You can’t have a culture without architecture.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
September 20, 1955 … New Haven, Connecticut … Union Station
A man wearing a cape and porkpie hat stepped off the train. Scanning the platform, he saw not so much as a raised hand to acknowledge his arrival. No one approached to offer respectful words of greeting.
This was unexpected.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s face had graced the cover of Time magazine. Cabdrivers in Manhattan knew him on sight and hung on his every word. It was generally accepted that Ayn Rand had based the central character of her bestselling novel The Fountainhead on Mr. Wright. NBC had recently broadcast his black-and-white visage into America’s living rooms on the popular television show Conversations with Elder Wise Men. In an era when fame was meted out in small doses, his outspoken opinions and an innate gift for attracting the public eye made Wright the only architect with a name widely recognized at the American supper table.
Yet on this day in New Haven, despite having been booked as the headliner for the inaugural event in Yale’s “Perspectives” series, the eighty-eight-year-old Wright made his way from trackside by himself.
No apprentice waited on him, as one would have done at Taliesin, his home in Spring Green, Wisconsin (constructed in 1911), or at Taliesin West (constructed in 1937), the winter quarters of his school-cum-architecture practice in Scottsdale, Arizona. At his latest place of residence, his second-floor suite at the Plaza Hotel (dubbed, inevitably, Taliesin East), his arrival would have caused one or two or five acolytes to rise, to lift his bag, to seek the Master’s approval.
Just last year the great university a few blocks away had bestowed upon him the honorary degree of doctor of fine arts. But Wright seemed to be the forgotten man as he emerged from the bowels of the New Haven rail station. All 609 seats in Room 114 were booked for the nine P.M. event at Strathcona Hall, and the event’s organizers, the Yale Daily News and Yale Broadcasting Company, expected a great clamor. They were delighted at what seemed likely to be a standing-room-only crowd.
Still, Wright remained alone as he entered the great waiting room. On another day, he would have paused to critique Union Station, a Beaux Arts exercise of the late Cass Gilbert. Called by some the “vestibule of the city,” the space was brightly lit by the midday sunlight pouring in from the ten towering, semicircular windows that lined the thirty-five-foot-tall walls of polished white limestone. Wright could not approve, of course; he had spent decades decrying the application of Roman and Greek details to contemporary buildings. In the presence of a suitable audience, he might have waved his rubber-tipped cane, pointing out the dishonesty of using fenestration from the age of Diocletian two millennia too late. But it seemed that no one knew or cared what he had to say.
Seething with anger, Wright settled on a solution.
He moved deliberately toward the ticket windows. If no one could be bothered to greet him, he saw no need to stay. He would simply climb aboard the next southbound train and return to Manhattan.
In that moment of resolution, Mr. Wright also knew whom to blame. That would be Philip Johnson, the man he knew best here in New Haven. After all, a few months ago, at another of the Ivies—at Harvard, no less—the younger man had cruelly and publicly dismissed him “as the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.”1
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On this particular September day, the forty-nine-year-old Philip Cortelyou Johnson drove himself to New Haven, as he ordinarily did twice a week during term time.
A few years before, he had established his base of operations in nearby New Canaan, Connecticut, setting up shop on the second floor at 89 Main Street. He shared architectural offices with a small and varying staff that consisted of a draftsman or two and a part-time secretary. Though it overlooked the village’s busy main intersection, Johnson’s place of business was austere, characterized by its “absolute order.” All clutter, from drawings to drafting pencils, was banished to the many cupboards and drawers.2
Johnson liked New Canaan, which Holiday magazine termed a “conservative, pretty, station-wagon town.”3 Its convenience to Manhattan, an hour’s drive southwest, enabled him to continue his on-again, off-again curatorial labors under the aegis of his closest friend, Alfred Barr, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). There, in 1932, Johnson’s first curatorial effort, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, had established his reputation. That show also led to his first—and rather problematic—exchange with Frank Lloyd Wright.
While his architectural practice now showed genuine signs of keeping the hyperactive Johnson fully occupied, for the preceding half decade New Canaan had offered him both a respite from Manhattan and access to yet another career, since New Haven and its famed university were an easy, easterly meander along the coastal road overlooking Long Island Sound.
At Yale, Johnson’s work as a New York curator and New Canaan architect took a backseat to his role as pedagogue. He had found a not-quite-professorial place within the university structure, functioning as a critic-in-residence at the School of Architecture. As at MoMA, he took no pay from Yale. Independently wealthy, Johnson could afford a need-blind approach to such jobs, and he reveled in the accompanying sense of independence.
He delighted in talking about design and buildings; his joy in architecture was infectious. Johnson possessed a fast-firing critical mind, and though he respected the disciplines of the lecture hall and design studios in New Haven, his candor and humor also meant his aphoristic tongue could shock and even offend people. For the students, his sometimes impolitic remarks and sharp critical assessments only enhanced his standing. He could and did say what he liked, and as one of his brightest Yale pupils, Robert A. M. Stern, put it, “He talked circles around the other critics.”4
Johnson liked nothing better than to schmooze and amuse, and the neutral territory of the Yale School of Architecture suited him. He had earned his architecture degree at Harvard, but he could hardly have allied himself with its Graduate School of Design. Johnson had conspicuously avoided architecture department chairman Walter Gropius as he earned his architecture degree during the war years. (Their disconnect was personal and professional; Johnson admitted to liking neither the man nor his work.) Johnson cultivated mentors and friends in Cambridge, but many of them, including Gropius’s old Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer, had since established peacetime practices in New York. Several of those, including both Breuer and John M. Johansen, had built homes in New Canaan. Together with Johnson, their cohort had established a Modernist bastion in what had been a predominantly clapboard New England town. They built houses of steel and glass, unadorned and geometric.
Although Yale’s program still remained in the shadow of Harvard’s (thus far, it granted only baccalaureate degrees), Johnson recognized the emerging talent there would soon bring it to the forefront. The regular faculty included architect Louis Kahn and a young architectural historian named Vincent Scully. R. Buckminster Fuller was among the many significant architectural thinkers who arrived periodically to offer commentary. (“No one had the kids eating out of his hand like he did,” Johnson observed.)5 But landing Wright to lead an evening forum was something of a coup.
Yale had treated Johnson well. Just the preceding January, an exhibition of his works had been installed at the Yale Art Gallery, featuring models, mural-size photographs, and stereopticon slides of his work. Mounted by a recent graduate from the Yale School of Architecture who worked as an associate in Johnson’s office, the little show had been a happy inversion for Johnson, usually the curator rather than the curated. Central to the show had been his most notable and, to some, his most notorious design.
That nearby domicile, which he had built for himself back in New Canaan, had become the most talked-about home of the postwar era. The very idea of the Glass House, completed in 1949, shocked people, with its walls of quarter-inch-thick plate glass. The house consisted of a single room, its open plan punctuated only by the bathroom, enclosed by a brick cylinder that rose through the roof. The place attracted the curious, invited and not. Johnson relished the attention, even when the house, as it often did, became the object of jokes. The New Yorker made light of it in a cartoon, and a column in the New York Sun observed that to live there “would be like living in Macy’s window.”6 Johnson merely smiled his Cheshire-cat grin.
He welcomed New York friends to New Canaan for weekends, but also made the Glass House an informal part of the Yale architectural curriculum. On Sundays, he conducted an ongoing charrette about the future of architecture. Attendees included Yale faculty, such as Paul Rudolph, Louis Kahn, and George Howe; neighbors, such as Breuer and Johansen; and other prominent architectural friends, including Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Edward Larrabee Barnes. The eminent English architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner came to visit and stayed to watch the sun set through the full frame of the Glass House’s I-beam structure.
These men argued and critiqued one another’s works. For the students, a visit to Johnson’s New Canaan home was a field trip of a unique sort, one that exposed them to both the controversial Glass House and Johnson’s impressive circle of architects, journalists and critics, and museum professionals.
Frank Lloyd Wright had visited the Glass House. Two Connecticut commissions, including one in New Canaan, had brought the Master of Taliesin to the neighborhood in the early 1950s. He could hardly permit himself to like Johnson’s unusual domicile. Just as he dismissed Beaux Arts buildings such as Gilbert’s New Haven train station, Wright offered harsh criticism of the steel-and-glass structures of the International Style. He had for years dismissed them as “flat-chested,” but he never tired of finding new ways to express his disapproval.
On a recent visit, Wright arrived unannounced at the Glass House. Primed for a resumption of the conversational combat that tended to characterize his interactions with Johnson, he found the owner was not at home. But Wright wasn’t going to let Johnson’s absence prevent him from delivering his opening gambit. The maid would do.
On entering the Glass House, he took in the large, sparsely decorated interior and the unobstructed view of the lush landscape outside. He assumed the look of a man surprised by what he saw, as if he’d never come through the floor-to-ceiling glass door before.
