Phillip Johnson
Phillip Johnson is dead and for the most part the public will glance at the page-one notice, acknowledge that 96 years is a long life and turn to the sports section. Such is the minor fame of major architects in a fame-glutted society.
Johnson, it seems to me, had several attributes that allowed him to move easily and powerfully through the world of architecture . . . and a dizzying, spiteful, jealous and egotistical world it is: he was independently wealthy, intellectually curious, smart, enormously enthusiastic and willing. A good many contemporaries shared the first qualities but were lacking in the last . . . willingness is not the same as self-promotional, it shrugs off the consequence of being wrong and there’s great strength in that.
Johnson was famously politically wrong and it says a good deal about his charm and intellect that, being so wrong about Hitler, he was able to move on to collaborate and learn from Mies van der Rohe and then move on again. Architects are famous for n…