Philip Johnson and His Mischief

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CONTENTS 6 Introduction 15

Definitions of Collage and Appropriation

19 Chapter One: The Only Style of the Epoch 28 Chapter Two: The End to the End of History 44

At the Edge of the Abyss

46 Chapter Three: Architecture into Sculpture 54

The Figure Caged within the Grid

56 Chapter Four: The Trickster Makes the City 74 Chapter Five: Last Works, Late Style

Opposite top: Palladian curtain-wall at One International Place, Boston (1987), John Burgee architects with Philip Johnson, Photo: © 2013 Christian Bjone When constructed, the cut-out Palladian windows at One International Place caused outrage from the profession as an example of Postmodern bad taste.

Robert Campbell at the Boston Globe has said “It’s obvious that these windows look awful. They’re so thin and flat they seem to be stuck onto the building with adhesive.” But in retrospect it has become one of Johnson’s most innovative details and is a tricksterlike comment on all high-rise curtain-walls, which are non-structural and, in reality, merely decorative wallpaper. These windows also connect to the serial repetitive work of much modern art as Warhol’s silk screens of commercial products.

Opposite bottom: Campbell Soup Cans (1962), Andy Warhol

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Index

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Author Biography

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Philip Johnson Professional Chronology

96

Acknowledgements

Four Types of Appropriation in Johnson’s Work Left: Memorial for the War Dead, Berlin, Project (1930), Mies van der Rohe Architect, Courtesy of MoMA Right: Memorial to John F. Kennedy, Dallas Texas (1970), Philip Johnson Architect, Courtesy of Getty images

In the chapters that follow, it is possible to see Johnson’s use of appropriation in four different ways: first, the copying of the work of his teacher and mentor; second, the copying of stylistic elements from the past; next, the copying of artist’s forms; and finally, the copying of urban images in his city plans. These four topics advance in chronology and in audacity.

As an introduction, I offer these two sets of examples that briefly show some of the various appropriations throughout his career: 1. The Johnson design for the JFK Memorial in Dallas, Texas (1970) highlights how Johnson dutifully copied much of the work of his teacher and mentor, Mies van der Rohe. It can be seen to be derived from the unsuccessful competition entry by Mies for the Memorial to the War Dead (1930), intended to be located in Schinkel’s Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) building in Berlin. The lifted image of the unbuilt Mies design worked perfectly for making an emotive “empty room,” open to the sky and separating the visitor from the noise of traffic to contemplate the assassination of the President. Strangely enough, the original German competition statement for the World War I memorial asked for its interior to opened to the sky, a condition rejected by Mies, but effectively utilized in Johnson’s American design. This is then an example where the copy is more faithful to the first competition requirements than the original design.8 The fact that this historic Berlin design was unbuilt allowed for an acceptable copying with the argument that it was an idea whose time had now come. The floor recess at the central inscribed black granite slab is copied exactly from the original; strangely this central assembly is also the design for Mies’ own gravestone (1969) in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. The closeness in time between the two project gravestones must have influenced Johnson as well, for each gesture of respect to Mies seemed to be followed by an effort to bury him.

2. Johnson also borrowed historical motifs in the Postmodern era. A clear example of this is the Johnson design for the Math Tower at the University of Ohio (1992), which illustrates Johnson’s use of a historical reference so hidden and obscure

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Philip Johnson and his Mischief

that it became a wildcard in the parlor game of other architects and historians guessing his sources, with many incorrect references offered.9 The true source of appropriation was the All Souls School at Foley Street, London (1908), an Edwardian Free Style building that was shown to Johnson by his employee Joseph Katanik, after his participation in the Victorian Society’s summer tours in the UK (an organization founded by Johnson’s good friend Henry Russell Hitchcock).10 Johnson made an immediate connection to this eccentric masonry structure that matched his longterm interest in the mid 19th-century German “round-arched style” (Rundbogenstil) and, with the stamp of the overlapping arches, he could then elaborate the façades with different arch patterns, none of them having a structural reality.

Left: All Souls Street School, London UK (1908), A. Beresford Pite Architect, Photograph courtesy of The Courtauld Institute of Art Right: Mathematics Tower at Ohio State University (1992), John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson, Photograph courtesy of Bluffton University

Later, I will expand the scope of this topic in two other directions: the first, using the example of the “Trickster”: the mythic archetype causing intentional chaos and the questioning of the natural order that exists; and the second, examining how Johnson fits within the current research on the nature of “Lateness,” the study of how the last works of an artist can establish a special meaning in the total assembled work.

This book will not cover a separate design strategy extensively used by Johnson, which I label as “Reflected Geometries.” In these projects, Johnson started with simple primary forms then stacked, mirrored, inverted, and manipulated them in serial formats, as seen in the angular prisms of Pennzoil Place reflected in their ground floor atrium roof, the upside down triangular plates of the American Life Insurance Building, the off-center stacked and receding elliptical volumes of the “Lipstick” building, the origami folded planes of the Crystal Cathedral, and the cylinder approximated by repeating revetments in 101 California, San Francisco.

This series may be said to have inspired a distinct “School of Johnson” and can be seen in the extension of these ideas in the early work of former employees such as Eli Attia, Alan Ritchie, and Scott Johnson.

Also there will not be a discussion of the obsession of Postmodern writers, such as Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, on the development of the simulacra— that cultural phenomenon where Western culture can no longer distinguish between the original and the copy. Johnson is motivated and acts on tangible and tactile examples and not the distant abstraction of Postmodern texts.

Introduction

13

Chapter Two The End to the End of History Postmodernism and Appropriation Top left: Publicity Photo of Philip Johnson and John Burgee with cake in the shape of 190 South LaSalle Street, Chicago (1987), Photograph courtesy of Chicago photographers Top middle: Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, Turkey (350 BC), Photograph courtesy of Josef Durm, Die Baukunst der Grieschen, Kroner Verlag, Leipzig, 1910 Top right: Temple of the Scottish Rites, Washington D.C. (1916), John Russell Pope Architect, Photograph courtesy of author’s collection

You cannot not know history. It’s just part of us, whether it is self-conscious in my case or unconscious…

Philip Johnson1

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

Hamlet2

The change in direction in many of the arts, during the 1970s and 1980s, from a remnant orthodox Modernist agenda to a new Postmodernist outlook, much too diverse to be called a single philosophy, affected Johnson tremendously and reinvigorated his career.3 But the idea and exploration of “Postmodernism” in the profession of architecture was noticeably different from the use of that term in painting, literature or cinema. For many, the term was a qualifier for a rigorous academic self-reflection and meta-narrative in the arts; to architects, it was mostly permission for a more sensuous and eclectic palette in historic form, color, and ornament. For Johnson, it was further justification to an already formed sensibility that allowed the duplication of neoclassical forms and other appropriations from his well-worn office copy of the illustrated pages in Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.

Although there is much written about Johnson and his role in Postmodernism, the book will focus on three general ideas: the new interest in the historic styles illustrated at the École des Beaux-Arts exhibition at MoMA and the tradition of validating a new design by referencing to a valued precedent; how Johnson used the freedom and confusion of the time to produce multiple stylistic references within the same building, which I classify as a “Hybrid Compression;” and how the concept of “Context” allowed an entrance and justification into a narrative of styles and logic of “Appropriation.” Johnson and his architectural office used this freedom of “no rules” and any stylistic option in the rapid and successful production of numerous name-architect branded high-rise office buildings in the 1980s, each with its own marketable image and historic style signifiers that brought a new scenographic era to the American Skyscraper.4 The Beaux Arts, the Crutch of History and The Production of Culture In 1954, Johnson gave a lecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University titled The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture. This was both a heartfelt and supremely cynical exposition on the self-imposed limitations Johnson saw

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in himself and his colleagues. It plays a trickster-like inversion with John Ruskin’s book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture,6 so that now what were considered as solid logic (aesthetic principles) are revealed to be the flimsiest excuses for an expedient solution (crutches). For Johnson, his entry in the Postmodern “free for all,” the most important is the first crutch, that of history.

