Word: manhattans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crematoria are among the singular documents of the early Industrial Revolution. That a building should have a top was, of course, anathema to Johnson's mentor, Mies van der Rohe; the glass prism required a flat roof, finished in one clean cut. But since all the great pre-Modernist Manhattan buildings have tops-finials, breadbaskets, cornices, towers-the first big Post-Modernist one must have...
...rich, beautiful prose of corporate style, achieved with acres of white marble that somehow always ended up looking like plastic 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...
...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, can be seen in the polished aluminum skin of Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Building in Manhattan...
...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 skepticism. Says Charles Moore, "Philip's a genius...
Before he was an architect, Johnson became the director of the architecture department of Manhattan's fledgling Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 he scandalized his colleagues by resigning from his post and, imbued with fervor for Nazi Germany, trying to start a splinter fascist party in America. This failed, and in 1940 Johnson entered architecture school. He had backed into the profession as a critic, but in the process he had helped bring Mies van der Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would...