Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson introduced the International Style to the United States as a curator and then built his own glass house. He moved from Mies to postmodernism and was the first winner of the Pritzker Prize.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio, into a wealthy family. He studied philosophy and classics at Harvard. Travelling in Europe at the end of the 1920s he encountered the new architecture and got to know Mies van der Rohe. In 1932 he became head of the new architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and that same year, together with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he organised the exhibition The International Style, which gave modernism its name in the United States. In the 1930s he became involved in far-right politics, which he later repudiated.

Johnson trained as an architect at Harvard under Walter Gropius and graduated in 1943. His own glass house in New Canaan, 1949, made him famous. He collaborated with Mies on the Seagram Building in New York and designed The Four Seasons restaurant there. Later his architecture became more formal and historical, and in the 1980s he became a leading postmodernist with the AT&T Building in New York, a high-rise with a broken pediment like a piece of furniture. He also designed the Crystal Cathedral in California and towers in Houston.

Johnson received the first Pritzker Prize in 1979. He died in 2005, aged 98, in New Canaan. He held a unique position in American architecture, as arbiter of taste, patron and networker, and he helped launch both modernism and deconstructivism, the latter in an exhibition at MoMA in 1988. He has been criticised for his political past and for opportunism in his choice of styles. The Glass House has become one of the best-known icons of modernism.