Architect Philip Johnson
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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 t
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ict between them occurred. . . the eminent pupil, already well known as a critic and historian, learned more from Breuer than from his prestigious Chairman (Noble 10).
Johnson graduated and went immediately into the army, but his service was short. In 1946 he returned to the Museum of Modern Art as Director of the Department of Architecture and Design. He completed in 1946 his first private commission, a house for Eugene Farney at Sagaponack, Long Island, New York:
Here, although the timber cladding and raised profile unquestionably evoked the domestic feelings of Breuer's work in the same genre, the planning and furnishing of the building as before obediently echoed the restraint and asceticism of Mies (Noble 10-11).
Johnson would later identify what he called the seven crutches whereby architects evaded their real responsibilities for innovation in design. The first of these was history, or the claim that since someone well-known had used a particular style or element, the inclusion of that element thereafter was to be accepted. Another was what he called pretty drawing. The third was utility, and in his denunciation of utility Johnson began his abandonment of the moral basis of the International Style. The fourth cru
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Approximate Word count = 1267
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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