JOHNSON, PHILIP CORTELYOU

1906–, American architect, museum curator, and historian, b. Cleveland. One of the first Americans to study modern European architecture, Johnson wrote (with H. R. Hitchcock) The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (1932), in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. He became an important advocate of the new architecture in the United States as chairman of the museum's department of architecture (1932–34; 1945–54). Johnson received his professional architectural degree from Harvard in 1943, and he founded his own firm in 1953. A landmark of modern American domestic architecture, Johnson's sumptuous, glass-walled house in New Canaan, Conn. (1949), reveals the influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with whom he collaborated on the Seagram Building in New York City (1956–58), now viewed as a modern classic. Two other important Manhattan commissions from his earlier years are the Rockefeller Guest House (1950) and the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center (1964). Johnson also wrote of Mies van der Rohe (1947).

Johnson had a successful partnership with John Burgee from 1967 to 1991. The two collaborated on such structures as the addition to the Boston Public Library (1973), Pennzoil Place in Houston, Tex. (1976), and the Crystal Cathedral in Anaheim, Calif. (1980). A latent historicism that had characterized many of Johnson's buildings in midcareer came to the fore in his unabashedly neo-Georgian design for the AT&T headquarters in New York City (1978–84, now the Sony Building), bringing the postmodern architectural debate into the public forum. Since then Johnson, who formed his own firm in 1992, has indulged in an eclectic variety of revival modes. One of his most interesting recent structures is the Chrysler Center (2001), a three-story retail pavilion in midtown Manhattan comprised of intersecting pyramids inspired by the tower of the Chrysler Building.

See critical biography by F. Schulze (1994); studies by J. M. Jacobus, Jr. (1962), C. Noble (1972), and N. Miller (1980).

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