Word: johnson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tradition, only irony can control quotation; and irony would become one of the main features of Post-Modernism. When Johnson decreed that "you cannot not know history," orthodox Miesians were scandalized. Johnson had allowed himself private ironies when building for himself; the gazebo on his lake in New Canaan, Conn., is scaled down to the proportions of the famous dwarves' quarters in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, a complete antifunctionalist joke. But for a long while Johnson was too embedded in the world of high taste and big money to permit himself large public ironies: that...
Thus the work that did most to precipitate the Post-Modernist attitude in America was not by Johnson...
These inflections of form, historical allusion and context work well in small buildings; so far, their main testing ground has been houses for the rich. Can one see a similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"-the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections...
...only architect to apply the historicist metaphors of Post-Modernism to a large corporate structure, still unbuilt, is Philip Johnson. And only his age (72) and prestige have enabled him to get away with it. The building in question is the corporate headquarters of the world's largest business, A T & T, to be built in midtown Manhattan. Given its cost of $110 million and the prominence of its site, the building could scarcely fail to provoke argument. But in addition Johnson and Burgee designed it as a summing-up of Post-Modernist building. This prospect fills some architects with...
...taste for simplicity," wrote Eugene Delacroix, as undeceived a painter as ever lived, "cannot endure for long." That could be Philip Johnson's motto. The septuagenenan senior partner in the firm of Johnson-Burgee is a lean immaculately turned out dandy with a merrily cackling laugh, a tongue like a sjambok and a power over taste that no other architect can equal. "Old age," he says, "is the most important single thing to have. You just thumb your nose at the world and go about your business. We take about 10% of the work that comes into the office...