The well-trained maid—even in graduate school, Johnson had employed household staff—waited for the gentleman’s reaction. Wright obliged:
“I don’t know whether I’m supposed to take off my hat or leave it on.”
His words left the woman wondering what to say—without knowing the rules of engagement, she had suddenly found herself in a conversational cross fire. But Wright wasn’t done.
“Am I indoors,” he asked with an air of faux innocence, “or outdoors?”
After a moment, the bewildered maid recovered herself—she was, after all, charged with tending to New Canaan’s most famous curiosity and had encountered bemused callers before. She asked her elderly guest who he was and what she could do for him.
“Oh,” he said airily, “just another foolish client. I want Mr. Johnson to build me a house—a glass house.”7
She duly reported the encounter to Johnson. And he was left to ruminate over the peculiar calculus of his friendship with Wright. When he recounted the story a few months later, he did so with delight, calling Wright’s wit “wonderful.” Little did Johnson know the hat-on, hat-off anecdote would become an indelible episode in the public history of his house.
He did know, however, that when it came to Mr. Wright, one could only wait and wonder what he would say next.
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The belated arrival of a greeting party of undergraduates prevented Wright from boarding a southbound train. Offering a flurry of apologies, they cajoled the evening’s lead attraction. Though he remained dubious, Wright was, as usual, available to young people. He agreed to remain in New Haven.
The architects-to-be escorted their guest to the Hotel Taft. This was perhaps New Haven’s most prestigious accommodation, but Wright complained of the hotel’s poor design. Surprisingly spry for his years, he booted ottomans out of his path as he strode across the lobby. Finally, his hosts managed to settle him into a room on the hotel’s sixth floor.
A short while later, when the appointed time came to depart for the evening’s events, a young man called from the house phone in the lobby.
“Can’t give the talk,” Wright announced. “I’m going back on the seven-ten train.”8
A worried voice pleaded that an audience awaited, both in the auditorium and over the airwaves.
After a pause, Wright inquired, “Will it be over television?”
“Not exactly,” he was told. But the guest again relented and soon descended to the lobby and strode out of the elevator. As the college paper reported the following day, he “waved his stick, swirled his cape, and marched across the Green … kicking pigeons out of his way as he went.” His escorts followed.
This was Wright in his element: He liked attention to be paid. He enjoyed stirring things up, doing and saying the unexpected. He always had. And Yale, as both familiar and foreign territory, was the perfect place to put on a little show. He never assumed he was among friends, but tonight he was to share the stage with Professor Vincent Scully, Yale’s young and passionate scholar of American architecture—but a man who, just two years earlier, had taken Wright to task in print for his narrow view of the International Style. Another panelist would be Carroll L. V. Meeks, a member of the faculty inclined to classical architecture. Wright’s family motto—“Truth against the world”—was always operative, but on this evening of all evenings, his feelings still bruised, he was surrounded by men he perceived to be the enemy. The other person scheduled to join him onstage was Philip Johnson.
Once in Hendrie Hall, home of WYBC, his guides tried to make Wright comfortable in the studio for his pre-lecture interview. He doffed his cape and hat—but then he spied Johnson arriving. Once the evening’s proceedings got under way the younger man was to deliver an appreciation of Wright, but the honoree had something he wished to say now. Like the captain of a warship maneuvering into position, Wright steered toward Johnson then hove to at hailing distance.
Professor Scully, also present, would remember Wright’s “loud, clear voice.”9 Johnson later wondered whether Wright was speaking to him or for the benefit of those around them, but Wright’s manner of delivery—another in attendance remembered it as warm—seemed pitched for all to hear.10 His words shocked Johnson like an iced highball tossed into his face.
“Philip!” Wright exclaimed in mock surprise. “I thought you were dead!”
Frenemies Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson at Yale University on September 20, 1955. (Austin Cooper, Yale Daily News)
A nonplussed Johnson sidled over, but Wright wasn’t finished. “To think of it,” he reminisced. “Little Phil, all grown up, an architect, and actually building his houses out in the rain.”
To that, Johnson offered no response.
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The night belonged to Wright. Reportedly more than two thousand people were turned away at the door, and a rapt audience in the hall listened in “an atmosphere of profound tribute.”11
When Wright described his architectural vision, he claimed, as he often did, that his designs fulfilled the “great and noble promise of the Declaration of Independence.”