Top left: Chapel, Florence Italy (1461), Filippo Brunelleschi Architect, Photograph courtesy of author’s collection Top right: Rendering of base at the AT&T Building, New York (Sony Building) (1984), Johnson / Burgee Architects, Renderer: Pat Lopez

In his chatty way Johnson’s explained his first example, “The most important crutch in recent times is not valid now: the crutch of history. In the old days you could always rely on books. You could say, “What do you mean you don’t like my tower?

There it is in Wren.” Or, “They did that on the Sub Treasury Building—why can’t I do it? History doesn’t bother us very much now.”7 This statement is a perfect summary of the use of precedent by turn of the century revivalist architects and their training at the École des Beaux-Arts. The reality is that what we would label as “Appropriation” was at one time a proud proof that eclectic architects used to validate their designs.

This connection to Johnson is explicit in the exhibit in 1975, titled The Architecture of the École des Beaux Arts at MoMA, Johnson’s home away from home. Johnson is quoted as saying that the show “did a very stirring and controversial thing by showing that modernism isn’t any longer the line that has to be followed.”8 Besides the Beaux Art’s luxurious renderings there was the unearthing of the historicist tradition that was called imitation (endlessly defined by Quatremère de Quincy in his “Essay on the nature, the end and the means of imitation in the fine arts” from 1833).

This was a principle that was questioned throughout the École’s existence. In his chapter in the MoMA catalogue for this exhibition David Van Zanten noted the criticism

by Leonce Reynaud in1835:“The principle of imitation, however, had been laid down and was followed to its ultimate conclusion […] The result has been in recent years to see our churches, stock exchanges, theaters, tollgates, even guardhouses take on the form and attire of antique temples.”9 The conflict between innovation and tradition was a debate even within the walls of the École and its Ateliers.

We are in a new, permissive era, in which all the strictures of modernism are being questioned and the lessons of the past are no longer taboo. This exploration of forbidden sources is a course that was pursued as early as the fifties

by Mr. Johnson, who has always been an admirer of his historical peers. But there is a new twist today in the deliberate distortion of historical scale and intent, which bears a curious parallel to the offbeat vision of Pop art. A kind of artful scavenging approaches the capricious in the pursuit of sensory effect.

Ada Louisa Huxtable5

This tradition of imitation, that I am relabeling here as Appropriation, can be seen in the architectural career of John Russell Pope in the golden age of American Neoclassical architecture.

Chapter Two

29

Top left: Clock in Masonic Temple Model, Date Unknown, Photograph courtesy of the author’s collection Top middle: Sketch of 190 South La Salle Street, Chicago (1985), John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson, Renderer: K. Jeffrey Sydness, Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago Collection Top right: Chicago Board of Trade (1930), Holabird & Roche, Photograph courtesy of author’s collection

but keep the Xeroxes just in case.” In hindsight, it is clear from this interview that Johnson was not interested in the straitjacket of a literal borrowing at that time in his career. The use of Hybrid Compression for his design process was a shallow reading of a few appealing historical motifs and not any deep systematic study of the images used. The production of culture depended on appropriation that was suitable for the branding and real estate needs of the moment.

From the John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson design studies that were donated to the Art Institute of Chicago by the developer of the building, the John Buck Company, it can be seen that some of the first images play with appropriation of the Art Deco tower at the end of LaSalle Street the Chicago Board of Trade and the unbuilt Goodhue design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition of 1922.29 This line of investigation was rejected as its narrow centralized plan did not match the requirements of the rectangular site for the new project.

The next step was a wider search for appropriation, and Johnson’s response to the turn-of-the-century “First Chicago School” of high-rise office buildings. It was an entirely unharnessed architectural set of forms with loaded possibility for appropriation. Johnson was well-acquainted with the “First Chicago School” from his work with Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1933 show, Early Modern Architecture, Chicago 1870–1910, and David Lowe’s book, Lost Chicago, both of which remain in his New Canaan library.30 The question is how the Masonic Temple building was chosen to be duplicated and not other “lost” Chicago historic high-rise buildings such as Holabird and Roche’s Tacoma Building (1899), demolished in 1929, or the even more famous Chicago Stock Exchange by Adler and Sullivan (1894) and destroyed in 1972.

