The Maverick Designer

"A 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, and the rest we turn down " Johnson-Burgee and I.M. Pei & Partners are the two "hot" corporate firms in American architecture today; and between Johnson and Pei, younger architects tend to side with Johnson, the maverick.

Johnson's reputation as an enfant terrible, floating like a butterfly between the styles and stinging like a bee at the conferences, goes back a long way. It is grounded in his wealth; he did not need to build for a living. The son of a well-off Cleveland lawyer who handed over to him a bundle of stock in a new company named Alcoa, Johnson lives in a manner unrivaled by many architects since the days of the gentlemen dilettanti of Georgian England. He maintains several buildings for his personal use, most of them in a rolling park in New Canaan, Conn., including an underground culture bunker for part of his private collection of paintings.

Being rich, he could travel. Johnson scraped through a degree course in philosophy at Harvard--with interruptions because of nervous collapses, it took seven years--and set off to Germany in 1930 to see the new architecture. He met its founding fathers, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and in 1932 he and his friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock published a book that named the new phenomenon: The International Style.

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 delight in poking fun at 40 years later. During his long association with the International Style, he built some of its canonical late buildings, notably his own glass house on his estate at New Canaan (1959) and, with Mies, Manhattan's Seagram Building (1958), which survives as the virtual Parthenon of glass-grid architecture. But unlike some other men of his generation, Johnson kept his restless, stylish sense of incongruity and his loathing of repetition. He is the Balanchine of architecture. His range is wide, running from the Renaissance monumentalism of the A T & T building to the airy glass cathedral now in progress for a California hot-gospeller, Robert Schuller.

Like all high Tories, Johnson is now impatient with the idea that architecture can improve humanity. And also like them, he believes in the need for palaces, almost as a biological urge. "As birds have beautiful plumage," he intones, his round, George Meany glasses glinting like an owl's eyes, "so do we try to have beautiful buildings. There is no other purpose."

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