Word: johnson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearest man Post-Modernism has to a senior partner is, in fact, the leading American architect of his generation: Philip Cortelyou Johnson. The firm of Johnson-Burgee has become to American architecture what McKim, Mead & White was 80 years before: the voice of authority, flavored with luxury. Johnson's critics see him as a brilliant opportunist capable of adapting to any regime of taste: in effect, the Anastas Mikoyan of architectural ideology. Certainly Johnson has, with dazzling skill, traversed the whole range of 20th century manners: from the idealistic severities of the International Style (whose name, as an architecture critic...
...right in the middle of it. It is the watershed between what we have all been brought up with as the Modern, and something new, uncharted, uncertain and absolutely delightful." But to understand the newness of this terrain one must first grasp the culture out of which Johnson came: the attitudes of the International Style...
...might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into...
...cost. "Every cheap architect could copy Mies," says Johnson. "He could go to the client and say, I can do a building cheaper than I did it for you last year, because now I have a religion. We have a flat roof and simple factory-made curtain walls. It was a justification for cheapness that took over our cityscapes, and that is what you see in New York today." The universal glass box, cut-rate Mies (for real Mies was real architecture, and too expensively finished for most developers to tolerate), would cover any function: airport, bank, office block, church...
...laminate. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art by William Pereira is an early Western example of the genre; its equivalent on the East Coast was Lincoln Center in Manhattan, a large, poor parody of Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome, designed by Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz and by Philip Johnson, whose building was the New York State Theater. All the historical allusions in this corporate style (and there were plenty of them) were seriously trotted forth as an antidote to International Style purity. But they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly...