That was my bad political period.
The Late Thirties … New London, Ohio … The Errant Ideologue
Philip Johnson would occasionally take a seat at a drafting table. By 1934, he had laid out an apartment at New York’s Beekman Place for his wealthy friend Edward Warburg, which got Johnson-as-designer his first press notice, in the pages of House & Garden. His work was meticulous, so much so that, as Warburg remembered, “It really was an exceptionally beautiful apartment [but] … I always had the feeling that when I came into the room, I spoiled the composition. … If a magazine was slightly askew on the black coffee table, the mood was off-balance.”1 Johnson did another apartment for his sister Theodate, and as he moved to larger spaces, two more for himself. The latter, both on Forty-Ninth Street, must have felt familiar to his friends, since Johnson furnished them with the same Miës-designed furniture he had displayed in his first Manhattan digs, including Tugendhat chairs and the tablelike, tufted-leather daybed.
He added a new and central element on moving to 230 East Forty-Ninth Street. Johnson chose as the decorative focus for his sitting room a painting titled Bauhaus Stairway. He hung the large canvas, roughly five feet by four, near the floor, eye level for those seated on his low-slung chairs. At Alfred Barr’s request, Johnson had acquired Oskar Schlemmer’s oil painting in spring 1933 in Stuttgart (later, in 1942, he would give it to MoMA, where it would hold an honored place on permanent display). But in the year Johnson acquired it, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Bauhaus Stairway, the first work of Schlemmer’s to be sold outside Germany, seemed an elegy to a fading dream.
In the painting, youthful students climb a stair lit by a grid of windows, but the bright, utopian character of the scene is undercut by the implied motion of the figures, most of whom have their backs to the viewer as they ascend. The Staatliches Bauhaus had just been shuttered by the Nazis, and the Studenten, along with the Bauhaus’s artistic ideals, could be said to be headed for an uncertain future in a volatile Germany.
Johnson’s early design efforts proved far from exhilarating. Ground would never be broken for a house he sketched for himself, and as he recalled for his biographer years later, “I just figured that I could never be a Miës or a Le Corbusier.”2 (Clearly Wright wasn’t at the forefront of Johnson’s thinking.) After five years intimately associated with architecture, Alfred Barr, and the Museum of Modern Art, he decided to pursue a new path, and in December 1934, he submitted his resignation as director of architecture.
Along with his friend Alan Blackburn, who had rapidly risen in the hierarchy of the museum but resigned the same day, Johnson set off on what may, in retrospect, be kindly described as a bizarre and naïve quest—in an entirely new direction altogether—to explore an ideology that had seen fit dismiss so much that Bauhaus had stood for.
Fascist politics held a strong allure for Philip Johnson. During his 1932 visit to Berlin, he had joined his friend Helen Read, arts critic of the Brooklyn Eagle, at a Nazi rally in nearby Potsdam. He was mesmerized by the disciplined choreography of colorful flags, phalanxes of troops, and martial music, all prelude to the persuasive exhortations of Adolf Hitler. Johnson’s European travels convinced him, as he confided in Marga Barr, that the Nationale Erhebung (National Resurgence) would be “the salvation of Germany.”3 He also thought that Miës might thrive even in the changing circumstances, despite “the most stupid attacks on modern art.” Johnson liked order in society and in buildings.
Man-about-town Philip Johnson, photographed by his friend Carl Van Vechten, in 1933. (Library of Congress/Prints and Photographs)
While Miës had “always kept out of politics,” as Johnson observed, he himself could not resist.4 Though he regarded Germany as his second home, he and Alan Blackburn decided upon a shift from art to politics back in the U.S.A. With the Depression at its peak, the intellectually inclined Johnson, always alive to new ideas, had encountered some large ones in a book by another member of the Crimson connection. Lawrence Dennis had graduated from Harvard a dozen years before them, but Johnson and Blackburn made his acquaintance in New York. They found much to admire in Dennis’s polemic Is Capitalism Doomed? (1932).
The author drew upon stints in the Foreign Service and international finance to construct an argument that portrayed capitalism as teetering on the brink of failure. Johnson found Dennis’s thinking aligned with what he saw in Germany. Dennis regarded fascism as a “living religion.” He concluded, “The people must have a prophet, and prophets have never come out of the world of profits.”5 Johnson imagined himself in such terms.
Rather than sailing to Europe for his usual summer art and architecture tour, Johnson, along with Blackburn, embarked on a road trip in 1934 in Johnson’s big Packard Twelve, seeking to examine life in Middle America. To get a reading of Roosevelt’s New Deal in action, they stopped at regular intervals to talk with people on the street in towns and cities. What they observed, Blackburn told the New York Times on their return, was the “inefficiency of government” in helping millions of people suffering from the effects of the Great Depression.
The two returned home certain that neither art nor the New Deal would solve the nation’s social and economic problems. This precipitated their resignations at MoMA, but, as Blackburn explained to the Times reporter, “We have no definite political program to offer. All we have is our convictions.
“You might say that our plan is something like the view you get through an unfocused telescope. We know that we see something, but its outlines are not yet clear.”6 The thinking was admittedly fuzzy, but the passion palpable.
