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Architect Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson is described as the dean of American architecture. He came to prominence in the 1930s as an architectural critic with the publication of The International Style, for which he was cowriter with renowned architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock. This book defined the simple, unadorned modern style of architecture that would become the dominant form of design in Europe and the United States in the first half of this century. Johnson did not receive his architectural degree until he was 36, and his first significant design was the so-called Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, produced in 1949. In 1958 he would collaborate with his mentor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, on the Seagram Building in Manhattan. Both structures are now considered masterpieces of the International Style ("Philip Johnson" 314).

Johnson never really developed a signature style as an architect, and instead he has been seen as a restless architect, one who has never based his work on a theory of design. He sees architecture as a visual, changeable thing. He turned away from the Modernism of van der Rohe and others, feeling that in this approach there was something missing. His most recent adoption was of Deconstructivism,

the crazy, in-your-face style of architecture in which conventional symmetry and orderly precepts are tossed away: Walls can tilt, angles can be oblique, anything goes (McGuigan, "The Irrepressible Mr. Johnson" 162).

After his Modernist period, Johnson turned in the 1960s away from orthodox modernism. He formed a partnership with John Burgee of Chicago, and in the 1970s they developed a style of Postmodernism in such designs as the Investors Diversified Services Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pennzoil Place in Houston, Texas, and the American Telephone and Telegraph Building in Manhattan ("Philip Johnson" 314).

Johnson was born in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio. Johnson graduated from Harvard. Johnson met...

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Architect Philip Johnson. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 21:33, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700627.html