Leaving the lifts on the third floor of Fifty-Third at Third—a stepped pink granite ellipse that cabbies call the Lipstick Building—one confronts a pair of glass doors. The left is etched John Burgee Architects, and, across the alignment, the right-hand door adds the insubordinate clause with Philip Johnson.
“John Burgee and I are partners,” Johnson tells me. “But I graduated on the first of January. I’m now design consultant.” One’s heart sinks for the receptionist who will have to recite the revised mouthful every time the phone rings. From the caramel-coloured lobby, lined with anaemic Andy Warhols, we pass through a veil of “shattered” glass partitions into Johnson’s private office. The curvilinear cubicle (nicknamed the Rumpus Room by his minions) is furnished with Ed Ruscha prints on the wall and Robert Venturi oxblood chairs around a circular table.
The éminence blanche looks spry, debonair, a model of monochrome elegance. Unlike his architectural wardrobe, the Emperor’s sartorial style remains a constant. White hair stands like toothbrush bristles a quarter inch from his scalp. The signature black glasses adhere improbably to the sides of his skull— less spectacles than cranial cutlery, ebony chopsticks for the mind. All the better to see you with, my dear. . . “I had them custom-made forty years ago, because no one would make a round pair of glasses,” he explains. “It came from the Machine Aesthetic. Car wheel hubs should be cylindrical, but they cut them with a flat top. It drives me crazy! To me, glasses are round. They make a pair now with a little ‘Philip’ on the side. Awfully silly, but that’s the way I’m caricatured, always.”
When he speaks, in a soft, mellifluous baritone, his teeth show small and separate, like premature peas in a pod, a child’s milk teeth in a grandfather’s physiognomy. Sharp as ever at eighty, Johnson talks animatedly, the conversation darting from Ledoux to Lloyd’s, (Krier’s) Speer to Spitalfields, Mies to McDonald’s, Times Square to the Tate Gallery extension. Effusive on other current practitioners, he generally refrains from commenting on buildings he hasn’t seen, and grows aloof when it comes to questions of his current design projects. His practice, which had $2.5 billion worth of work on its drawing boards, according to the 1985 Rizzoli monograph, is actively involved in schemes in Boston, Washington, London, and Los Angeles, to name but a few.
“The figure eighty never seemed much to me,” says Johnson, shrugging aside his octogenarian status. “I go right on working, just as always.” Despite the disclaimer, he is evidently not unaware of his distinguished age. Citing “intimations of mortality,” he announced the donation of his New Canaan estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation just before last Christmas. The thirty-acre property has six buildings, including the 1949 Glass House, a design inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, with whose plans he was familiar. “Mies called my house a rather bad copy of his. He never liked it,” Johnson says candidly. “I wasn’t trying to do the same thing as him, though I was certainly vastly influenced by his work.” Under the terms of the donation, he will live at the Glass House for the rest of his life, and thereafter it will be managed for public tours by the Trust, as with several other important homes around the country. “It puts it in good hands, gives back to the community some of the things I’ve done, even if the architecture is very simple.”
Johnson never saw the original Barcelona Pavilion and is now unlikely to see its simulacrum, since he travels less these days. “Ninety nine point nine percent of us remember it only as pictures,” he notes, adding that “under normal circumstances” he would oppose the reconstruction of an “extinct” work such as this, known primarily through reproductions. “But this is not normal. It’s one of the monuments of the twentieth century. The building is apparently much better than the photographs, absolutely superb.” But he has a couple of minor reservations. “The glass is clear, and it’s supposed to be dark green. That stops the sense of enclosure in the main room, lets it seep out into the court with the [Georg] Kolbe sculpture that it should have been cut off from. But on the other hand, they did succeed in getting the spatial feeling, which is the main point of Mies’s work. So in this case, I think we’d make an exception to the idea that you can’t rebuild monuments.”
