Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 8th, 2016
110 YEARS AGO: (d. 2005) He was only twenty-four years old and fresh out of Harvard when he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He would have been regarded as a great visionary even if that had been his only accomplishment. But Johnson wanted more, and in his travels to Europe he became exposed to such masters of modernism as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. Johnson’s 1932 MOMA show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922,” introduced modern architecture to the American public, and Johnson became an evangelist for the International Style. Johnson’s travels to Europe also exposed him to the early ideology of Hitler’s National Socialism, which Johnson also eagerly embraced. He remained enamored with Nazism until Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, when he toured that conquered country at Hitler’s invitation. As Johnson later said, “I have no excuse [for] such utter, unbelievable stupidity. … I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”
Philip Johnson’s perfectly sublime Glass House (1949).
Fortunately for Johnson, there would be a second chapter to his life. After the war, he designed his 1949 masterpiece Glass House as his own private residence in New Canaan, Connecticut. That design put him at the forefront of modernist architecture in America. In the 1950s, he teamed up with his mentor Meis van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building in New York. The steel-and-glass design would define the essential elements of American skyscrapers for the next sixty years. Other important landmarks followed: the PPG tower in Pittsburgh, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis. Johnson’s minimalist steel and glass design would also be the defining feature of his Chrystal Cathedral, which he designed for televangelist Robert Schuller in Garden Grove, California. After Schuller’s empire went bankrupt, Chrystal Cathedral was sold in 2011 for $57.5 million to the Orange County diocese of the Catholic Church. After some sensitive and beautiful renovations for liturgical purposes, the building became Christ Cathedral, the diocese’s official seat.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: the AT&T Building, 1984.
By the 1980s, Johnson had decided that minimalism had boxed him into a corner, if you will excuse the pun. So in a fit of iconoclasm, he abandoned his minimalist signature by placing a garish Chippendale corbel on top of the AT&T building in New York. In doing so, he practically invented what became known as post-modernism. Because of that horrible act of vandalism to New York’s skyline, I hold him singularly responsible for the damnable plague of third-rate developers placing post-modernist geegaws on every tacky strip mall, apartment complex and gated community home in North America.
Fortunately, Johnson’s latest design is considerably more redeeming. The largest LGBT congregation in America, Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, commissioned Johnson for its Interfaith Peace Chapel, which opened to the public in 2010. Johnson didn’t live to see it come to fruition. He died in his sleep at Glass House in 2005, survived by his partner of 45 years.
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