Chapter 7: Philip Johnson

In a House of Glass

Philip Johnson
1906-2005

David Whitney sprinted across the Rhode Island School of Design campus to a lecture hall at the adjacent Brown University in Providence. In the fall of 1960, not many chances came along for an aspiring 21-year-old designer to listen to one of the most preeminent architects in the United States. The thought of being in the same room with Philip Johnson -- the mastermind behind the infamous “Glass House” -- was the thrill of a lifetime for the Massachusetts native.

When Philip -- wearing his trademark, black-rimmed eyeglasses -- finished his speech, David approached the 54-year-old master at the lecturn. A quick introduction segued to his bold request to tour the one-of-a-kind house that Philip built for himself. Flattered and bemused, the legendary architect acquiesced. David found himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, the following weekend, with his hero escorting him on a guided walk-through of the house. Their time spent together marked the beginning of an unlikely romance between an infatuated college senior and a mentor 33 years older, whose path to international acclaim began in Northeast Ohio.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the third of four children of the gregarious lawyer, Homer Hosea, and his refined, sophisticated third wife, Louise Pope Johnson. He could trace his Ohio roots to a 3,000-acre farm on Main Street in the rural Huron County village of New London, where his paternal great -grandfather, the Massachusetts-born Hosea Townsend, settled in the Western Reserve in 1815. The family also boasted of its genealogical link to the 17th-century surveyor Jacques Cortelyou, who, in 1660, drew the first street plan of New Amsterdam, which later was renamed New York City. Louise, meanwhile, was born into a well-to-do Cleveland family that built its wealth in the shipping industry.

Homer, who was born in 1862 at Townsend Farms, studied classical literature for two years at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Two years later, he transferred closer to home to Oberlin College in Lorain County, where he pledged membership in the Phi Delta fraternity and graduated in 1885. He earned his law degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1888, the same year he married his college sweetheart, Janet “Nettie” Whitcomb, who would die of tuberculosis a couple of years later. He walked down the aisle a second time in 1896 to marry Elizabeth Gertrude Beggs, who succumbed to pneumonia just two months later while the couple honeymooned in Europe. The twice-widowed Homer’s third marriage, to Louise, in 1901 lasted nearly 56 years until her death at 89 years old on November 9, 1957.

The Johnsons quickly started a family with the birth of their oldest child, Jeanette, on June 26, 1902. Their first son, Alfred Pope, died of mastoiditis -- or a middle-ear infection -- soon after he was born on June 18, 1903. Philip arrived three years later, with a second daughter, Theodate, completing the brood on August 13, 1907. Like most upper-class women raised in the Victorian Age, Louise, an 1891 Wellesley College graduate, made sure her children were well-versed in literature, fine arts and European architecture. Her first cousin, Theodate Pope Riddle, undoubtedly helped educate the kids in the last discipline since she was one of the country’s first female architects, concentrating on the design of country homes and private schools on the Eastern seaboard.

Homer and Louise reared their family in a spacious Tudor-style home at 2171 Overlook Rd. in Cleveland Heights, where a German-born governess, Emma Saudr, taught the children her native language. A couple of maids, Augusta Erieson and Elizabeth Eugstrom, also waited on the kids, while Homer and his unrelated Oberlin College classmate, Blake Johnson, managed a thriving law firm that specialized in trusts and wills in the Union Trust Building in downtown Cleveland. Homer also joined several country clubs to pad his client base. “He liked to claim that he got more new legal business in the locker rooms than he ever could sitting in his office," Philip’s 98-year-old sister, Jeanette Johnson Dempsey, told biographer Frank D. Welch in 2000.

Away from the office, Homer established himself as a civic leader. He sat on the boards of directors of both the Cleveland School of Art and Chamber of Commerce. He taught classes on constitutional law at Western Reserve University from 1892 to 1917. Between 1900 and 1924, he was a trustee at his alma mater, Oberlin College, where he was instrumental in helping to develop the school’s massive art collection and secure financing to build its glorious concert hall, Finney Chapel. Meantime, Louise kept busy with her volunteerism on the advisory council of the Cleveland Museum of Art and as a member of the Cleveland Women’s City Club.

Every weekend during the summer, the clan made the 60-mile trek westward to Townsend Farms and its two-story, white-frame main house. The children passed away the time with frequent fishing and horseback-riding expeditions. The family also wintered in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where Homer golfed and Louise gave art lectures to the community. And they periodically sailed to Europe, where Louise introduced her children to fine living and dining in France, Germany and Switzerland. Philip, in particular, proved to be gifted in the arts, a trait that his mother relished. “On Sundays in Cleveland, Mother would conduct slide-illustrated seminars on art and architecture, including the modern stuff, for Philip, Theodate and me in the living room,” Jeanette told Welch. “Philip just soaked it up. His aptitude for the arts was pretty clear to Mother very early.”

