Word: johansens
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...evidence of his work, John M. Johansen is a restless eccentric among U.S. architects. He seems willing to try anything once. Pecking among the styles, he has, in the past, gone through the routine Miesian curtain-wall phase, made his bow to Italian Baroque in his design for the U.S. embassy in Dublin and constructed a house in Connecticut framed like a ramifying tepee with 150 telephone poles (they were bolted together under the direction of a Norwegian shipwright). He also has designed buildings, like the Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, of an almost Egyptian heaviness. Currently his office is lodged...
...Johansen is still relentlessly curious and something of a loner, but his dissent has firmed. With a growing minority of other highly gifted American architects, Johansen is engaged in what amounts to the first rethinking of the architectural commandments handed down years ago by the late Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His new approach has crystallized in one challenging building: the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City...
...worked in London for three years, then came to the U.S. In 1938, he accepted the post of chairman of Harvard's Department of Architecture, and the school quickly became the focus of young talent, including such now famous architects as Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen and I. M. Pei. Gropius insisted that their work meet society's needs and that they move ahead alongside industry-until then largely overlooked by architects as a partner in their art. A technical innovation like the prefabricated glass-and-plastic facade, he knew, could be used as excitingly...
Tuesday, 4 p.m.: Johansen and Ormandy meet each other for the first time. "Did you practice the cadenzas?" asks Ormandy. "What cadenzas?" replies Johansen. His score does not happen to include them. At this point, Ormandy says that he is having a heart attack. But the one-hour rehearsal goes on, with Ormandy concentrating on the passages where piano and orchestra play together. A messenger is dispatched to obtain a score of the cadenzas. Later Johansen practices backstage, then hurries to the hotel for his tails, which are due back from the valet. No tails. Back to Philharmonic Hall...
Tuesday, 9:30 p.m.: Johansen strides coolly onstage in a grey business suit. After the orchestral opening, his first solo entrance is firm, clean and smoothly phrased. He reads carefully from the score, but otherwise nothing in his playing betrays the tension onstage. After the first movement, Ormandy leans over to whisper: "Bravo." Johansen ripples out silvery pianissimos in the slow movement, builds the finale with structural logic and power. At the finish, the audience-which has been told only thai Peter Serkin is "indisposed" and knows nothing of what has gone on-gives Johansen a warm ovation. Ormandy...