A subsequent road trip took them to the South to learn the methods of Huey Long, a sitting U.S. senator and former Louisiana governor. Despite his autocratic ways, Long’s populist message, “Every man a king,” won him wide influence. He championed the rural poor, and his proposal Share Our Wealth called for radical income redistribution, taking money from the rich and privileged, promising to provide every family in the nation with an annual income of $5,000. Huey Long fully expected his broad popularity to sweep him into the White House in 1936—he even wrote a book titled My First Days in the White House—but he was assassinated in September 1935, just a month after announcing his candidacy.
After attending Long’s funeral in Louisiana (Johnson and Blackburn hadn’t managed to meet the man in life), they returned North, taking up residence in the Johnson family’s rambling Victorian house in New London, Ohio. Homer Johnson had been born in the rural town, and although prosperity came to him in Cleveland, sixty miles away, he had expanded his holdings in Huron County to include fourteen tenant farms and a large house on North Main Street, as well as the large Greek Revival homestead north of town, known locally as Townsend Farms.
The younger Johnson had never truly been a member of the village community. Though he summered as a boy in New London and rode horses around the countryside as a member of the landed gentry, he hadn’t been permitted to mix with the local children and had attended school back in Cleveland (delivered there in a chauffeured limousine) prior to heading East for boarding school and college.7 On his return as an adult to reside in New London, he still didn’t look the part of a native, dressing in the long overcoat and fedora he favored. But he involved himself in local politics. A regular at town council meetings, he asked questions that required the town counsel to examine long-established procedures, and his enthusiasm got him an appointment to the local park board.
He launched a grassroots effort to increase milk prices. He announced his candidacy for state representative, but after winning the Democratic primary, he withdrew before the November election. By then he and Blackburn had allied themselves with another national figure, the Detroit-based radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, who published the weekly newspaper Social Justice and dismissed Democratic president Roosevelt’s “government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.”8 Coughlin had an immense radio audience of some 30 million weekly listeners, and his apparent power and visibility appealed to Johnson; together with Blackburn, the two transplanted New Yorkers offered their services. After a night spent with Coughlin at his home outside Detroit, they founded a local chapter of Coughlin’s National Union of Social Justice back in Ohio. Johnson would also design a platform for an enormous National Union rally in Chicago in late 1936, one that bore no small resemblance to the Hitler rally Johnson had witnessed in Germany. On the stage Johnson crafted, the tiny figure of Coughlin was outlined against an immense backdrop, as his booming voice exhorted a crowd that approached one hundred thousand people.
The two Manhattanites brought more than political activism to sleepy New London, population 1,500. To the surprise of his neighbors, Johnson updated his father’s sprawling two-story house on North Main Street. Carpenters arrived to remove two interior partitions to create an open plan for the first floor, which had consisted of numerous small rooms, a reflection of the several additions and renovations since the construction of the house in 1867. What truly astounded the townspeople, however, was Johnson’s change to the exterior. On the south wall, the clapboard siding came off and the stud wall behind was dismantled. In its place, Johnston installed floor-to-ceiling glass that opened a view out of—and into—the main parlor.9
Johnson’s visual imagination worked in Miësian terms, and his architectural surgery transplanted a Tugendhat element into a vernacular Victorian house, a place that had been memorable for its large porch. The new wall of glass altered its character.
The Ohio idyll ended for Blackburn when he married a daughter of New London and abruptly moved back to New York with his new bride. The party the two men had founded—the Young Nationalist Movement to Save America from Communism—dissolved, and Johnson’s political activity in Ohio ebbed. Back in New York, he reengaged with Lawrence Dennis and others of his political inclinations.
Johnson also resumed his periodic visits to Europe, and one of those visits, in 1939, was no innocent interlude. He was in Berlin when Germany invaded Poland. Sensing that events could erupt at any time, Johnson got himself accredited as a foreign correspondent for Coughlin’s right-wing Social Justice, and he filed stories from Danzig. Unmistakably pro-German and anti-British in tone, his writing was inflammatory enough that the FBI soon opened a file on him. One letter he wrote at the time suggests Johnson’s state of mind as he described a Polish town near Warsaw shortly after the blitzkrieg rolled through: “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”10
Despite Johnson’s sympathetic view of Hitler and the Germans, the entire episode might have been lost to history except that he shared a hotel room for one September night in an East Prussian town called Sopot. The other man, a young CBS reporter named William Shirer, kept a firsthand account of those days. Shirer apparently disliked Johnson on sight, dismissing him in his journal entry as “an American fascist.” When Shirer’s book Berlin Diary appeared two years later, it became an immediate bestseller and Johnson appeared in it pages. “He has been posing as anti-Nazi,” Shirer had written in his diary, “and trying to pump me for my attitude.”11
The trip to Poland proved an inglorious end to Johnson’s political adventures. He gained neither fame nor power (his Ohio party appears to have had fewer than 150 members); in fact, the misadventure became infamous, an embarrassment that, even fifty years later, had a way of periodically resurfacing. Abby Rockefeller would forgive him: “Every young man,” she reportedly said at a 1957 board meeting when Johnson’s candidacy for the MoMA board was under discussion, “is entitled to one bad mistake.”12 But some have seen less naïveté and more malevolence in Johnson’s words and actions.
The up-and-coming young journalist Joseph Alsop may have had it about right when he prophesied in the New York Herald Tribune, at the time Johnson resigned from the museum, that the ex-curator was embarking on a “Sur-Realist Political Venture.”13 Like millions of well-bred, well-educated upper-class Americans in the 1930s, Philip Johnson spoke disparagingly of Jews; clubby, cocktail-hour anti-Semitism was a commonplace in privileged Protestant culture, though Johnson went further than most, reporting disapprovingly of the preponderance of Jews abroad (JEWS DOMINATE POLISH SCENE ran one headline on a Johnson dispatch in Social Justice).14 The avid amateur, having succeeded in the art world, regarded politics as just another sphere where he thought he might exercise influence. For five years he tried, employing his overflowing confidence, charm, intelligence, and abundant funds (he contributed the significant sum of $5,000 to Coughlin’s coffers).
His refusal to recognize the underlying violence of the National Socialist Party was certainly surreal. Johnson’s place at the top of the social hierarchy left him singularly ill equipped to understand the sociology of Europe after the Great War. He had known no hardships, so the concept of affordable housing, a preoccupation of Oud and the Bauhaus, had no personal reality. He was moved by beauty, not by people (Chartres and the Parthenon brought tears to his eyes; children in a soup line did not). In assembling the landmark 1932 MoMA exhibition, he embraced the style of what came to be called Modernism. For him, the key was the abstract purity of glass and steel as art, and he failed to share the vision of its European inventors (and of Lewis Mumford) that modern architecture could be a means of building economical buildings to better the lot of Europe’s postwar population. Not coincidentally, Johnson’s favorite among the International Style buildings was the immense mansion Miës designed for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat.
Johnson had to know that those who had gained power in Germany held homosexuals in the same low regard they did Jews, but he chose not to acknowledge that danger. He was extraordinarily fortunate that his German escapade left his reputation only slightly tattered. His dilettantish charm saved him from a more permanent taint, just as it would repeatedly win him unlikely friends.
No less a figure than Bertrand Russell, teaching in those years in the United States, found him an engaging dinner partner. The British philosopher wasn’t for a moment taken in by Johnson’s politics and told a mutual friend about the evening. With a wry chuckle, he remarked, “[Johnson] is a diabolist … but how much pleasanter it is to spend an evening with a gentleman you disagree with than with a cad you agree with.”15
Many events in Johnson’s life can be well documented, but few details survive of the story of his political floundering in Ohio. The files from his fascist detour are thin, notably lacking in the long and confiding letters that his mother, friends, and family had grown accustomed to receiving. The clattering of his portable typewriter, so often heard in European hotel rooms in the late twenties and early thirties, either ceased or, perhaps, the letters he wrote were later relegated to the dustbin when Johnson realized the depth of his European folly. The result is that, for the most part, we glimpse Johnson in the late thirties largely as a man at the edge of the frame, an incidental presence in the recollections of contemporaries. One singular report in Johnson’s own words—the telling of his ill-conceived cheering for Hitler in Poland—survived not in his files but preserved in his FBI dossier.
A consequence of this seemingly expurgated version of events is that Johnson’s misdeeds never quite rose to the threshold where he felt obliged to offer a true mea culpa for his fascism and anti-Semitic statements. Instead, when challenged much later about his thirties politics, he habitually deflected. “I cannot explain it or atone” was a terse and typical refusal to confront the past.16
In contrast, Johnson’s reticence to revisit that shadowy time did not extend to the career change he made in 1940, thanks in no small part to Frank Lloyd Wright.
1937–40 … Two European Émigrés
America’s architectural center of gravity shifted in the 1930s. Its classical constancy, long resilient despite the presence of Wright’s changeable work, began to absorb new influences. Johnson and his friends at MoMA had helped encourage a new austerity, and the move from traditional decoration to high function would also gain from the arrival of Modernist reinforcements from Europe. By 1938, both Miës van der Rohe and Walter Gropius had joined the German diaspora and settled permanently in North America.
Philip Johnson unabashedly disdained Wright, but Miës van der Rohe maintained his esteem for the Master of Taliesin. His admiration dated to Miës’s days as a young assistant working in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens. Then—the year had been 1910—the Wasmuth portfolio had struck him and co-workers Walter Gropius and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (a decade later the latter would adopt the name Le Corbusier) with the power of revelation. On traveling to America for the first time in 1937, Miës made a point of visiting Spring Green.
Alfred Barr deserves indirect credit for the first, Depression-era encounter of Wright and Miës. At the request of MoMA trustee Helen Lansdowne Resor, Barr wrote to Miës during the winter of 1937. He knew Miës’s architectural practice in Germany was at a standstill and that Mrs. Resor and her husband, Stanley, wanted a house on their ranch in Wyoming. The couple ran J. Walter Thompson, the world’s largest advertising agency. He was its head; she, a vice president of the firm, had a reputation as one of the most imaginative copywriters of the era. To Helen Resor, Miës seemed like just the man to design them a fine home.