In 1924, a year after Philip graduated as the salutatorian of his class from the exclusive all-boys’ college-prep academy, the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, Homer surprised his three surviving children with early inheritances. He bequeathed prime downtown Cleveland real estate to each of his daughters. Philip scored a substantial number of shares of stock in the Pittsburgh-based Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, a company that his dad’s college buddy, Charles Martin Hall, founded in 1888 after discovering the process to smelt aluminum. Homer’s investment in the business made Philip an instant millionaire nearly 40 years later.

But the roaring ‘20s was a decade of uncertainty and restlessness for Philip. He floated in and out of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, blaming his homosexuality on a nervous breakdown in 1925 that delayed him from earning a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy until he was nearly 24 years old. When he wasn’t enrolled in classes, he traveled to Germany, where he met acclaimed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was hailed as a pioneer in architectural modernism. The formidable designer’s expertise influenced and challenged him for the rest of his life. While criss-crossing Europe, Philip also experimented with gay sex. Years later, he joked that, aside from the German lessons from his governess as a youngster, he learned the language “in the horizontal method” from native men.

After graduation, Philip immediately accepted a job as the first director of the Department of Architecture at New York’s two-year-old Museum of Modern Art, an institution that trumpeted its holdings as “the art of now.” In the position, he helped organize the 1932 exhibit, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, featuring the American debuts of the latest architectural-design trends by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Frank Lloyd Wright made waves prior to the display’s opening, when he withdrew from the line-up because he didn’t think the museum would more prominently showcase him among the other designers.

Philip returned to Germany that summer to vacation with Helen Applegate Read, a New York art critic who arranged for the pair to attend a Nazi Party rally in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, where dictator Adolf Hitler spoke about national socialism and anti-Semitism. To say the gathering impressed Philip was an understatement. The precise marching drills of the German military’s finest-looking soldiers alone was enough to make him swoon. His Jewish friends in New York thought “his wires got crossed,” when he returned to the States.

Philip’s obsession with the Nazi movement prompted his abrupt resignation from MoMA shortly before Christmas of 1934. He and Harvard chum Alan Blackburn then began to organize the Young Nationalist Party, a right-wing political organization that espoused radical populist policies. The men drove to Louisiana to gain support from Democratic U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, a “down-home fascist” whose Share the Wealth campaign that year lobbied for financial equality for all Americans in order to fend off poverty and crime. “It was the depths of the Depression,” Philip recalled decades later. “The country was going to pot, and no one could do anything about it. (President Franklin Roosevelt) seemed powerless. People were hungry on the streets of the richest country in the world. It was absurd.”

But when Long refused to meet with the wannabe activists, Blackburn returned to New York, while Philip retreated to Townsend Farms. He established residency, won a seat on New London’s parks board and helped set up a dairy farmers’ strike to protest the wholesale cost of milk. He also contemplated a run for Ohio’s House of Representatives but quickly nixed the idea. Consequently, he and Blackburn agreed to disband their party.

Philip briefly returned to Germany in 1939 as a journalist to cover such newsworthy events as the annual Nuremburg Rally, where the Nazis convened to bolster their party’s ego. He also witnessed the German-Soviet-Slovak invasion of Poland in 1939 that marked the start of the British-French invasion of Germany and World War II. “The German green uniforms made the place look happy and gay,“ he dispatched from the frontlines to some of America’s socialist newspapers. “There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being burned. It was a stirring spectacle.”

The sight also left Philip both upset and disgusted. He returned to the U.S. and immediately signed up for a two-year enlistment in the Army. While his stint was uneventful, it helped to change his outlook on Hitler’s Holocaustic mission for a “New-World order.” “I have no excuse. Such utter stupidity,” he famously said years later about his attraction to Nazi Germany. “I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

Colleagues eventually forgave Philip for the pro-socialist viewpoints for which he argued during the latter half of the ‘30s. He, however, never apologized for the beliefs he held at the time. “When Johnson did come to -- seeing Hitler for the evil he was -- he quickly turned away from politics,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture, in a 2005 essay for the trade journal, "Architectural Record." “Johnson’s misadventures of the 1930s need to be seen against a broader canvas of the times and in light of all sorts of demons that plagued him then.”