The answer is the singular form gesture of the original Masonic Temple’s gabled roofs gave Johnson the ability to find a starting point and a visual justification for his design studies that would give him an elaborate building top and silhouette.

Adapting the image of the Masonic Temple (1892) to the limitations of the site the project, advanced with paired gables facing east and west and a single gable centering on both the north and south façades, allowed a set-up more elaborate than the original.31

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Philip Johnson and his Mischief

Top left: Sketch of 190 South La Salle Street, Chicago (1985), John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson, Renderer: K. Jeffery Sydness, Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago Collection Top middle: East facade of 190 South La Salle Street, Chicago (1987), John Burgee architects with Philip Johnson, Photograph courtesy of CBRE Inc. Top right: Sketch by Johnson over 190 South La Salle Street building elevation (1986), Photograph courtesy of a private collection Left: Lobby of 190 South La Salle Street, Chicago (1987), John Burgee architects with Philip Johnson, Photograph courtesy of Richard Payne Above: Rooftop Library at 190 South La Salle Street (1987), John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson, Photograph courtesy of ESTO

Chapter Two

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At the edge of The Abyss Top left: Elevation of Atrium Building, Potsdam, Germany (1845), Frederick Persius Architect, Architektonische Album 1854 Top middle: Photograph of Philip Johnson photographing the Atrium Building in Potsdam (circa 1933), Photograph courtesy of the Glass House Foundation Top right: Detail of Parapet at Atrium Building, Potsdam, Germany (1845), Frederick Persius Architect

When you stare into the void, the void stares back at you.

Friedrich Nietzsche44

When you watch television, the TV watches you.

Susan Sontag45

One of the questions I propose that must be answered is: did Johnson believe that his appropriations were original design statements? Did he believe that if he found something so obscure and forgotten that this act of archeological deep digging was the same as invention? I believe he did, and as an example to show this, I offer this self-interview, for while I was under Johnson’s employment I was assigned several design projects with him, one which in 1994 was the limited MTA competition for the proposed new subway entrance at 72nd Street/Broadway in Manhattan’s West Side (called a “Control House”).46 Johnson was quite enthusiastic for the project as he was only a design consultant to the firm Urbahn Architects; the project was without technical headaches for him in that the partnering architectural and engineering firm would deal with them, so that he was allowed to play with a 25-foot-by-65-foot (8 meters by 20 meters) one-room pavilion, an almost perfect assignment for his interests.

After working on the scheme at his New Canaan estate during the weekend, he presented me with a yellow tracing paper sketch (more of a scribble) of an elevation of a flat-roofed cubic block with a neoclassical entablature, voided between the triglyphs. What happened next requires a long wandering explanation. To me, at that time in the 1980s, New York City seemed like a way station for the debris of civilization: the museums, the flea markets, the homes, the shops, the garbage filled lots. As if every building was just a shell of a warehouse waiting for the next delivery: the next anyone and anything, desperate to fill its emptiness.

At one time there were strange places called Used Bookshops, which smelled of mold and dust and Chinese takeout. One in particular, on East 9th Street, would specialize in destroying books—breaking old damaged elephantine folios into separate sheets, which were then plastic-wrapped and sold individually for their graphic qualities.

Without any order or categorization, the bins in the store juxtaposed Art Deco fashion, medieval Talmudic texts, Civil War weaponry and ancient architecture. It was a place that had unglued history from any place or time; it seemed that each object, person and word had been reduced to a baseline equality.

Certainly, the French Poststructuralist Philosopher Michel Foucault would find it a comfortable place, his book The Order of Things presented other such disordering systems of history. And when Johnson presented me with his invention I went to my

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desk to pull out a page that I found from that strange store ripped from a book on the German architect Friedrich Ludwig Persius (1803–1845). At the top of the page it stated “Impluviumim Paradies gartlein bei Sanssouci” and then featured an elevation sketch of a flat-roofed cubic block with a neoclassical entablature, voided between the triglyphs.

I puzzled over the connection—why would Johnson not just show the book he was looking at and point to the picture? Later, I presented him with this yellowed and faded rendering and inquired if this was the building that he was studying and wished to appropriate as the beginning of the design? He stopped, shrugged his shoulders in a body language exclamation that meant a new idea was ending or starting and said with delight “You caught me! And now we can begin.” He then described that he once wanted to write a doctoral thesis on Persius, the architect of the little “folie:” the Greek Atrium Pavilion (1854) in the Botanical Gardens of Potsdam, and visited every one of his buildings in Potsdam before World War II. Persius was a student and associate of the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, so strong a design influence that decades after his death a group was still inspired by his work, called “Schinkel-Schüler” (Schinkel students). Was this a crude appropriation or just one more link in a chain of neoclassical Germanic architects whose influence started in the 18th century with Friedrich Gilly, who taught Schinkel, then to Persius, jumping 50 years to Behrens, who then employed Mies, and finally to Johnson. It cannot be called Appropriation if it is in the lexicon of the approved heritage of sources.

Top left: Elevation of Atrium Building with pool, Potsdam, Germany (1845), Frederick Persius Architect Top right: Axonometric of 72nd street subway entry, New York, Project (1984), John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson, Drawing: © 2013 Christian Bjone

He did not win the competition but it added to the legendary stories of his presentations; when Johnson was asked by the MTA review committee if he would accept changes to the proportions of his proposed building (a simple request that could mean only inches of adjustment), he replied defiantly: “No!” This was greeted with deadly silence in the room and Johnson’s team was crossed off the list.47 Many years later, I found a particular photograph at the Glass House Archives of Johnson, in Potsdam in the 1930s, being photographed while photographing the Persius “Atrium” building that was just discussed. It was an image of someone in history staring at Johnson, who is himself focusing on history, while history stares back at us.

Chapter Two

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Top: Final plan of Starfish House (Project) (1994), Philip Johnson Architects Middle: Wire frame model of Berlin alternative, Project (1994), Philip Johnson Architects, PJAR architects Bottom: Perspective of office building in Shenzhen, China, Project (1994), Phillip Johnson Architects, Render: Louis Blanc

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A striking example of Gehry appropriating directly from a Stella sculpture would be his use of the second wax sculpture given to Johnson by Stella, also based on his failed Dresden Museum design. It is obvious that the origin of one piece of the polymer outdoor furniture set designed by Frank Gehry for the Heller Company, the coffee table (2004), takes the Stella sculpture and copies it directly, fitting in along with the stools that abstract the warped shapes and sharp arris edges of Stella’s work.

Top left: Parking garage at United Bank of Colorado Tower (Wells Fargo Center) Denver, Colorado (1983), Johnson/ Burgee Architects, Photograph courtesy of Richard Payne Top right: Lithograph, Delphine and Hippolyte (1967), Frank Stella, Photograph courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYC

Before the visitors’ center, Johnson had also appropriated the graphic work of Frank Stella for the diagonal aluminum slatted façade of the 10-story parking garage at United Bank of Colorado Tower in 1983 (now the Wells Fargo Center) in Denver.

Johnson and his staff copied directly from the prints of Frank Stella lithographs Black Series II (1967), specifically the black diagonal striping of Delphine and Hippolyte.

The entire collection of eight prints was owned by Johnson and exhibited in the 37th-floor offices of Johnson/Burgee Architects in the Seagram building. The end result is a strange scaleless box with a few small rectangular windows cut at the corners for the stair landings; disappointingly, the garage is neither sculpture nor building. But the simple geometric forms were never associated with the property rights of the artist, even if the appropriation by the architect was clearly literal.

Art/Architecture Education by Imitation of the Master In his early career, Johnson taught design at a number of Universities (Pratt, Yale, and Harvard) and he always assigned the same problem: design a house on a suburban site using the style of one of three architects: Mies, Wright, or Le Corbusier.

