There have been few personalities in architecture as vexing, complex, and influential as Philip Johnson. Born in Cleveland in 1906, Johnson was heir to a vast stock-market fortune. From his education at Harvard to the height of his career, designing skyscrapers for some of America's largest companies, Johnson was aided by both his money and his vast social circle, becoming one of the most powerful and polarizing men in the history of the field. His architectural expression underwent dramatic stylistic transformations, from a consummate Miesian modernism to a polemical postmodernism; in the 1970s and '80s, Johnson's corporate skyscrapers seemed to pop up in every major city in America, for better or for worse.
“Johnson was a historicist who championed the new, an elitist who was a populist, a genius without originality, a gossip who was an intellectual, an opportunist who was a utopian, a man of endless generosity who could be casually, crushingly cruel.” This is how Mark Lamster's new book, The Man in the Glass House, introduces its subject, setting the stage for a biography that not only raises the bar for writing with nuance about difficult historical figures, but also offers an eye-opening glimpse into architecture's transformation from a staid and upwardly mobile white-collar profession to the deeply unequal and star-studded spectacle it is today. Glass House tackles the myths and enigmas of Johnson's life, and of a supposedly egalitarian architectural culture, in one fell swoop. As Lamster concisely puts it: “We cannot not know Philip Johnson's history because it is our history—like it or not.”
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