He professes to be “delighted” with the outcome of the Mansion House Square saga, having written in successive letters that he felt this Mies building, commissioned by Peter Palumbo, was “most inappropriate for London. Palumbo bought the Mies house here, as you know, so we’re pals, but I thought that building should not be built there, and said so.” He declines to comment on James Stirling’s designs for the site, having only seen a couple of drawings, but moves rapidly into an encomium of Big Jim’s work elsewhere, emphasising his ability to produce great architecture while cramming complex briefs onto tight sites. “What Jim can do so marvellously is to adapt the feeling of the street and the neoclassic building next door, and weave it into the programme, which was so unbelievably difficult,” Johnson remarks of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie. “You have to snake through the building because you want to get to that little siedlung at the top of the hill. I would have said, ‘Go change your brief, Mister, and I’ll be back!’ But he got all of that in, and made that beautiful circular court. All you can do in this Vale of Tears we call the world is to get the greatest architect you can and let him work against the restraints,” he says, pointing to the Sackler Museum (Fogg addition) at Harvard University, for which Stirling also produced alternative solutions.
“I’m crazy about the Fogg, but then I’m so totally devoted to Jim. Who else could make a staircase so it’s a pleasure to walk up three or four floors? And he’s a genius with the rooms at the top, where you walk through in an interesting, though logical and simple way.” Then his tone changes to that of a benevolent headmaster scolding a favourite pupil for his latest prank: “The facade does not please me, needless to say. Jim made out that this was what the States was building in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘Fake Banding’ as we called it in our first book. Where you take two bands and emphasise them using two bricks, and just pop the windows in wherever function tells you to do. Jim can do better than that,” he chides. “And has, in many buildings. I like the new Tate,” he adds quickly, mollifying the rebuke. While in London for his first British commission—a 1.6-million-square-foot office complex at Hay’s Wharf—Johnson was quick to catch a glimpse of Stirling’s latest. “Well, I crept under the hoardings!”
Johnson’s own project is similarly under wraps, allegedly still at yellow-trace conceptual stage. At first he divulges only that it will step down toward the river, in black granite and Portland stone, and refers darkly to its forthcoming scrutiny by the Royal Fine Art Commission. Later, however, pointing out the sample slabs of charcoal stone ranged on the carpet in the corner, he crooks his right thumb and forefinger into a C, flashes a mischievous grin and murmurs: “We’re doing Greenwich.”
If Stirling’s London building was a predictable delight for Johnson, the same could not be said of Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s. In fact, it knocked him off his feet. “I’m amazed I like Lloyd’s,” he says fervently. “But I admire it more than I can say. I was surprised because my own interests are so neoclassic, or historically minded.” He had anticipated that Lloyd’s was “messy . . . out of place in London, especially the City of London . . . anti-urban . . . the wrong direction for us, anyhow . . . That kind of mechanolatry certainly ought to be over by now.”
Instead the building proved “quite the contrary. This is a superb example of a technology carefully done, artistically done. To me a machine that perfect had never been created. And it should have been. It expresses one direction of modern architecture—the Machine Art attitude—that has never been carried out so well.”
He checks his enthusiasm with a few reservations. The main entrance was, he says, “not grand enough for such an expensive object. You don’t crawl into mouseholes to get into such a superb, important building. I could say that a tall vault the height of a cathedral doesn’t do any good unless it’s a lot longer, that Beauvais is too short because it’s just an apse. Lloyd’s atrium is too tall: it doesn’t count any more, it’s too far up to see. Now, in a real Gothic cathedral, like Notre Dame, you can see all the way to the altar. The relation of height to length works.
“But I don’t see any point in talking about those things, since they’re mere details. If I criticised Lloyd’s as I would a neoclassical building, I would be using the wrong set of criteria. In terms of what he was trying to do, it was unbelievable.” Suddenly, Johnson is intensely animated. “I admire anyone that can make 4,400 drawings or whatever, and work out that handrailing, those fittings in the toilets, those elevators with the parts all visible, the light coming through them, the way all those parts cling to the building, the elevators all polished, and a single piece of glass for the roof. You cannot carry that direction through more successfully.”
He pauses on a note of pragmatism—“I hope they can clean it, in a few years’ time”—then shifts again to higher gear, buried passions bubbling to the surface. “I remember vividly when I was young going into the great engine room of an ocean liner and watching the pistons going in and out. You expect people in oily rags to go around wiping those pipes and pistons all the time!” The metaphor evokes Fritz Lang’s sinister underworld in Metropolis. “Nothing wrong with Metropolis. That had a great influence over us.”
