NEW YORK — The adage, “When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt” generally stands on its own. But as unlikely as it seems, the late architect Philip Johnson managed to speak for himself at an event held in his honor last week, thanks to the airing of a 1965 CBS program about him.
In a move that he no doubt would have been among the first to chuckle at, Johnson’s televised analysis of his career managed to upstage the trio of architectural experts who discussed his work at length Feb. 16 at the Museum of Modern Art. The event, “Philip Johnson: Portraits,” was a curtain-raiser for a Yale University symposium about Johnson, who died last year at the age of 98.
In 1965 when the then less-known architect taped “This Is Philip Johnson” for a now defunct CBS News program that centered on a-day-in-the-life reporting, he never could have imagined his insight would have such staying power. Now highly regarded as an architectural visionary, Johnson seemed to have a fast grasp of the societal changes underfoot in the Sixties, and didn’t hold back about his disapproval of people being stricken with “telephonitis” or “microclimatology.”
The man who once famously said, “Architecture is the art of how to waste space,” became the first director of MoMA’s architecture department in 1946, and later a trustee. He helped Americans get acquainted with European modernism, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. While many in last week’s audience knew he had a hand in the MoMA’s original addition, the Seagram Building, the AT&T Building, the New York Pavilion at the World’s Fair, the Glass House and Chapel on Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas, most were not as familiar with his rapid-fire speech, razor-sharp wit and sheer candor.
At one point during the CBS program, Johnson said, “One never talks about mistakes. There are some architects that do. But every time they do, I write them a letter and say, ‘Don’t admit it.'”
Despite that policy, the bespectacled architect faced his share of highs and lows. His father’s gift of Alcoa stock made him financially set and allowed him to fund his directorship at MoMA. But in 1932 after his successful co-authorship of the museum’s exhibition catalogue “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” Johnson left the museum.
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During his recap of Johnson’s work at MoMA, Terence Riley, the Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design, explained why Johnson moved on. When asked how he could leave the institution that had given his life such direction, the architect once said, “My father thought I was a momma’s boy, which I was. But I never got a paycheck from the museum, so I felt I had to do something else.”
After leaving the museum, Johnson spent eight years promoting fascism and even tried to team up with Louisiana governor Huey Long. The Cleveland-born Johnson sought public office in his home state and later tried to start an American fascist party. By the mid-Forties — following an FBI investigation — he stopped supporting Nazis and went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to study under architect Marcel Breuer. While Johnson did not delve into his political pursuits in “This Is Philip Johnson,” he did examine his profession. Early on in the program, he quipped, “I became an architect because I wasn’t a very good critic.”
Routinely asked by architectural students for direction, Johnson said, “I always give them the advice they can’t take. ‘Leave school.'” Later in the program he touches upon one of the challenges of the working world. “It’s very difficult to work with people. As far as I’m concerned, it’s totally impossible.”
In the CBS program, John Manley, an associate of the architect since 1955, described how Johnson’s taste evolved over the years. On one project Johnson suggested, “Let’s use teak. It’s cheaper.” But by the time they were working on the New York State Theater, home to the New York City Opera and New York City Ballet, Johnson had kicked things up even higher. Manley recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s use gold. It’s cheaper.'”
Johnson weighed in on urban planning: “I don’t believe in city planning. I believe in city design. Hire an architect and say, ‘Build this.'”
His glass house in New Canaan, Conn. — a design that some say mirrored Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House — triggered some of his livelier comments on the CBS program and apparently with strangers, too. “If you built one for normal people,” said Johnson, pausing and then laughing at his choice of an adjective, “you would need to give them the sense of enclosure to protect them from the yapping of their children and their dog.”
Explaining how he could live in such an exposed environment was something Johnson had to deal with all the time. “Nobody but nobody has come up and looked in the windows. In a glass house, anyone who walks up to your house thinks you’re looking at them.”
Despite their curiosity about the perils of getting dressed in a glass house or the potential for Peeping Toms, “I tell them I like it very much.” When a woman told him she could never live there, he offered, “Madame, I never asked you to. The answer is often too easy.”
And for all those relentless questions about what he does indoors to deal with the strength of the afternoon sun, Johnson said he simply walks outside to sit in the garden.
But he did not want to be mistaken for an outdoorsy kind of guy. “I hate sports. The only time I think about sports is when I’m so delighted that I don’t have to do it.”
During his presentation, Riley noted that even late in life, Johnson was limber and charging forward. He recalled walking crosstown on Lexington Avenue and “talking about this, that and the other thing,” when Johnson, 88 at the time, unexpectedly broke into a light jog. Riley asked about the urgency and the architect responded, “Well, if you walk, you’ll hit a red light on Park Avenue.”