People who live in glass houses…
Goodbye, Philip Johnson.
He was a man I would love to have met, someone who not only was on the cutting edge of architecture for longer than many of us get to be on this earth, but who was also a fascinating human being, one with a deep understanding of the human condition, an amazing candor about the profession of architecture, and an appreciation of students and young architects as the future of the field.
He was born in 1906, just a few years after Frank Lloyd Wright built the Martin House complex and just near the end of the Victorian period of American architecture. He died on the 26th of January, at the age of 98.
Architectural Record article
The Late, Great, and Colorful Philip Johnson
Still the Bad Boy, Philip Johnson Looks Ahead at Age 95
And, an alternate viewpoint from Slate:
Lived in Glass Houses, Threw Stones
In response to the article at Slate, which essentially bemoans the wandering of Johnson into the terrain of Postmodernism, I have a few things to say.
I respect Johnson a great deal for his willingness to change and find the new. If art does not stay active and progressive, it stagnates, and Johnson realized this. The criticism from Slate that “in less capable hands, Postmodernism quickly degenerated into a facile and repetitive pastiche of old and new,” is certainly true; but this does not invalidate the work of those who were capable. For example, the American saltbox has been ripped off by developers in countless banal suburban tracts, but this does not take away from the power of the real thing anchored on the New England coast.
Johnson valued change. He valued the young. And while Postmodernism was not the greatest thing that ever happened to architecture, it probably needed to happen and was inevitable, and Johnson was fortunate to have lived long enough to see the next generation of architects after postmodernists such as Graves and Stern. He supported such young architects as Rem Koolhaas, for example. Koolhaas is one of the greatest architectural minds of our time, and his Seattle Public Library is the best building built since Bilbao, in my opinion. You must go. It is truly a stunning space.
Yes, valuing change is inherently risky. But it is only in this risk that exciting art occurs. Thanks, Philip Johnson, for continually pushing architecture forward and embracing change. The built environment is better for it. You knew you were not as good as Mies or Corbusier, but you found your strengths and capitalized on them, and in the process won the respect and friendship of much of the architectural world. You used the capital you earned to support and advance others who you believed in, and many owe their success to your faith in their abilities and ideas.
As much as you hated the idea of your mantle passing onto others, I truly hope that there will be those in the profession who will be as passionate as you were in embracing the young and supporting my generation as we seek to take architecture to a new place in the next thirty (or sixty, if we’re as fortunate as you were) years of our careers.