“The site is magnificent in its surroundings and the house itself would be fairly large,” Barr advised Miës. “It would involve certain problems of planning which I think would interest you.”17 With the Resors’ ample means, a major commission was in the offing, and in July Miës traveled to Paris to meet and talk with Helen Resor at the Hôtel Meurice.
“I liked him immensely,” she reported to Barr. “I have great respect for him and feel sure that after he sees the ranch … he will do a fine thing.”18 With few options in Germany, Miës sailed for America a fortnight later, together with Mrs. Resor and her two children, and at her expense. A day after stepping ashore in New York, he boarded a cross-country train, headed for the Resors’ Wyoming ranch.
His schedule permitted him just one day in Chicago, and he spent it looking at works by H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Wright. On his journey back East, he had more time, since he was being wooed by representatives of the Armour Institute of Technology, an engineering and architecture school in Chicago, with whom he met several times that September to discuss the directorship of Armour’s architecture program. After taking an auto tour of Oak Park, he dispatched a telegram, on September 8, to Wright: WOULD LIKE VERY MUCH TO DRIVE TO TALIESIN AND PAY MY RESPECTS IF CONVENIENT TO YOU.19
For his part, Wright regarded Miës as an individualist, rather than a Johnson-style propagandist tied to a school or a style. He knew the Tugendhat House from both the architectural literature and the model in the 1932 International Exhibition; he saw in the Brno house originality and echoes of his own work. More disposed to Miës than to either Walter Gropius or Le Corbusier (Wright had rebuffed earlier attempts by both to visit Taliesin), he invited Miës for lunch on Friday, September 10.
To the surprise of the apprentices, the two men settled into an easy camaraderie. Communication wasn’t simple, but one of the young Chicago architects who accompanied Miës, Bertrand Goldberg, had studied at the Bauhaus and spoke German fluently. He acted as Miës’s interpreter, although Miës frequently resorted to hand gestures as he saw firsthand the buildings that he knew from the printed page.
Knowing Miës’s exacting standards, his translator carped in German about some of the architectural detailing on view at Taliesin, then, as always, a work in progress, built by self-trained apprentices. “Shut up,” Miës bluntly instructed Goldberg in German. “Just be grateful it’s here.”20
When he stepped out onto a Taliesin terrace, the usually taciturn Miës was impressed. “Freedom,” he said in German. “This is a kingdom!”21 Wright could not help but be disarmed by Miës’s admiring words.
The luncheon guest would remain overnight; one day became two, then three. On the fourth day, Wright summoned a car and driver and personally escorted Miës back to Chicago. They stopped at the construction site of the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin; at the Unity Temple in Oak Park; and went on to the Robie House on the South Side of Chicago. On parting, Wright presented Miës with a Japanese print, a landscape from the hand of Hiroshige.
When Miës returned to Chicago the following year to head the Armour Institute, he asked that Wright introduce him at a welcoming dinner. Wright obliged in his own way: “I give you Miës van der Rohe,” he said to assembled trustees and faculty. “But for me there would have been no Miës … I admire him as an architect and respect and love him as a man. Armour Institute, I give you my Miës van der Rohe. You treat him well and love him as I do.”22
Despite his new life in nearby Chicago, Miës never returned to Spring Green; the September interlude during which Miës paid his respects to the Master did not flower into an enduring friendship. Still, in the personal library of some three hundred volumes that Miës brought from Germany, Wright was a significant presence. Among the several Wright-related titles were the Wasmuth volumes and a translation of Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones (1924).
In 1940, Miës would write an admiring essay about Wright’s “incomparable” talent.23 For the most part, however, the two titans went about their business as if no particular connection had ever existed.
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Walter Gropius—dapper, solemn, and precise—also arrived in the United States in 1937. He accepted an appointment to a professorship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, then, a year later, became chairman of the Department of Architecture. Once installed in Cambridge, he expressed surprise at what he called his students’ “vast ignorance” about the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Gropius brought to his new school not only his Bauhaus philosophy but also an open-eyed appreciation of Wright. On an earlier visit to America, Gropius had recognized both the Robie House in Chicago and the Larkin Building in Buffalo as “close to [his] own thinking and feeling.”24
Wright pointedly ducked Gropius when the latter proposed a visit to Taliesin in 1937, but finally, in January 1940, the men talked at length. In Boston to deliver a lecture, Wright accepted Gropius’s invitation to visit him at home in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Forbidden by the Nazis to remove financial assets from Germany, the immigrant Gropius had landed with little more than his books, papers, and a few Bauhaus furnishings. Within a year, however, the generosity of a Boston benefactor permitted him to embark on construction of a new home for himself, his wife, Ise, and their teenage daughter.
In contemplating his house’s design, Gropius surveyed vernacular architecture in the region, then incorporated into his plans such traditional New England materials as fieldstone and wood clapboards. Though he employed local builders, his house on a four-acre rise overlooking an orchard differed from the older farmhouses in the vicinity. Its asymmetrical entrance, flat roof, and ribbon windows were a departure. His suppliers were bemused at his use of large sheets of plate glass, chrome banisters, commercial light fixtures, and glass blocks.