Coming to his senses, Philip enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1941 to study the career that would make him world-renowned: architecture. While renting a two-story house on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, he worked on his dissertation for a master’s degree by designing and building a home for himself on Ash Street. Completed the following year, the house attracted undergraduate architecture majors, such as I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph and Edward Larrabee Barnes, to inspect and marvel at the wood-framed structure with one wall made of glass into which many guests crashed. “Damn fool!” Philip grumbled every time it happened. He sold the house in 1943 for $24,000, the same amount of money he invested from his personal wealth to build it.

Philip went back to New York and his position at MoMA in 1946 after a post-Harvard stint with the Army Corps of Engineers. His return resurrected his quest to introduce new architectural styles to the general public. “We all agreed, all us young architects, that our so-called modern architecture was too old and icy and flat,” he said on the day after his 90th birthday in 1996 to correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault on the PBS program, "Newshour With Jim Lehrer." “Frank Lloyd Wright used to call it flat-chested -- no breasts -- because it was all sheer and smooth with glass up to the top, and the top cut off, and it didn’t seem human.”

Philip and grad-school classmate Landes Gores set up a private practice the following year in a small apartment on Lexington Avenue, where they dedicated their work to designs of private homes. But they butted heads with the law four years later, when New York authorities discovered the pair conducting business without a state-approved license. So the partners packed up their office belongings and relocated to a two-story storefront 100 miles across the Connecticut border in the reserved, WASP-ish hamlet of New Canaan in Fairfield County. Philip then set out to construct his own home on the one and only parcel of land a real-estate agent showed him: a five-acre plot on a bluff that overlooked a pond at 199 Elm St.

Nearly 80 schematic designs later, Philip selected a plan that featured a 1,700-square-foot glass house that was supported by eight steel beams and sat on a brick platform. In the blueprints, he devoted space to a brick guest house that would face the main structure 30 yards away. His plans also called for a long, winding driveway that led to the roadside, where a stone wall would hide the two structures from view. After nearly a year of construction, Philip moved into his house of glass on New Year’s Eve of 1948.

Applauded for its minimal structure and elements of geometry, proportion, reflection and transparency, the main house was anchored by a centrally placed living room, in which its only furnishings included a chaise lounge, glass coffee table, a couple of deck chairs and a single painting. The corner bedroom -- separated from the rest of the house by a six-foot-high wall of walnut cabinetry -- took up about a third of the living space. In another corner, the kitchen contained a simple L-shaped counter, with all the appliances stored in cupboards below. The dining room occupied a third corner. The only encased part of the house was the aquamarine-tiled bathroom that was shielded by a floor-to-ceiling brick cylinder.

To armchair architects in 1949, the aptly named Glass House represented a new dimension in design. Philip allowed it to be on a fundraising tour of seven homes in the neighborhood that spring. House & Garden magazine even devoted a 10-page spread of it in its October issue. And for years afterward, its owner invited the country’s leading architects, artists and designers of the latter half of the 20th century to convene at the house for an ongoing series of intellectual conversations, or “salons.” The Johnson name became synonymous with ingenuity and innovation for which new clients suddenly clamored.

One of Philip’s first projects of 1950 took him to Houston, where banker John de Menil and his socialite wife, Dominique, hired him to conceive a blueprint for Texas’ first-ever “International-style” residence in which the couple would live. Popular in early-20th century Europe, the contemporary design featured a form-follows-function flair. And Philip was more than happy to oblige. “I like Houston. It's the last, great 19th-century city,” he told a Financial Times reporter in June of 1989. “Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.”

While he designed several homes throughout the United States, Philip simultaneously oversaw construction of MoMA’s west wing in 1951 and sculpture garden in 1953. He then resigned again from the museum a year later to focus on the design of commercial properties.

To silently atone for his actions in Germany two decades beforehand, Philip donated his expertise in 1956 to overhaul Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Port Chester, New York. He then teamed with Mies van der Rohe in 1956 to construct a 515-foot-tall, bronze-and-glass skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan. Two years later, the 39-story Seagram Building at 375 Park Ave. was unveiled as the headquarters of the Canadian distiller, Joseph Seagram & Sons.

The project, which "The New York Times" proclaimed as the most important building of the 20th century, was a study in corporate modernism. It also drummed up more commissions for Philip, from the 1959 design of the Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram to the 1960 expansion of St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, D.C. To Philip, architecture mirrored art. And sometimes, it fostered frustration. “The painters have every advantage over us today,“ he wrote in his contribution to the 1966 book, Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America. “Besides being able to tear up their failures -- we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough -- their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life -- for an artist.”

