9/3/2023 0 Comments Philip johnson houston![]() His father's early investment in ALCOA aluminum made Johnson a millionaire in his 20s. It’s a parametric and deconstructivist experiment, an ultimate demonstration of his author’s uttermost stylistic versatility.PHILIP CORTELYOU JOHNSON, FAIA (1906-2005) One of the most intriguing of his latest works is the Visitor’s pavilion in New Canaan (1995), one of the most recent additions to his estate. Philip Johnson dissolved his association with Burgee in 1991, but he continued his activity until the end of the millennium. It was mostly thanks to its crowing, a bewildering incomplete pediment, that the building became an icon of an age and a style. Interestingly enough, though, the most renowned of Johnson’s skyscrapers from the 1980s is a solid monolith in red granite stone: the l’ AT&T Building in New York (1984), also deeply postmodern. The experimentation on the curtain wall, a thread link between these and dozens of other high-rises, attained one of its most interesting achievement with Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral (1980), a multifaceted prism entirely clad in glass panel. The IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972), Pennzoil Place (1976), the Republic Bank Center and the Transco Tower (1981-1984), all in Houston, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company headquarters (1979-1984) and the sensual Lipstick Building in New York (1986), where they site their headquarters, stand out amongst the many skyscrapers that they built in this period. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Johnson and Burgee significantly contributed in the transformation of several large and medium-sized American cities’ downtown landscape. Meanwhile, his partnership with John Burgee, established in the late 1960s, marked the opening of his prolific postmodern season. The masterplan for the Lincoln Center, an art and cultural district in New York’s West Side, as well as its State Theatre (1964), can be considered as an arriving point of Philip Johnson’s modernist period. Johnson collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on the project for New York’s Seagram Building (1958), where he realized the interiors of the Four Seasons Restaurant (1959). ![]() ![]() A comparison between the two buildings helps to understand the distance between the European “master”, a spokesperson for an ethically and socially oriented prewar Modernism, and the American pupil, embracing its aestethics more than its utopian momentum. ![]() The Glass House clearly drew inspiration from the German architect’s coeval Farnsworth House (1945-1951), though introducing several variations to its model. Philip Johnson’s relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was crucial in this phase of his career. A few years later he designed the most significant of his modernist works: the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949), the first of a long series of constructions that he realized within the same estate. In 1941 he enrolled at the Harvard School of Design, where he counted Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius amongst his masters. In the 1920s he studied both philosophy and law in Harvard, but towards the end of the decade his encounter with Russel-Hitchcock steered his interests towards architecture. Philip Johnson started his career as a designer at a relatively advanced age. ![]()
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