PHILIP JOHNSON For more than 50 years, Philip Johnson was one of the most influential figures in American

design and architecture.

After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Harvard in 1930, Johnson became founder and director of the Department of
Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first museum-affiliated program in the United States
devoted to the study and exploration of architecture as an art. It was during his first tenure in the position -- he headed the
department between 1930 and 1936, and again from 1946 to 1954 -- that he and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock
mounted their landmark exhibition entitled "The International Style."
This 1932 effort, which labeled an architectural style being practiced by such European masters as Mies van der Rohe and Le
Corbusier, introduced a generation of American architects to a revolutionary approach to design. Characterized by the use of
such modern materials as glass and steel, and emphasizing function and structure over ornamental decoration, the International
Style dominated our city skylines for 50 years, and continues to heavily influence contemporary design.
Johnson returned to Harvard at age 34, to study architecture, and after military service, embarked on a distinguished career as a
practicing architect. In addition to promoting the theory of the International Style, Mr. Johnson was credited with creating some of
its major monuments, including the Seagram Building (in a collaboration with Mies van der Rohe) and his own famed Glass
House (1949), a single room entirely walled in glass, which has been donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Johnson designed many landmarks across the nation, including the twin trapezoid-shaped Pennzoil Place in Houston, the 51story IDS Center in Minneapolis and the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.
In 1967, Philip Johnson formed a partnership with John Burgee. Mr. Johnson entered a new phase of his career with Mr. Burgee,
an architect with a reputation for mastering large and complex projects. Together, Messrs. Johnson and Burgee attracted the types
of commissions -- important high-profile projects, both large-scale and small -- that neither, individually, had previously attracted
on a regular basis. These jointly designed projects -- from Minneapolis' IDS Center, to the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove,
California, to the corporate headquarters of Pittsburgh Plate Glass -- reflect a distinctive, if not easily categorized, approach to
design.
Johnson and Burgee's design for the AT&T Corporate Headquarters building (1984) in New York, with its stone cladding and
identifying broken-pediment top, changed the dialogue of contemporary architecture just as dramatically as the International
Style had 50 years before. Its blatant use of a material that did not reflect the functional or structural realities of the building, as
well as the incorporation of design elements merely for their own aesthetic value, ran counter to the tenets of the International
Style. AT&T represented a critical watershed: it was the first major built structure that revived the use of historic styles -- an
approach to design prevalent throughout history but strongly abandoned and derided by the profession during the supremacy of
the International Style.
Mr. Johnson was justly celebrated for championing the two architectural movements that most profoundly affected urban
landscapes during the second half of the 20th century: the International Style; and the reintroduction of the uses of a wide variety
of historic styles in contemporary architectural design. Philip Johnson won the first Pritzker Architecture Prize for lifetime
achievement and received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor of his profession.
Through his designs, writings, and teachings, Philip Johnson played a seminal role in defining the theoretical shape and literal
form taken by architecture in the 20th century

GLASS HOUSE Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass. The Glass House (1949) that he designed as his own
residence in New Canaan, Connecticut was a profoundly influential work, but "universally viewed as having been derived from"
the Farnsworth House, according to Alice T. Friedman. Johnson curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohe work at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1947, featuring a model of the glass Farnsworth House.
The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real "walls" had been developed by many authors in the German
Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already realized by Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal
structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.
The house sits at the edge of a crest on Johnson's estate overlooking a pond. The building's sides are glass and charcoal-painted
steel; the floor, of brick, is not flush with the ground but sits 10 inches above. The interior is an open space divided by low walnut
cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.
Johnson continued to build structures on his estate as architectural essays. Offset obliquely fifty feet from the Glass House is a
guest house, echoing the proportions of the Glass House and completely enclosed in brick (except for three large circular windows
at the rear, set in wooden frames, 5 feet in diameter, which reveal the interior of the building that was originally designed with a
window in each of three rooms, two guest bedrooms at each end and a study in the middle). It now contains a bathroom, library,
and single bedroom with a vaulted ceiling and shag carpet. It was built at the same time as the Glass House and can be seen as its
formal counterpart. Johnson stated that he deliberately designed it to be less than perfectly comfortable, as "guests are like fish,
they should only last three days at most".
Later, Johnson added a painting gallery with an innovative viewing mechanism of rotating walls to hold paintings (influenced by
the Hogarth displays at Sir John Soane's house), followed by a sky-lit sculpture gallery. The last structures Johnson built on the
estate were a library and a reception building, the latter, red and black in color and of curving walls. Johnson viewed the ensemble
of one-room buildings as a total work of art, claiming that it was his best and only "landscape project."
The Philip Johnson Glass House is a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and now open to the public for tours.