Philip savored any chance to pass on words of wisdom to young, budding architects. Nearly every day at lunchtime, Four Seasons patrons saw him hold court at a corner table in the restaurant’s Grill Room, where he regaled students with war stories from the architectural front. He also continued to work the lecture circuit on college campuses, where, after a 1960 speech at Brown University, he met a college senior who would become his longtime life partner.

David Grainger Whitney was born in March of 1939, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The son of a prominent banker, he once acerbically told a reporter that his family was “of absolutely no interest whatsoever.” His sardonic wit, coupled with a zeal for art and architecture, immediately captivated Philip. Not long after their first rendezvous at the Glass House, David commuted between Providence and New Canaan to spend every weekend with his much older paramour while he finished his senior year at the Rhode Island School of Design. “I was just legal,” he quipped about the 33-year age difference between him and Philip.

David graduated in late spring of 1961, and Philip pulled strings to get his lover a job as a MoMA curator. David also organized exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a well-regarded institution founded in 1918 by sculptor and art doyenne Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to whom he was not related. David quickly made an impression with the museum’s members, who flocked to art displays he organized of pieces by pop-art icons like Cy Twombley and Jasper Johns. Andy Warhol also forged a friendship with both Philip and David that remained tight until the artist’s sudden death on February 22, 1987, after a routine gallbladder operation.

Tongues also wagged over David’s appearances at “happenings,” a see-and-be-seen series of social events at which New York’s elite on the Upper East Side converged to scrutinize art-exhibit debuts in the oddest places. There was the time in May of 1965 at the Claes Oldenburg display, "Washes," at Al Roon’s Health Club. Located in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel, the spa featured a swimming pool, where David proceeded to shed his business suit and walk naked past the guests. “Everybody wanted to be a star,” he said afterward. “So I decided to upstage them and take my clothes off.”

Meanwhile, Philip and his new “Mrs. Johnson,” as he jokingly nicknamed David, maintained an East 52nd Street townhouse that originally had been designed as a guest house for philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III. And in New Canaan, they began to buy land abutting the Glass House, where they added a lake pavilion in 1962 and a painting gallery in 1965 to the compound. They also amassed a collection of antique furnishings and fine art, from Federal-style pine tables and hooked rugs to priceless George Ohr pottery and Willem de Kooning oil paintings. David, a lifelong green thumb, also took care of the estate’s sculpted landscapes and peony gardens.

In 1967, Philip teamed with the Notre Dame-educated John Burgee to found Johnson/Burgee Architects, a firm that would provide the most productive era of their careers. Projects ranged from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza in Dallas in 1970 to the pink-granite addition, the Johnson Building, at Boston Public Library in 1973. The IDS Center in Minneapolis, the Pennzoil Place in Houston and AT&T’s headquarters in New York all became treasured landmarks because of the partners’ collaborations.

The American Institute of Architecture recognized Philip’s lifetime of work and awarded him its gold medal in 1978. The following year, the Hyatt Foundation bestowed upon him the first-ever Pritzker Architecture Prize to “a living architect whose work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment.” The award, which the industry described as its “Nobel prize of architecture,” also came with a $100,000 check for Philip. “I am a whore,” he told reporters in 1985. “I am paid very well for high-rise buildings.”

Philip’s most ambitious design, however, was commissioned in 1980, when televangelist Robert H. Schuller hired him and Burgee to build his Crystal Cathedral in the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove. Made with 10,000 rectangular panes of glass, the 2,900-seat megachurch cost $17 million to erect. Its sturdy construction also guaranteed that the building could withstand an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale. “This may be it for me,” Philip said, after a journalist asked him to rank the project on a list of his largest-scale ventures.

In 1983, Philip finally was hired to help oversee a project in his hometown. The Cleveland Play House had just closed its East 77th Street Theater eight blocks from its Euclid Avenue headquarters. To replace the shuttered performance space, the organization called on Philip to design a sister stage to its existing Drury Theater. The result: the 558-seat Bolton Theater, with an accompanying rotunda lobby in a neo-Byzantine style. The expansion made the Play House the largest regional theater in the U.S.

But of the most-analyzed Johnson/Burgee projects, the “Lipstick Building,” at 885 Third Ave. in Manhattan continually attracted a litany of critiques after its completion in 1986. With an elliptical shape that resembled a tube of lipstick, the steel-and-red granite building stood 34 stories tall, with the Latham & Watkins law firm occupying the vast majority of office space. (The structure made national headlines in 2008, when a $65 billion Ponzi scheme unraveled between the 17th and 19th floors in the offices of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. Its 70-year-old founder subsequently was sentenced to a maximum 150-year sentence in federal prison for orchestrating the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history.)

