New Canaan, July 8, 2016 is the 110th anniversary of Philip Johnson’s birth. His long life — he died in 2005 at age 98 — spanned almost a century.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906, he traveled east to attend the Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., and went on to college at Harvard, where he studied the classics and philosophy. His love of landscape and architecture started early with family trips to Europe, and after completing his undergraduate studies, he became the first curator of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, then a new and somewhat rebellious institution. He was in fact the first curator of architecture anywhere, bringing architecture into the museum world under the umbrella of art. He and colleague Henry-Russell Hitchcock curated the 1932 International Style Exhibition, which introduced the Bauhaus architects to the American art world.
During his time as a curator, he helped bring artist and teacher Josef Albers to the Black Mountain College, the art school in North Carolina whose students included Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, poet Robert Creeley and many other luminaries of the American avant-garde.
After a disastrous detour into politics, he reconsidered what his life’s work should be and in 1940 returned to Harvard, enrolling as a 30-something student (very unusual at the time) at the Graduate School of Design. His teachers there included Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. As Franz Schulz writes in his 1994 biography, Johnson was excused from the required architectural history course because he had written one of the textbooks, The International Style, published as the catalog for the exhibition in 1932.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Breuer, Johnson, Landis Gores, and John Johansen would all follow Harvard colleague Eliot Noyes to New Canaan where they, along with architects John Black Lee and Victor Christ-Janer helped reshape the history of modern residential architecture in the U.S.
While he practiced architecture (his skyscrapers are notable forms on numerous city skylines) and continued to work on his masterpiece, his Glass House property in New Canaan, he never left MoMA. He curated a ground-breaking exhibit on Mies van der Rohe in 1947 and served as a board member and donor. He and his long-time partner David Whitney, a respected independent curator, donated more than 2000 works to MoMA during their lifetimes.
They also hosted at the Glass House, what Yale Professor Vincent Scully has called “the longest running salon in the history of the United States.” Architects and artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Peter Eisenman, Robert A. M. Stern and many, many others were visitors. Johnson was a lightning rod in the architectural world, bringing artists and architects together to discuss their work and ideas. He was a preservationist too, joining forces with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the 1970s to help save Grand Central Station from the Penn Station’s fate. In an interview conducted at the Glass House three years ago, his friend and colleague Peter Eisenman said no one had or could replace him in this role of encouraging, inspiring and bringing architects together.
Since the opening of the Glass House to the public in 2007, visitors have begun to appreciate that the Glass House is more than just the iconic glass pavilion. There are 14 structures on the site, two of which are large galleries housing a significant permanent collection of art as well as seasonal exhibitions. But the landscape itself stuns—a 49-acre site where Johnson created Ohio meadows on Connecticut’s rocky slopes and wetlands and where he preserved 200-year-old stone walls, mature trees, and vistas worthy of a 17th-century painting or an English country house estate. “Some people say I’m a better landscape architect than I am an architect,” he once said to his biographer, Hilary Lewis. “To me, it’s one art…I don’t find the line drawn anywhere.”
As he grew older, he spent more and more time at the Glass House, which in earlier years had been a weekend place. He walked the paths of his property every day, into his 90s, and designed a doghouse for two Keeshond puppies he and David adopted in the 1990s. He died in New Canaan in January of 2005.
Every day at the Glass House we walk by the row of young maple trees he planted along the gallery walkway late in his life. He knew the 200-year-old sugar maples wouldn’t last forever, and he planted a new row of them, which now have full crowns that turn orange, then gold in the fall. The Baroque allée of maples, his White Pines, the Willows on the slopes, the Hickory tree that breaks a high stone wall, and the White Oaks that hover over the Glass House—these are also an architecture of sorts — one he returned to, appreciated, and gave away to all of us.
Philip Johnson relaxing outside his famed Glass House on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan. — Magnum Photos USA. New Canaan, Connecticut. 1964. Architect Philip JOHNSON sitting in front of his “Glass House” designed in 1949. ©Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
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