But the film was meant as a criticism . . .
“At that time. But you see, ever since the Futurists in 1911, the machine has been a great symbol. We had a show at the Modern in 1933, called Machine Art, which celebrated the machine, the wheel, the ratchet. Most of the movies were against it—[Charlie] Chaplin’s Modern Times—but they didn’t seem to affect our sense of worship.”
And now? Does the technical impetus still pertain? Two recent shows, at the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums (High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design, 1985–86, and The Machine Age in America, 1918–1941, 1986–87), have indicated a revival of interest in that era.
“It’s really messy to call all that Machine Art,” Johnson retorts. “The interpretations were all over the place. If I were still a machine idolator, I would be a purist and not go in for streamlined pencil sharpeners!” But he is far from dismissing the machine as a force in culture. “To me, it’s one of the mainstreams of our times, as is neoclassicism. You see, I’m a great admirer of Léon Krier.”
Recently appointed the first director of the SOM Foundation Institute, to be based in Chicago, Krier’s name crops up repeatedly in the course of the interview. “I think Krier may be brilliant,” says Johnson, hastening to add that he does not share Krier’s views on Albert Speer (“I don’t think Speer was a very good architect”) nor his attitude to the contemporary condition. “I don’t agree with his analysis of the industrial and commercial and consumerist world, because I think that’s where we are. It doesn’t do any good to fight against what’s happening. But on the other hand,” he says, in a reversal which appeases all positions, “if people didn’t fight against what’s happening, we would never make any progress at all. Like [Claude-Nicolas] Ledoux, sitting around making books instead of helping on the Revolution.”
Krier’s contribution, according to Johnson, is as a theorist: “Not necessarily a designer that is caught in the actual web of building. There are all kinds of architects, like [Frederick] Kiesler, like Ledoux, Krier, that become leaders without necessarily building. What Krier’s done for drawing, for urban conceptualism, for the reappreciation of [Camillo] Sitte in modern times, is enough for one man to create. He’s created a whole school.” By way of illustration, Johnson says he just awarded first prize in the McDonald’s hamburger corporation’s student design competition to a scheme that “looked exactly like a Krier sketch.”
Tadao Ando’s work is another point of departure from Krier. “He’s one of the best of the Japanese. I wouldn’t want to go live in one of his houses, but I understand the line of design better than I do [Arata] Isozaki’s. It’s so chop-chop! I don’t even pretend to understand in Iso’s work what I conceive of as a lack of conviction. I like the building in LA, of course”—the “of course” a tag whose habitual use tends to undermine the phrase to which it is appended. Johnson is alluding to Isozaki’s new Museum of Contemporary Art, seen while on reconnaissance trips for his own speculative office development in downtown Los Angeles. “But I’ve never been to Japan, and I’ve never seen Ando’s work, so I shouldn’t talk about his either. Nor have I seen Léon’s—very symptomatic, don’t you think?”
I interject that Krier is supposed to be building at Seaside, the new town on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
“Oh no he is not!” comes the riposte. “That building has been ‘being built’ for five or ten years. But he seems to me to get to the essence of what cities are: the city square, the relation of dwellings to the country, to the street, and to the water. His redo of Washington: Boy! that is urban design. That’s the highest form of our art. A man like Krier can vastly help form-making by focusing attention on the urban scene. Maybe he wouldn’t be any good at making foundations,” he chuckles, “but then, he’s just a chicken.”
Krier’s influence is detectable in Johnson’s PortAmerica scheme, a mixed commercial and residential project on a site along the Potomac river outside Washington, DC, for the developer James T. Lewis. A waterfront structure shown in the renderings of Johnson’s scheme bears more than a passing resemblance to the pyramidal portico in Krier’s Roma Interrotta project of 1979. Johnson and Burgee’s proposed World Trade Center tower, a lynchpin of this scheme, will now be smaller than originally proposed, following criticism that it would overpower Washington’s monuments and might endanger National Airport traffic. But the project’s luxury “Georgian” residential quarter will probably go ahead much as planned, in a series of crescents that Johnson describes as “pretty classical. We picked the English street names out of fun. It’s very Brighton, very Bath. What’s wrong with that? No one’s ever done better.”
Talking of domestic architecture, I raise the question of New York’s grave housing crisis, its alarming homelessness statistics. What is Johnson’s position regarding the architect’s social responsibilities? How should the architect intervene to promote such concerns? His answer is unequivocal. “I’m not in politics,” he replies. “Whoever promises the most housing is the most interesting from a social point of view. We can’t design unless we’re told what to design. The architect is not the instigator of social policy. Maybe there are some that think they are,” he continues, his voice tinged with impatience, “but it doesn’t do them any good, because they never get it built. Never did, except in Vienna in its great socialist period. But that was a unique situation politically. We don’t have that situation. We don’t choose not to do workers’ housing. We’d like very much to. Since the aim of all architecture as such is habitation and cities.”
Johnson is temporarily stumped when asked which recent New York buildings he would recommend to an architectural pilgrim. “Let’s see,” he murmurs, gazing out of the window at the mêlée of International Style boxes in the vicinity. He enumerates the Helmsley Palace hotel, Edward Larrabee Barnes’s Equitable Center, and developer Harry Macklowe’s black glass wedge on West Fifty-Seventh Street, among others, before citing Helmut Jahn and Kohn Pedersen Fox as the two most interesting practitioners in the tall building category, “one that is not much regarded by architectural historians, but certainly by those of us that have to build them.” I. M. Pei’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is potentially “very good, sui generis, because of its inexorable battle of the space truss—using it on walls, ceilings, and everywhere.” But he declines a firm judgement, since he “just drove by” and hasn’t thoroughly inspected its interior. I venture that perhaps the Convention Center might be deemed a trifle retardataire. This innocent turn of phrase triggers a moment of unexpected reverie.
“Retardataire . . . ,” he echoes, savouring the term as one might a vintage cigar. “Haven’t heard that word for years. [Henry-] Russell Hitchcock and I used to apply it to most everything,” he chuckles with the knowing amusement of one who has lived to see the pendulum swing both ways. The aroma of the past not yet entirely dispelled, he concludes his list on a predictable note of loyalty. “I don’t think we have anything really striking in New York.” He demurs: “I mean, we have the Seagram Building. It’s the greatest. Still.”
Why then the change in his own work, and that of the “younger generation”? What accounts for the renewed attention to the skyline, to the sculptured massing of the tall building? “It is very interesting,” Johnson begins, only to entirely abdicate an explanation. “I have no idea what influenced me. Boredom, I’ve called it many times.” Jahn and KPF he diagnoses as “trying to express the skyscraper in different modes from the flat-roof-plop-plop-indistinguishable International Style.” How much are they following his lead, say at AT&T, in this respect? “I don’t know how much. But it’s in the air, dear.”
Is this the Zeitgeist creeping in? “Oh, I hope not,” he retorts, as if it was an idea whose time had passed. “I don’t think one needs Zeitgeists to explain changes in periods.”
As in earlier remarks, such as those recorded in Oppositions in 1977, Johnson explains his retrospective appreciation of precisely those architects whose work he’d implicitly disparaged in his famous polemic. “It wasn’t until we could shed the whole mystique of the International Style that we could start appreciating what Raymond Hood and especially Bertram Goodhue— my idol—were doing. At the time it seemed inevitable—the way the world was.” Only later could he acknowledge that “our International Style book was talking about the decade before, the decade that had already passed. You see, in the old days when Hitchcock and I wrote that book, we had blinders on.” His pitch rises theatrically, as if tangibly pointing out something that was obvious all along and only now was being confessed. “And quite rightly. How would you make a propaganda statement, a declaration of religious conviction, if you could see the good parts of the other side?”
But to make such a declaration, one must surely be aware of the opposition, to define one’s own position with respect to it.
“We knew perfectly well about Hood. Rockefeller Center was being built at that moment. But we said, ‘This is not the true revelation of the skeleton of the skyscraper.’ Only the Seagram Building—only really the PSFS [by Hood and William Lescaze in Philadelphia], which we exaggerated out of all proportion—had the right religion, if not the beautiful look of the Hood building.”
Louis Sullivan is another architect to whom Johnson has become converted. “I used to dislike Sullivan so strongly because he strengthened the corner by leaving out every other pier. Every other pier had a column behind it. That was very annoying to us purists, you can imagine.”