The point of that exercise was to connect to the tradition in the arts by studying the masters through imitation, as Johnson noted: “You don’t have the mental equipment as a student not to copy, so why disregard the originals? Frank Lloyd Wright shows evidence of copying in the Charnley House (sic). I think copying is the normal way.”13 Johnson is the best illustration of this apprentice system, not only in his appropriation of the examples of Mies, but also in Frank Lloyd Wright in the unbuilt homage to the circle upon circle design of Wright’s Jester House proposed for Johnson’s own Lucas vacation house of 1953.

Chapter Three

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Chapter Five Last Works, Late Style Deconstructivism and Appropriation Top left: Johnson in front of Advertising Billboard with Johnson photo for “Checkpoint Charlie Buro” ceremony (now Philip Johnson Haus), Berlin Germany, (1996), Photograph courtesy of © 2013 Christian Bjone Top middle: Advertisement of First Study “328 Spring Street” for zoning revision (2000), Photograph courtesy of the author’s collection Top right: First Study, Apartments at 328 Spring Street, Project (2000), PJAR architects, Photograph courtesy of PJAR Architects, Renderer: Sven Johnson

…But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved conflict?

Edward W. Said1

How much has changed! Chaos theory has replaced classical certainties. We prefer Heraclitian flux to Platonic Ideas, the principle of uncertainty to the model of perfection, complexity to simplicity.

Philip Johnson2

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The Columbia University Professor of Comparative Literature, Edward W. Said, started a book on the idea of artists and their late style, the concept originating from an essay on the final works of Beethoven by Theodor W. Adorno titled Spatstil Beethovens in 1937. Although Said did not live to finish his book, which in itself might be a qualification of Artistic Lateness, the assembled lectures and papers were published as On Late Style: Music and Literature Against The Grain (2007) and present a principle that might be applied to Philip Johnson, the last decade of his life, and his continued use of appropriation.

Artistic Lateness studies do not describe just one direction but try to open a space for critical review of the final cultural production of an artist that would incorporate biography, myths, psychology, and other perceptions that allow a close reading and wide set of interpretations. We assume that, at the end of the long careers of various artists, they would be able to make a summary of their life’s work and experiences. The shining example is Claude Monet, whose work progresses step by step to climax in the luxurious series of paintings, Water Lilies (1915–1926), that show both his Impressionist beginnings and point to the future in their advancement into pure abstraction—a new era. But not all artists end this way, and the point that Said has made about the composer, whose deafness, anger, and frustration defined his late style highlights this: “[in] Beethoven’s case the music is episodic, fragmentary, riven with the absences and silences that can neither be filled by supplying some general scheme for them…”3 Said comments that Lateness can be a form of exile: “Lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.”4 I propose that the start of Johnson’s late style would come as a result of several dramatic and isolating changes in his life: Johnson had cheated professional death (breaking with his partner John Burgee in 1991 before his bankruptcy), then survived the controversy of the publication his biography Philip Johnson: Life and Work, by Franz Schulze in 1994, and escaped physical death but with diminished health (his heart surgery in mid-1996)—so the line had been drawn for entry into his late period. The start-up of a new/old office

“Philip Johnson Architects” (later PJAR architects) was the final 10-year period of his productive professional life, from 1992 to 2002 (Johnson died in January 2005 at the Glass House) in that time he found strength and stability with his new/old partner Alan Ritchie, who was, at one time, president of the corporation, John Burgee Architects, but Johnson found himself in a much more limited capacity. If the work from that time can be separated from those projects in which he had little or no involvement, such as the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Headquarters Competition (1996), the single design continuity is a restless clash of simple geometry, a roll of the dice, an impatient assembly of forms to consciously show disorder and chaos. Johnson made strength from his weaknesses of distraction, carelessness, and impatience by the reuse of primary forms assembled in an easy non-composition of collision.

