As a young architecture writer I resolved to steer clear of all enterprises that involved Philip Johnson, convinced that this charming cultural corrupter, as I saw him, was the very antithesis of my socially conscious role model, the architecture critic Lewis Mumford. Avoidance of Johnson, however, was easier imagined than accomplished, since the first decades of my career—the 1970s and 1980s—coincided with the professional apogee of the man then reflexively called “the dean of American architects” or, less reverently, “the Godfather of American architecture” because of the powerful but largely hidden influence he wielded, not unlike that of a mafia don. He decided who got reputation-making exhibitions, conferred architectural commissions awarded through the many juries he served on, and distributed lesser jobs he himself was offered but uninterested in to grateful younger practitioners.
Nothing says more about Johnson's high status at that time than his being named the first recipient of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1979, because, as its benefactors made known, he alone among all living master builders possessed the gravitas needed to establish the award's international prestige. Yet also alive at the time were such greatly superior architects as Luis Barragán, who went on to win the Pritzker, and Marcel Breuer and Josep Lluís Sert, who did not.
Try as I might, I couldn't wholly avoid this maestro of manipulation, who insinuated himself into seemingly every aspect of the New York art and architecture scene, particularly at the influential Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (the avant-garde think tank he helped fund) and the Museum of Modern Art, whose department of architecture and design he had founded in 1932; its chief curator customarily served at his pleasure, and Johnson remained a MoMA trustee throughout the last five decades of his life. But as Mark Lamster notes in his searing yet judicious new biography, The Man in the Glass House, Johnson excelled at disarming his detractors through self-deprecating responses to even their harshest criticism.
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