Word: johnson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond Hood (chief architect of Rockefeller Center, designer of the old McGraw-Hill Building and the Chicago Tribune Tower). This point was not lost on Johnson. Fantasy veiled as history: such is the message of A T & T. In the process, Hood is appropriated to the recipe...
...Johnson's most fervent admirer among critics, Paul Goldberger of the New York Times, who called it "the most provocative and daring skyscraper proposed for New York since the Chrysler Building" and "the first major monument of Post-Modernism." Hogwash, retorted another critic, Michael Sorkin, in the Village Voice: A T & T will be "the architecture of appliqué ... the Seagram building with ears...
...courtyard front of Brunelleschi's 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Florence. One cannot guess from drawings or models how well this will work. To take a small, private Renaissance chapel and inflate it to nearly the size of the Baths of Caracalla is the kind of perversity Johnson enjoys but has never been allowed to do on such a scale before. It is architecture mimicking the strategies of Claes Oldenburg. What A T & T will eventually make of this high-camp, post-Pop irony performing as status monumentalism is anyone's guess, but that is what Johnson has produced...
...Johnson remarked in 1973, "the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food or sex, regardless of how we denigrate it. All cultures that can be called cultures have built monuments-that is, buildings of unusual size and expenditure of effort, that have aroused pride and enjoyment as well as utility...
...building, but rather the permission it will grant other architects to build their own monuments of the hybrid. Johnson did not create the way of thinking that his building reflects. But he helped bring it about, and now he has given it a degree of public validity that cannot help affecting other corporate clients. Houses change the secret history of style, but monuments determine its public fate. Can one have a monument to doubt? Perhaps not. The idea would not have arisen 50 years ago. But what else, in a time of transition, questioning, and mannerism, can one expect...