Johnson makes a revealing slip when asked why, in his view, the climate changed. “I put the blame on . . .” He corrects himself: “I mean, I give the credit to the preservation movement. But why did people all of a sudden want to save every damn church on every street corner in every city in the country? It’s the same impulse that makes people want to live in a house that looks like a house, the way a child draws one—whereas a Mies van der Rohe house doesn’t.
“I remember when I was first teaching at Yale, I put on the wall ‘You cannot not know history.’ You’re reacting to it whether you think so or not, so you might as well know what you’re doing. Back in the old days it was simple. There were rules. Mies believed you could teach architecture. There are no such illusions anymore.” Johnson maintains that architecture can’t be taught except “by example, by apprentice to genius, by finding a Goodhue or a Wright.”
This leads into precarious territory, the prickly issue of genius and the problems of its identification. “It manifests itself. Take the time of The Five. You have a guru talker, like Peter Eisenman; a type of genius, maybe, like [Michael] Graves; people like [Richard] Meier, a very clear-headed chappie. We don’t know which of them will be great. They didn’t think [Pablo] Picasso was very good—you can’t tell genius till later.” But genius alone cannot guarantee success; a capacity for adaptation is also essential. “Like an animal in the Darwinian system. Take [Henry Hobson] Richardson, a very great adaptor. He was the man who said: ‘What’s the first principle of architecture? Get the job.’ Now that is a very American remark, very consumerist. But, you see, getting a job takes quite a different mental apparatus from doing great design work. Richardson did both. Some people can, others can’t.”
Schools, he contends, are “not very helpful for learning architecture. I don’t know what they really are good for. I tell people not to go to school, but then my advice is to go just the same— the snazziest one you can get into, Big Five, Big Ten. When the church is running things, you make the right genuflections. These days you make them to the system which society has set up for you: the schools.”
He traces a genealogy of past masters whose education was necessarily less institutionalised than today. “Richardson, the greatest we have, went to the Beaux Arts since there were no schools in this country. Wright stayed in Wisconsin and went to engineering school for a while. Where did he get the idea he could be good? Working with the big man, Sullivan.” The latter, in turn, “went to the Beaux Arts and didn’t learn anything. He learned it all from [Frank] Furness. I often asked Mies why [Hendrik Petrus] Berlage was his god,” he continues, talking of his mentor. “I guess he didn’t get along with [Peter] Behrens. But that’s in the mists of history.”
Questioned on current projects, Johnson slips into the polished opacity of a press release. He describes the Times Square development, for Park Tower Realty, as “a developer’s submission to the city for a type of subsidy to enable business rents to be paid in an unfavourable area.” The office stopped work on the scheme some time ago, he says, pending discussions regarding the prospective merchandise mart/hotel site at one end of Forty-Second Street. Johnson lists the various interested parties and refers me to Park Tower Realty boss George Klein or Burgee for the urban planning and financial details. “Those I don’t know. That isn’t my part of the work.”
So what is?
“Design.”
This he does at New Canaan, making freehand sketches on yellow trace over the weekends and bringing them in for the sixty-strong office to hardline and develop. “Then I take them home and rework them.”
Johnson describes the evolution of the firm’s buildings: “It goes in sequence. The first building we did was what [Charles] Jencks would call ‘late Modern.’ Pennzoil [1974–76] had a Miesian skin, but we warped the entire building. Then we got more interested in skins as such—in different colours of glass and how they behave in reflection, and in history. Transco [in post-oil Houston, Texas] was next, and that’s very Goodhue. It looks black and white, but it’s actually all the same. Those lessons we learn as we go along.
“When it came to the Republic Bank [in downtown Houston], they absolutely refused to let us do a modern building. They didn’t want to look like the one across the street. It’s a new thing on the part of developers . . . like a circus! At first we were livid. We wanted a decent community of buildings based on the theme we’d started there.”
Republic’s stepped-down gables were the result of Johnson’s revised attitude to historical form, but were postrationalised by the fact that one of the site’s owners had an office in the Pennzoil building looking out across to where the new building would be. “We used that as an excuse. It wasn’t a real reason.” But he adds, by way of further justification, that “gables are very expressive forms against the sky.”
