Philip Johnson turns ninety on July 8, and the occasion is being celebrated here in New York as if it were the birthday of the Queen Mother, which in a way it is. Magazines and broadcasters have duly paid court: before we met, he appeared on the cover of Out, America’s best-selling gay and lesbian magazine, in connection with his proposal for the world’s largest gay church; the New Yorker carried a Talk of the Town item by Dodie Kazanjian; and Peter Blake interviewed him in New York magazine. At a huge fund-raising garden party held in his honour at the Museum of Modern Art, in June, guests all wore paper spectacles in the shape of his trademark circular black glasses.
Having first interviewed him nearly ten years ago for Blueprint (“Now We Are Eighty,” March 1987, pages 81–96 in this volume), I decide not to ask Philip the obvious questions about the current state of architecture, his or anyone else’s. Instead, on the principle that the older one gets, the clearer one’s recollection of long-ago experiences, I ask him to recall a particularly vivid memory from each decade of his life. Still spry, if on the thin side, he looks off into the distance and answers, in a sometimes barely audible voice. “My vocal chords are shriveling,” he explains.
“Fräulein Dorner, she’s the key figure that stands out in that decade,” he begins, launching gamely into the years 1906–16. “A very stern Prussian: I didn’t like her. She kept a portrait of Wilhelm, the Kaiser, in the closet. And she showed it to us kids. Mother didn’t like newborn children,” he says. So while their parents took off for Europe, he and his sisters, Jeannette and Theodate (still alive and kicking at ninety-four and eighty-nine, respectively), were left in the care of their governess, who taught them uplifting verses. In fluent and rapid German, Philip recites “Ich bin klein, Mein Herz ist rein . . .”
I am small,
my heart is pure,
no one can see in there
but God himself.
Next, Philip remembers his teens. “Ah: the discovery of sex! Falling in love, with a girl, Talita Jova, at fifteen.” A classmate of his sister’s, Jova was “to me a perfect beauty. Oh God, that’s a nice age to be in love, isn’t it? It’s so much purer. Actually never went to bed. Too young. I went to Harvard and that was the end of that.”
We jump to the year 1919, when the Johnson family moved to Paris. His father was working on a commission headed by Henry Morgenthau investigating Jewish pogroms in Poland. “He couldn’t find any,” Philip remarks chirpily. To keep himself occupied, the young Philip set himself the task of visiting every metro station, going to the end of every line. “That’s how I discovered my favourite part: the Buttes-Chaumont, in the northeast, with fake mountains, towers, and bridges. It would look kind of small to me probably these days, but then it was very dramatic.”
The year 1919 was also when he first visited Chartres Cathedral. “That was when I first realised I had to become an architect: it was a personal epiphany. I was emotional and teary, all the proper things. I remember the glass was gone because of the war: they’d taken it down and put it in hiding. They had oiled paper, khaki-coloured, instead of the stained glass in the windows.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s sort of like sex: like any excitement when you’re young, it’s blown up to enormous proportions.”
A second epiphany occurred in 1928 when he saw the Parthenon. “Tears, the works,” he recalls. “You know, that’s the best way to judge how people like a building: if their eyes glisten. If they don’t, they’re either not visual or they hate your building or something. The only building I’ve made people do that with is my new visitor centre”—the gatehouse at his estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, designed, he claims, in the manner of expressionist Hermann Finsterlin.
So it’s an emotional reaction he’s after?
“Is there any other?” Philip scoffs. “I always thought architecture was an art that you got excited about. That’s what Mother always said.”
Travelling around European museums with Mother, whose favourite painter was Duccio, Philip acquired an early penchant for Poussin (“I’m a Romantic, and all Romantics like Poussin”) before developing a more abstract taste for Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Then there’s Caspar David Friedrich, whom he discovered one summer in Berlin. “That’s the only painter I go to see if I’m forced to go to that dreadful city. It was destroyed in the war, and now instead of finishing it off with a few well-placed bombs, they’re talking about redoing it.” He happens to be doing a “huge building” there, but nonetheless vouchsafes that “I don’t think you can use capitalism to rebuild cities. The impulse has to be a passion for the city as it was for the Greeks or in the Middle Ages. You can’t re-plan cities based on the idea that everybody’s going to make money on them.”
