style?
Johnson's style shifted significantly across his career. His early work, including the Glass House, was in the International Style modernism he had done so much to promote. From the mid-1970s onwards, working with John Burgee, he moved towards postmodernism — reintroducing symbolism, historical reference, and ornament. In his later career he explored what he described as non-Euclidean geometry and made work associated with the broader deconstructivist movement.
When did Philip Johnson win the Pritzker Prize?
Johnson received the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. He had previously won the AIA Gold Medal in 1978. The Pritzker is now widely regarded as the most prestigious international award in architecture; Johnson was its inaugural recipient.
What was Philip Johnson's relationship with Mies van der Rohe?
Johnson was among the most important champions of Mies van der Rohe in America, having introduced his work to American audiences through the 1932 MoMA exhibition. Johnson commissioned Mies to design the interior of his New York apartment, organised Mies's first visit to the United States, and collaborated with him on the Seagram Building (1956–58). His own Glass House (1949) is openly indebted to Mies's ideas, particularly the Farnsworth House. The two men had a long, complex relationship that influenced both their careers.
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