Johnson regards working with commercial clients as an inevitable interaction. “You can’t leave architects to do architecture unless it’s your grandmother’s house in California, with Sheetrock and studding.” This is just a gentle dig at the “wonderful free-style movement that’s going on around Frank Gehry” on the West Coast. “I don’t understand it, but I love the atmosphere in LA. That’s a different generation from mine, less business-oriented. It’s very admirable that they can be building that freely. But they’re all children,” he says benignly of architects such as Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, Frank Israel, and Frederick Fisher. Anyone younger than forty qualifies as a “child” in Johnson’s eyes.
Perhaps taking a cue from the Californians, he says the firm’s new approach is to mix materials: marble, granite, and terracotta. Johnson’s Los Angeles building—a speculative office downtown for developer Robert Maguire—promises to be “in bright colours. Mostly we’ve been monochromatic and monomaterial through the Crescent,” an office/retail/hotel scheme nearing completion in Dallas.
Commercial developers have changed, in Johnson’s view. “Fifty years ago at the Modern we considered them speculators. They were just people who bought land cheap and sold it dear. They built a building on the wind, as badly as they could, and shed it as quickly as they could. Now it’s quite the opposite. A man like Gerald Hines, he’s the leader of the pack, doesn’t want to get rid of his building right away. The aim now is to keep a building and make a name for it so it will rent for longer years. Even the people who were known as schlock are demanding quality.”
Whether a building will accrue this kind of reputation is a question of its “reliability, the excellence of the product,” a combination, says Johnson, of its external image and its internal functioning. But one thing he can’t abide: “We in this office are very much against engineers who make the floors so they bounce. To me that’s not good construction. I don’t know why. They’re not going to fall down, but it feels cheap. Bouncing floors!” he scoffs, as if it were a breach of etiquette, like entering one’s club without a jacket and tie. “All you do is make that much more steel,” ensnaring a couple of inches twixt two digits. “That kind of thing goes right through a building from the toilets to the lavabos to the front door.”
Asked whether he finds contemporary information technology a source of architectural inspiration, akin to that once provided by the machine, Johnson shakes his head. “You can’t see it,” he says, quickly qualifying by reference to Lloyd’s and its corresponding cost. “At AT&T they had information specialists crawling out of the walls. We left it to them. I’m sorry,” he repeats, unapologetically, “it doesn’t interest us. The only difference is that the floors have to be thicker.”
But as to the formal appeal of exposed technologies: “It’s too much work, too expensive. We’d rather put the money in the stone.”
Johnson mentions that he is due to make a “final statement before the architectural profession in June . . . a very formal speech, my philosophy.” Asked which writers have been formative influences, he says he likes “different critics for different reasons.” Explaining: “When I was young: [Lewis] Mumford, Hitchcock. Hitchcock affected me enormously, because we worked together on the first book. It was really his book. He was the leader. Then there was the generation of [Vincent] Scully. My favourite critic right now is Alan Colquhoun, he’s brilliant. I am amused by Jencks, but he doesn’t influence me in any way. Colin Amery I find acute, and I have great sympathy with Gavin Stamp, because he opened up the English Domestic school—absolutely fascinating and still not properly appreciated.
“American critics are so against me now, for obvious reasons,” he continues, retrieving a square-inch silver snuff box from his left trouser pocket. With long translucent fingers, he idly flips and snaps its monogrammed lid and says: “I’m not Mies van der Rohe. I’ve built too much, though we build very little compared to the big firms, like [Helmut] Jahn and KPF. That’s something they don’t like, so they take it out on me.”
How does he think he will be remembered, as an architect or as an art collector? “My collection is very minor,” he replies, “and besides, it’s all given away.” He declines to disclose his “little list” of possible successors to the late Arthur Drexler, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, and, as such, tenant of the post which he himself created.
“I certainly will be remembered as an architect, but only one kind,” Johnson reflects. “As a person that’s in the middle of the maelstrom, the whirligig that is architecture, rather than for my formal greatness. I’ll never be remembered for the Seagram Building. I’ll never be a ‘Great Architect,’ quote-unquote, capital G.”