We skip lightly over the early years at Harvard, where he studied philosophy, found his fellow students “absolutely stupid,” and preferred to fraternise with his tutors, becoming part of the coterie around Alfred North Whitehead. “I became an escort for Mrs. Whitehead. Drove her around, country driving. We talked and she smoked.” More than that? “No,” he says, emphatically. “She was five times my age. I was homosexual by then.”
By age twenty-four, Johnson was working at the Museum of Modern Art. “Is 1930 in my third decade?” he asks, eager to keep things in chronological order. That year saw him travelling in Germany with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “looking for modern architecture” that they would shortly canonise as the International Style. Thanks to their MoMA exhibition of 1932 and its accompanying book, we know full well which buildings they discovered. But what was the vehicle of this epic journey?
“A Cord, a front-wheel drive. Very, very long, low, and racy. Green. It was the car: everybody screamed and yelled as we drove through. I love to drive fast. The Cord Company: gone, long ago.” Except for one gigantic silver Packard 12, it’s been “nothing but Mercedes since then.”
And his passenger? “Very strange. But Russell was a great architecture critic: he knew a building from a mile away. I had no eyes and had no reason to. I’d never taken a course in architecture and I still haven’t any history. Hitchcock refused to take photographs. He said, ‘It’ll keep you from looking at the building.’ So I didn’t take photographs. I had the architects we stopped to see send them on.”
Mies’s Tugendhat House, in Brno, “was one of the great events” but he can’t quite recall when he first saw it. “I can’t tell, because I spent so many other trips with Mies. With him, I remember food. There were two great restaurants in Berlin. We would have these very expensive, deee licious meals. I had more money than him. More money? He didn’t have any. He was a gourmet. He would just shut up and eat. And he had a real knowledge of wine. Whatever he drank, he drank to excess. He was no intellectual.” So what was Mies’s favourite dish? “ Gaense Leberpastete mit Zwiebel,” says Philip, savouring the memory. Goose liver pâté with onions.
We delicately reconnoitre the ugly period, documented in detail in Franz Schulze’s 1994 biography, of Philip’s involvement in right-wing politics in America. Then there was his time in Nazi Germany. How does he feel about that period of his life?
“Oh very much ashamed. Because I went to Nuremberg and listened to Hitler, who was a great speaker. But he weren’t no Huey Long, no populist. He was a dictator. A nasty, horrid man. Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune said, ‘Don’t you know you’re making an ass of yourself? Get out!’ So I took the next plane.”
Didn’t he realise that himself?
“Not enough. It wasn’t clear to me. I think Nuremberg was the most febrilely exciting day I ever had. Ten, twenty, fifty thousand people yelling in the streets. I couldn’t understand the speeches, and I wasn’t there because of the German boys, in spite of what people think. It was feverish, like the way Americans feel about sports. I was there for one day, and I never saw it with the lights.”
Having suffered a major angioplasty a week before his eightieth birthday, Philip hardly expected to last another whole decade, but after a year of recovery, he gradually regained strength. “Now I’m perfect. The only thing now is I fall down, lose my balance. I was going to quit when I was a hundred, but now I realise that I can’t possibly. I’m thinking of too many things. The gatehouse gave me a new kick. I’m proud of doing viscerally exciting new buildings. I’m doing sculptural building now, only,” he says, as if announcing the look for the new season.
He’s busy with numerous commissions, including the new gay and lesbian community church in Dallas, the nearest thing on the drawing boards right now to a cathedral, which is the kind of project he told Peter Blake he’d most like to design. “You can’t get an emotional enough building unless it has an impetus that I don’t happen to share,” he explains, somewhat paradoxically. “I’m not religious, but it doesn’t make any difference. I can work on a shape that I think is exciting. The gatehouse is very churchlike.” I’m reminded of the verses that Fräulein Dorner engraved upon his heart.
After an hour and a half of chatting, it is 4:00 p.m. and time for him to leave his office. We have only made it somewhere into his third decade, so we agree to reconvene in 2006. The rest, as they say, is history.