The Johnson-Burgee team also became one of the building’s tenants after it was built. But the move was ill-fated. Burgee, as the firm’s chief executive officer by contract, craved more attention. So he immediately demoted Philip to the less important role of “design consultant.” And in 1991, he eased his 85-year-old partner out of the company altogether.

By this time, Philip and David had made their home base in a stunningly appointed apartment in the Museum Tower above MoMA. They also continued to add to their Glass House compound, with the construction of a sculpture gallery in 1970, a library-and-study combo in 1980 and the all-glass “Ghost House” in 1984, which Philip described as “the spirit” of the estate. David also bought both the neighboring Calluna Farms and the Grainger House across the street in 1980 to expand their real-estate portfolio to an impressive 47 acres. The couple then made a 1986 commitment to bequeath the house and its additions to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to maintain after their deaths.

Philip then arranged to build a final attraction to the property in 1995, when he named a proposed visitors’ center, “Da Monsta,” in tribute to the burgeoning hip-hop musical movement of the decade. Designed in his signature post-Modernist style, the building is a three-dimensional network of wires that were coated in a sandwich of plaster on the inside, Styrofoam in the center and concrete on the outside.

Philip also continued to accept new projects, now that he was an independent consultant. He returned to Cleveland again in 1996 to help design the “Turning Point” display on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Described by many spectators as a “mini-Stonehenge,” the exhibit consisted of five sculptures that stood in the shadows of the Peter B. Lewis Building, where pedestrian traffic suddenly shifted from north to northeast near Bellflower Road. When the college added a garden, Philip spoke at its dedication on April 27, 2001. “This is an enormous kick of pleasure for me,” he told the audience. “This is the most important statement in art that I’ve ever been able to make. I’m just delighted with the results, and all you can do is crow, which is not very dignified.”

Once he turned 90 in 1996, Philip limited his choice of outside projects. His final two major drawings included the Philip-Johnson-Haus in Berlin in 1997, when he designed a retail-and-office complex near the former Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. And in 2001, he drew the blueprints for the First Union Plaza, a mix of commercial and residential space on 4.1 acres in the heart of Boca Raton, Florida.

Its completion marked the start of Philip’s final years of relative idleness. On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, he peacefully died of natural causes at his beloved Glass House. David, who had been diagnosed with lung and bone cancer, passed away five months later on Sunday, June 12, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on East 68th Street. He was 66 years old.

Along with the 1986 Glass House donation to the National Trust of Historic Preservation, Philip bequeathed an $8 million endowment to the agency for the costs of the estate’s upkeep. David’s will then directed Sotheby’s to auction off the couple’s mammoth collection of artwork, antiques and collectibles from four properties: the Glass and Grainger houses, the Manhattan apartment and an oceanfront ranch house in Big Sur, California, that David himself had bought in 2000.

On November 16, 2007, nearly 300 lots of belongings went on the auction block at "An American Visionary: The Collection of David Whitney." A small crowd of potential buyers showed up at Sotheby’s to compete with a full bank of telephone bidders with deep pockets.

While a George Ohr vase went for $132,000 and a slate cup by Kenneth Price sold for $228,000, the highest bids pored in for the Warhol memorabilia that the artist gave to Philip and David during their two-decade friendship. A 1972 Christmas present of a 10-inch-by-12-inch acrylic-and-silkscreen of the late Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung snagged the highest bid of the day at $2.25 million, or 10 times its appraised value. And a silkscreen of Warhol’s mother, Julia, also brought a sweet bid of $1.3 million. At the end of the day, $13.9 million had been raised to help to maintain the Glass House.

Five months before the auction, the trust foundation opened the house for public tours during an inaugural gala picnic on June 23. Guests ranged from legendary artists Jasper Johns and Frank Stella to architectural photographer Julius Shulman and Guggenheim Museum Director Lisa Dennison. Philip’s own nephew, Philip Dempsey, also made an appearance. Foundation executives made it clear to the gathering that they were committed to preserving both the house and the artistic innovations of post-Modernism that Philip and David both championed. “We believe our mission also will extend beyond our boundaries to have a broader impact on modern preservation and continue the vibrancy of the site by maintaining its focus on new ideas and new talent,” said Christy MacLear, the house’s first director.

Today, the estate is open between May and November each year, with 13-person guided tours of the house, “Da Monsta” and both the sculpture and painting galleries. Philip tags along in spirit, channeling his mantra for cutting-edge architectural splendor. “To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it,” he once told a classroom of Harvard students in the ‘50s. “Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: Building cities for people to live in.”

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The whereabouts of Philip Johnson’s remains are unknown. He was 98 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser