Philip Johnson

1906–2005 · American · 18 buildings on the wall

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) was an American architect and curator whose long career ran from modernism to postmodernism. In 1932 he and Henry-Russell Hitchcock staged the Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition of modern architecture, which gave the International Style its name, and in 1979 he became the first winner of the Pritzker Prize. In the 1930s he openly praised Hitler and the Nazi Party and voiced antisemitic views, which he renounced when the United States entered the Second World War.

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His own Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949), a glass room in the landscape, was openly influenced by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, and he later worked with Mies on the Seagram Building in New York. From 1967 he worked in partnership with John Burgee. The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980) wraps a 2,248-seat church in 10,000 panes of reflective glass. The AT&T Building (550 Madison Avenue) in New York (1984), a pink granite tower topped by a broken pediment, became a landmark of postmodernism. Philip Johnson's buildings let students follow the main shifts in 20th-century architecture through the work of one architect.

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