He offered his architectural philosophy. He was a great lay preacher, his faith based upon what he called “organic architecture,” a philosophy of building he defined for the Yale audience as “something with a spiritual meaning, something integral, something in which the same relation exists between the part and the whole as between the whole and the part, something built of the thing and on it.”
Nature must be the foundation of organic architecture, he explained, invoking by name Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau, and “the real poet and singer of America,” Walt Whitman. “We’re going to be great by recognition of the study and expression of nature as nature: the reality of a building consists not in the four walls but in the space to be lived in.”
The old man seemed to grow younger as he talked. He critiqued modern architecture, the university, and the church. Having mesmerized his youthful listeners, he closed with an advisory: “There is only one moral to all this: Hell, let’s be ourselves.”
The audience responded with thunderous applause.
Philip Johnson closed the evening’s presentation. He praised Wright as “America’s greatest living architect.” He called Wright’s work inimitable and termed Taliesin West “a work of poetry.” Those in attendance remembered the tribute as deeply moving (Johnson himself would describe it, without apparent irony, as a “eulogy”). But Wright, hearing the honeyed words as a mea culpa for Johnson’s dismissal of Wright’s work as outdated, decided he still wished to have the last word.
When Johnson was finished, Wright responded, “Attaboy, Phil,” loudly enough for the audience to hear. “Now you’re on the right track.”
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To cite their names is to sum up architecture in the twentieth century. First came the Master, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), and his provincial manner, the Prairie Style, which influenced the world. Much later, with the turn of the millennium, the Maestro’s serial sponsorship of such varied modes as International, Post-Modern, and Deconstructivist made Philip Johnson (1906–2005) architecture’s chief talking head. The man wearing the black-framed glasses with the circular lenses had become the ubiquitous face of American architecture.
In ways that no one before had done, the two placed architecture at the center of culture.
In the years they shared—between their first acquaintance in 1931 and Wright’s death in April 1959—the two men were the yin and the yang, in love and in hate, the positive and negative charges that gave architecture its compass. A shared characteristic stands forth as a singular asset: Although each man lived into his nineties, neither, it seems, ever stopped talking. Their words might be barbed, witty, self-aggrandizing, pandering, or visionary, but in a profession where wise utterances are hardly commonplace, their pronouncements were consistently provocative. Both could be imperious, inspiring, funny, trivial, and profound, but each had a personal charisma and directness that made him good copy. Often they talked to and about one another, and their shared legacy amounts to a mixed bag of architecture, self-promotion, iconoclastic wit, and uninhibited ego.
They shared a deep commitment to the cause of architecture, but the two could hardly have been more different, separated as they were by age, region (Wright regularly expressed his dislike for Johnson’s adopted home, Manhattan), and sexual orientation (Wright admitted to disliking the “homosexuals who dominate the art world”).12 They shared a restless creativity; the body of work that each produced over many decades of professional practice was eclectic and changeable, but their oeuvres rarely overlapped. Perhaps most of all they were separated by a great chasm in taste, with Wright the unreformed Romantic, Johnson the Modernist with an enduring fondness for the classical.
In their three shared decades, however, they built the two most admired and discussed houses of the century, Wright’s Fallingwater and the Glass House, both of which took on personalities in their own right. The two men competed for the soul of Manhattan when the ziggurat on Fifth Avenue, Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (completed in 1959), assumed its place overlooking Central Park, and Johnson’s (and Miës van der Rohe’s) tower for the House of Seagram, completed the previous year, reached for the sky in Midtown. In triangulating twentieth-century urban architecture, those two buildings are key coordinates.
Wright is a giant; to be certain, Johnson is the lesser architect. Yet they were essential foils for each other, and clearly discernible shifts in the careers of both men resulted when their careers collided. Johnson admitted frankly that, as he neared fifty, Wright challenged the critic-curator Johnson to devote himself to the practice of architecture, telling him, “Philip, you’ve got to choose.” When Wright set out to build his house in a waterfall, he told a young apprentice conspiratorially, “We are going to beat the Internationalists at their own game.”13 Like colliding atomic particles, Johnson and Wright altered each other’s paths.
Their dynamic was such that Philip Johnson could say—though only after the Master of Taliesin was dead—that Wright “changed my life.”14 Wright, operating from his presumed position of superiority, got no closer than asking, quizzically, of the Glass House, “Is it Philip … and is it architecture?”15 Yet, together, the two men transformed the art of building in their time.