Gropius and Wright had met briefly thirteen months before—a photographer caught them in cocktail conversation at a major Bauhaus exhibition at MoMA in 1938—but their several quiet hours talking together in Lincoln tempered Gropius’s admiration of Wright. He observed that to talk with Wright was to be on the receiving end of Wright’s opinions; he experienced firsthand what he called Wright’s “haughty arrogance.” He learned their pedagogical styles differed radically. Gropius noted that Wright invited worshipful imitation among his Taliesin fellows, while Gropius, at the Bauhaus and Harvard, fostered another approach. Gropius’s stated goal was to “help the student to observe and understand physical and psychological facts and from there let him find his own way.”25 In the years that followed, Gropius would also grow to resent Wright’s pointed criticism of International Style buildings, like his own house in Lincoln.
Mr. Wright meets Herr and Frau Gropius at the opening of the Bauhaus exhibition at the MoMA, December 8, 1938. (MoMA/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)
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Walter Gropius wasn’t the only one to feel ill-treated by Wright that year. At the time of his 1940 conversation with Gropius, Wright was already anticipating a major show scheduled for the fall at the MoMA. It was to be the biggest celebration yet of his work, and John McAndrew had spent two days at Taliesin the previous September making preliminary plans. The exhibition was to include the construction of a full-scale house in the sculpture garden behind the museum’s new Fifty-Third Street home. The Wright house was to be a prototype that embodied his newest thinking about good but affordable domestic design. He called such homes Usonian, a name he coined to identify a subset of his building built after 1936. These single-story dwellings were typified by low ceilings, open plans, central fireplaces, neither basements nor attics, and modular construction.26 Installing a Usonian house in New York appealed to him, as a broader public could experience a scaled-down Wright house (his Usonian houses typically enclosed about 1,500 square feet), which embodied his gift for integrating living spaces, with the dining room becoming part of the living room, the kitchen newly convenient to the main public areas.
A Festschrift was also in preparation, a collection of admiring essays about Wright and his work. The proposed essayists included Lewis Mumford, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philadelphia Museum of Art director Fiske Kimball, Finnish Modernist Alvar Aalto, and all three of the Kaufmanns, E.J., Liliane, and Edgar jr. McAndrew invited Alexander Woollcott to contribute, too. Though he initially agreed, Woollcott withdrew due to failing health, suggesting that the museum reprint his 1930 New Yorker essay, but McAndrew chose not to pursue it, since the piece had already been published in a Woollcott collection. (The opportunity was sadly missed, as Woollcott would have no chance to refresh his insights into his old friend Wright, dying in January 1943, after suffering a heart attack during a radio broadcast.)
In 1940, Wright rode a wave, since commissions rolled in at Taliesin as they never had before. His major project at Racine, Wisconsin, the S. C. Johnson & Son administration building, commissioned in 1936 and, after constructions delays, completed in 1939, thrilled visitors with its half acre of open space beneath a translucent Pyrex tube ceiling supported by a forest of mushroomlike columns. A tour de force, the Johnson Wax Building had been a boon to Wright’s commercial practice akin to Fallingwater’s impact on his domestic commissions (see Fig. XX).
In preparation for the forthcoming MoMA show, Wright had set his apprentices to work making new models. He commissioned fresh photography in anticipation of an opening in October 1940, but the elements, as they had in 1932, came together slowly. At Wright’s insistence McAndrew flew out to Taliesin in mid-September. DROP EVERYTHING, Wright had demanded. WANT TO SHOW YOU GENERAL SCHEME FOR CATALOGUE AND SHOW AND HOUSE.27
Had he been at hand, Philip Johnson might have recognized Wright’s tone as an ill omen. The plan soon began to unravel. Wright demanded more space (it wasn’t available). He wished to retitle the show In the Nature of Materials, and he prepared his own cover design for the accompanying catalog. Then, upon reading the essays McAndrew had commissioned, Wright grew furious. If the essays in hand were published, he telegrammed, THERE IS GOING TO BE NO EXHIBITION.28
The negotiations that ensued resembled those of January 1932, with McAndrew writing a groveling letter to Wright (“May I beg you one last time to reconsider, and … not just because I am in hot water.”)29 The show was saved, but delayed until November. The Usonian house in the garden was eliminated from the plan, and Wright arrived to dictate the installation of the models and images. Having been shunted aside, McAndrew found himself writing letters of apology to the contributors to the catalog; Barr would not permit the essays to be rewritten to suit Wright’s ego, so no accompanying publication went to press. To Wright’s irritation, the museum also distanced itself from the installation, inserting the clause “arranged by the architect himself” into its invitation and signage.30
When the show finally opened, the critics were not persuaded by McAndrew’s press release, which bore the headline GREATEST LIVING ARCHITECT COMES TO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. The New York Times critic Geoffrey Banks wondered whether the claim was “dangerously exaggerated.”31 And Parnassus magazine described Wright’s show (it had become his in every sense, not McAndrew’s) as a “bewildering mélange of blue-prints, architectural renderings, scaled models, materials and photographs,” for which, the writer observed, “surprisingly enough there is no catalogue.”32
Had the catalog been published, the public would have encountered Miës’s encomium, among others. His essay described Wright as a “master-builder drawing upon the veritable fountainhead of architecture.” He concluded, “In his undiminishing power [Wright] resembles a giant tree in a wide landscape, which, year after year, ever attains a more noble crown.”33 But Wright wasn’t ready to let Miës or anyone else define him. As long as he lived, he guarded that prerogative as closely as he could.
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Although Philip Johnson had next to nothing to nothing to do with the exhibition that Wright called “the show to end all shows,” he did reach into his own deep pockets for $500 to help underwrite the planned (but eventually stillborn) Usonian house. As a MoMA adviser and confidant of Alfred Barr’s, Johnson kept abreast of Wright’s antics and, feeling a sense of déjà vu, sympathized with McAndrew’s frustrations.
Having moved from New London, Ohio, Johnson reestablished New York as his home base, rejoining his cadre of MoMA friends. At a personal crossroads, he looked to distance himself from politics, and his first instinct was to reengage with architecture. He resisted the urge to return to the day-to-day bureaucracy of museum life, with its demanding schedule of installing one season’s exhibition even as the plan for the next one (and the one after that) competed for attention. Certainly he liked the impact his public voice had had, but he wasn’t ready to settle for resuming his old roles of curator and critic. Or to do battle with the likes of Wright.
He felt the stirrings of a latent desire to design. Ten years before he had assured his parents, “I have no … intention of doing any building at this my youthful age. There are too many problems I should like to work out first. The strategic time is later, though if I had all the money in the world I would just build continuously, keep on experimenting.”34 By 1939, however, he had reached a new emotional low that led to a rethink, a return to an old inclination.
“Despair. Personal despair … I realized I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t contributing anything to any cause, black, white, or indifferent. I realized that there was something terribly, terribly lacking. And I’d always liked designing, and I thought, if you like it, for Christsake, Johnson, what stops you from going to school?”35
Concluding it might just be his long-sought-after vocation, he decided to reinvent himself as an architect.
His qualifications for admission to architecture school had both strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, his time at MoMA amounted to a valuable credential, and the accompanying notoriety did not hurt. His connections at Harvard ran deep from his undergraduate years; and he knew Gropius, now a department chair at the Graduate School of Design. Johnson’s lack of undergraduate training in engineering or mathematics was worrisome, as was the culture of the GSD, where most of the other applicants were recent college graduates, typically ten or more years younger than thirty-four-year-old Johnson.
Another not-so-small matter was his lack of drawing abilities. He was acutely aware that his was not a deft hand at the drafting board. On arriving in Cambridge to talk of his possible architectural future, he met with another recent arrival at Harvard, Marcel Breuer, the Gropius protégé who was helping establish GSD’s place at the cutting edge of world architecture. As Johnson remembered the moment, he confided in Breuer, who, surprisingly, didn’t seem notably concerned about Johnson’s drafting skills.
Breuer asked the applicant to flex his hands and fingers.
Johnson complied.
“They work all right,” Breuer told the prospective student. “I don’t see any problem.” No further examination was required.
In the fall of 1940, as Wright and McAndrew wrestled over the installation on West Fifty-Third Street, Philip Johnson boarded a train for Boston, on his way to matriculate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He would later see the moment as “going out into the wilderness to seek my fortune.”36
1940–43 … Cambridge, Massachusetts … Back to School
Johnson rented a small house a few blocks from Harvard Square. The neat two-story structure at 995 Memorial Drive, with its view of the Charles River, suited him. The elder statesmen among his classmates, eager to make friends, he entertained lavishly. His means permitted him to hire an Irish maid and to set an elegant table, with fine china and silverware.
His style impressed his new acquaintances. One, a Midwesterner named Carter H. Manny Jr., wrote home to Michigan City, “This guy must be made of money. He spends it like a drunken sailor.”37 According to another fellow student, John Johansen, Johnson was savvy enough to leave his rich-boy ways at the classroom door. “He … didn’t stand above or to the side of us in the studios.”
Initially, however, Johnson’s work left his new peers unimpressed. “We didn’t see him as having much talent,” Johansen remembered, “and didn’t take him seriously as a designer.”38 One first-term assignment for a beach pavilion made clear that Johnson intended to iterate the Modernist notions he had previously championed at MoMA. His project bore an unmistakable resemblance to a Miës design, but his professors approved. One member of the jury—Walter Gropius himself, whose charge at the GSD had been to update the curriculum from its Beaux Arts traditions—singled out Johnson’s design for praise.
Johnson found himself surrounded with a talented cohort of architects-in-the-making; in addition to Johansen, other GSD students of the era who gained later fame included Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Ulrich Franzen. As his fellow students set about fulfilling the degree requirements in the expected way, Johnson, his confidence growing by the day, conceived a novel approach to earning his M. Arch.
By spring 1941, he was planning a house for himself, which he proposed as his senior project. He persuaded his professors that, rather than merely devising, designing, and drawing a senior project, as most of his fellow students would do, he would build his thesis and reside there.
Various currents competed for the attention of Johnson and his fellow students; one was Frank Lloyd Wright. Carter Manny in particular maintained an admiration for Wright, one partly born of family connection (his parents were friends of two of Wright’s children). “[Philip] was always trying to wean me away from Frank Lloyd Wright,” Manny recalled.39 In the end, Johnson failed, as later in the war, Manny would become a Taliesin apprentice.
During the winter of 1941, Johnson began to develop a plan for a small house, one very much suited to his own needs. He found a convenient site, having often walked past an empty lot on Ash Street in Cambridge, the vector that led directly from his rented house on Memorial Drive to the Harvard campus. In May, Johnson took title to the eighty-foot-wide, sixty-foot-deep plot at No. 9, on the corner of Acacia Street.
Even in its early stages—by summer Manny sketched a version of his friend’s proposed design in a letter home—Johnson’s house promised to shock his neighbors in suburban Cambridge. Most of the nearby dwellings were wood-frame structures that dated to the mid-nineteenth century; their builders, working in the local vernacular of the Greek Revival, had applied corner boards and raised gable roofs that resembled pilasters and pediments, thereby identifying the otherwise plain buildings as the geometric descendants of classical temples. Just blocks away were aristocratic Georgian mansions lining “Tory Row,” the old King’s Highway, which predated the Revolution (one had housed George Washington during the siege of Boston and, later, been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home). The streetscapes on other blocks featured elaborate Victorian houses in Queen Anne, Second Empire, and Gothic modes, with turrets, mansard roofs, broad porches, or band-sawn bargeboards.
Cantabrigians had certainly encountered new architectural ideas before; indeed, in proximity to Johnson’s proposed house stood a home that, when constructed in 1882–83, had been a certifiably innovative house, a landmark in the evolution of American architecture. Just one block north of Johnson’s new property, at the corner of Brattle and Ash streets, stood the Mary Fiske Stoughton house, built for a wealthy widow. Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Johnson himself had acknowledged its designer, Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–86), in Modern Architecture: International Exhibition; they saw Richardson as one of the carriers of “modern American architecture, the thread which passed from Richardson to [Louis] Sullivan, from Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright.”40
An early example of the Shingle Style, the Stoughton House hinted at a new simplicity. It was a distant forerunner of the designs Johnson cogitated upon for his site a few doors south. Richardson had distilled the traditions of the houses nearby, incorporating a turret, bay windows, and intersecting gable roofs. But instead of calling attention to the eclectic elements, he cloaked his admixture of shapes in a skin of uniform shingles that conformed to the undulating shapes of the house. No scrollwork carpentry elements distracted the eye; the minimal trim was painted to match the deep olive green of the shingles. Even the porch was withheld, a hollow within the mass of the house. The windows, grouped in twos and threes with numerous small lights, added to the horizontal feel, making the house look lower. Though already twice added to, in 1900 and 1925, Richardson’s Stoughton House was a fixture in Johnson’s landscape, a house that used materials in as plain a manner as he himself would.
By the time Johnson obtained his building permit in September 1941, Richardson’s design seemed no more than an incremental shift from the other houses in the neighborhood. Johnson’s house, which was to be the first freestanding work of his design to be completed, was a more radical departure. As a local paper, the Cambridge Chronicle-Sun, would soon observe, it was a house “the like of which Cambridge has never seen before.”41
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Predictably, Johnson borrowed the basic idea from Miës van der Rohe. In his last years in Berlin, the burly German had designed a series of houses within enclosed courtyards. Though only one was built, all of Miës’s “court-houses,” in Johnson’s words, consisted of a “flow of space … confined within a single rectangle formed by the outside walls of court and house.”42
Johnson decided the configuration suited the increasingly dense Cambridge streetscape, where small lots could mean nosy neighbors. The house he envisioned consisted of an elongated, “earth-hugging” box some sixty feet long and just twenty feet deep. Once he decided upon the basics, Johnson hired draftsmen in the office of G. Holmes Perkins, a local architect and Johnson’s friend Manny’s tutor at the GSD, to execute the working drawings. This established a lifelong pattern of collaboration: Like the restaurateur with a gift for conceiving a place and selling it to the public, Johnson became the front-of-house man with back-in-the-kitchen assistance. His hirelings also produced a model that earned him a spot in an advanced design class, taught by Marcel Breuer.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor that December and a sudden scarcity of some building materials, Johnson shifted from his original (and Miës’s) specification of brick for the court-house. To assure construction in wartime, Johnson substituted stressed-skin plywood for the house and the enclosing fence. On-site construction got under way in mid-April 1942 when the wall and roof panels, prefabricated in New York, arrived to be bolted and glued together on-site.
The house sat well back from Ash Street, with a narrow driveway behind. But even before his neighbors could react to it, the low, flat-roof building disappeared behind a nine-foot-tall fence that enclosed the courtyard. The combined indoor-outdoor space of the house and courtyard nearly filled the site, leaving only the driveway to the west, a minimal setback on the abutter’s side to the north, and a strip of trees and plantings adjacent to the sidewalk lining Acacia Street to the south. The fence that lined the main frontage on Ash Street stood at the very edge of the sidewalk, which meant that, to anyone walking by, Johnson’s abode had the forbidding air of a fortress. No windows looked out upon the street, and together, the house and contained garden occupied roughly two thirds of the 4,800-square-foot lot.