Top left: Aerial Photo of Philip Johnson’s Davis House and Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House (1987), Gehry Partners LLP Top right: Winton Guest House, Minnesota (1987), Gehry Partners LLP Bottom right: Site plan of Winton Guest House (top) and Davis House (bottom), Drawing: © 2013 Christian Bjone

At this time, Johnson’s constant repetition of the use of words like “freedom” and “chaos” can be first attached to his designs to a competition for an office tower in the Mideast (1993) and later developed and transformed into the proposed apartment building at 328 Spring Street (2000) in New York City. This image of disorder is shown in the forced and loosely composed unsteady shifting of the façade planes.

From there, he moved on to building plans of willful disorder, with little of the new design coming from a reordering of program or spatial vision.

The Dialogue of Gehry adding to Johnson and Johnson adding to Gehry Gehry’s Guesthouse for Johnson I am convinced that the source for Johnson’s late compositions came not from his involvement with the brooding theories in the “Deconstructivist Architecture”(1988) show at MoMA but from the tactile appropriation of the loose assemblies that Frank Gehry first explored (in built form) in the scattered organization of the five singleroom pavilions that add up to be Gehry’s Winton Guest House, an addition to the Davis house by Johnson (1954).7 Gehry is quoted as saying the new casual order of his building’s massing was inspired by the painfully precise still life compositions of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.8 Later, the relationships were reversed when Johnson was invited by Gehry to work on a small guesthouse for the main house of the client, Richard Lewis. A sketch by Johnson at the start of the process for the Lewis residence seems to show him taking the puzzle like plan shapes from Gehry’s Winton pavilion and trying to reassemble them for his own design.

I don’t think I am a big time original architect. I’m no Frank Gehry: I’m different. I think everybody has said bad things about me and they’re usually right. But they don’t bother me.

Philip Johnson5

It (the collaboration) was like a chess game to me. Philip was playing with the trajectory of where we were going—It was all very subtle. But then, he did it at that moment and I freaked when the “Octopus”(Johnson’s third design) came because, damn it, he got there first. I loved it.

Frank Gehry6

Chapter Five

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Conclusion The Last Words on Philip Johnson A serious analysis of Johnson’s continually changing and elusive work has always seemed impossible. The 2010 Yale University, School of Architecture symposium, “Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change,” was meant to be both a tribute and critical review of Johnson’s works. Unfortunately, with the reluctant faculty in a forced march to the funeral pyre, it turned out to be an example of how limited the current analysis of Johnson’s career is.3

Opposite: Portrait, Philip Johnson, Photograph courtesy of Corbis, William Coupon Top left: Etching, Melancholia 1 (1514), Albrecht Durer

This book has attempted to initiate a more productive review of this body of work using the template of appropriation. Whether the strategy of appropriation was an inherent part of Johnson’s character—ironic, cynical, and playful—or restlessness, it was an obvious, although rarely acknowledged method in his contribution to the production of architectural culture.

That Appropriation is one of the themes of Johnson’s work can be seen as a thread through his entire career: the specialized beginnings of his interest in architecture through historic works at an early age; the entry into modernism with an emphasis on style not structure or functionalism; the Miesian universal system that demanded specific solutions be copied exactly; the reaction to an exhausted Modernism and the Postmodern revival of historicism; the advancement of the scale of modern art to be the size of buildings presenting new forms to copy, utilizing the theories of collage in his urban plans; the introduction of yet another avant-garde style, Deconstructivism, which matched his interests in the scattered composition of Gehry and others. At each step, Johnson played to his strengths and indulged his weaknesses—the inability to draw led to communication by appropriating examples, the impatience for focused development led to an office standard of simple reusable details (appropriated from Mies) and the uninspired attitude on structure or function was mitigated by his selection of commissions of building types that were anonymous volumes easy to shape; office towers were treated the same as his famous one-room buildings.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde1

Art, of course—Nietzsche said it— is the most important thing in the world. Art is with us in order that we not perish from the truth—if you understood truth as he did. Nietzsche felt that art is more important than philosophy.

Philip Johnson2

I will explain the sensibilities of a designer who would be able to utilize the method of Appropriation by using some of his most controversial and revealing statements, which present themselves as a cross between a shocking Nietzschean epigram and a self-mocking Wilde quip.

Conclusion

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