Louise Johnson came to admire her son’s work-in-progress in May, but at least one neighbor was less impressed than Johnson’s mother. He filed a complaint asserting that the house was too close to the property lines and that the stockadelike fence exceeded the local code restriction by a full two feet. The courts declined to order Johnson to correct the violations, ruling that no one had been harmed. The elements of the simple house came together quickly, and Johnson took up residence in August 1942.
A ca. 1943 sketch of Philip Johnson’s Thesis House, which nicely captures the stockadelike quality of its relationship to passersby on the street. (MoMA/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)
As a first work, the Ash Street house suggested both the transparency and the guardedness of its designer. The inhospitable fence at streetside implied a resident within who wanted to remain anonymous; however, once inside the keep of Johnson’s castle, a visitor got the opposite message, as the front wall of the house, made entirely of glass, revealed a bedroom left, the dining space at center, and a living room right. The interior was open, with a minimum of partitions to the rear to enclose the two baths, utilities, and kitchen, and only a partial wall screened the bedroom. A bookcase helped define the dining area. The fireplace on the north wall was one of the few traditional elements. The house had almost no storage, with neither an attic nor a basement.
Johnson decorated the house with the Miës furniture from his New York apartment (including the chrome-and-leather slung chairs and the flat daybed with the bolster cushion), and he arranged them in a nearly identical rectilinear arrangement. Diaphanous curtains could be drawn across the glass to cut the glare. The floor was a uniform light carpet.
If Johnson wasn’t quite ready to open himself to the world, he was utterly unabashed about revealing his admiration for Miës. Johnson’s chosen vernacular, with its expanse of glass fronting a simple box, was fresh in the context of staid Cambridge; in its urban setting, its see-through character seemed an unlikely choice. Even to his fellow students, the house was a surprise: According to Ulrich Franzen, “It was the first Miësian house that any of us had seen.”43
In fact, the Ash Street house was a paradoxical trope. The enclosing fence discouraged entry, but once the outer boundary was breached, the usual barriers were nowhere to be seen; the garden was a part of the house. Paradoxically, the transparent wall looked out on the solid palisade wall that blinded the peering eyes of passersby (one trade magazine of the day criticized Johnson for his disregard for the “traditional American neighbourhood pattern”).44 That sense of privacy was, in part, illusory: there could be no closely held secrets since anyone on the second and third floors of the surrounding taller houses nearby could easily look down upon the happenings in Johnson’s house and courtyard.
The place was strange enough that it took some getting used to. One guest did his imitation of a confused bird: The man walked directly into the glass wall. “He fell to the floor more or less unconscious,” another guest remembered. “I remember Philip looking very annoyed and saying something like, ‘Damn fool.’”45
Perhaps the fellow had partaken of the drink that flowed freely—at Ash Street, Johnson hosted an ongoing salon where he welcomed his guests saloon-style, with drinks served by a Filipino houseboy. His many guests included not only Harvard architecture students but old friends Alfred Barr, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and George Howe.
Despite Johnson’s pique, the guest who was confused by the glass demonstrated that the owner-designer had succeeded in accomplishing what he set out to do. Though it was (and is) unroofed, the exterior walled garden, as the disoriented guest demonstrated, isn’t quite separable from the interior. The house and the walled garden are elements of the same space as adjacent rooms are in a normally partitioned home. The four immense sheets of plate glass that constitute the front wall separate the interior of the house from the garden and, simultaneously, integrate the garden into the house.
Architecture, at its most basic, concerns light, space, and shelter, and Johnson’s apprentice house is a distillation of just those elements. The long, shallow house has the aspect of an open-front lean-to, its front a wall of light during the day. Thus, his so-called court-house isn’t defined by the presence of a roof over the house or its absence over the courtyard. It’s a building united with its garden, obvious yet subtle, a place that, like Johnson, asked not to be seen even as it called attention to itself. When constructed in the early 1940s, the Ash Street house was a whispered promise of buildings and landscapes to come.
Johnson’s litigious neighbor wasn’t the only one who disliked the place. Neither Gropius nor Breuer approved. “People felt it didn’t jibe with the street,” Johnson recalled later, “and they were right—it didn’t.”46 On the other hand, many of his architectural peers, never having seen a house of its kind before, liked what they saw. Ulrich Franzen thought it was “very simple and very beautiful,” and John Johansen called it “stunning.”47
Always an insightful observer, Marga Barr found 9 Ash Street a “special place.” Once Johnson lent her his little house, where she and her daughter Victoria spent a spring break from their respective schools. They experienced the place as no cocktail-hour visitor could but as round-the-clock inhabitants. For her, the glass-faced house seemed “serene” and “logical.” She also thought it amusing that, as the enclosing fence didn’t quite reach the ground, the feet of passing pedestrians could be seen. (Johnson himself remembered neighborhood ladies trying to peer under.)
Mrs. Barr also understood it was very much Philip’s place. “As we sat in the living room or in the yard we felt magically secluded in a conscipusly [sic] elitist ambience, a special place where every space, every piece of furniture had its own special preordained location. While Philip was absent he was yet the ‘genius loci’ and—as in all his other works large or small, it is impossible to alter his arrangements. Whoever does is a vandal.”48