"Understand: We all grew up with the images," acknowledges Stephen Apking, one of the newest partners at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "But when you're actually inside and you watch how the sun moves across during the day, how the shadows of the trees play off the glass and the ceiling, you realize for the first time how much Philip Johnson was about the senses."
Apking was making his first pilgrimage to one of the most iconic structures in modern architecture, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The human dimension of Johnson's 1949 classically symmetrical design was once enjoyed only by his friends. Admittedly, that was a wide circle that ranged from Frank Gehry to Johnson's "kids": architects such as Peter Eisenman, Robert Stern, and Cesar Pelli. And of course there were the artists that Johnson's companion, David Whitney, befriended, like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham. Now, just over two years after Johnson's death at 98, his 47-acre estate—with 14 structures he designed—is open to the public.
The architects and designers who accompanied Apking one lustrous day this spring soon understood they were not at this architecture campus simply to pay homage. Rather, they acted as Johnson, always the provocateur, would have hoped: They walked the grounds, talking excitedly about the highs and lows of their profession.
Behind his signature black-framed glasses, Johnson was the consummate showman. Even though the Glass House, an elegant but hardly direct application of Mies van der Rohe's modernist principles, is one of the most recognized buildings in the world, Johnson never intended it to stand alone. Over the years he kept placing more buildings on the grounds—a former farm sloping down a steep ridge—each one emblematic of the popular architectural practices of its day.
Matthias Hollwich, who has worked with Rem Koolhaas and taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, is amazed at how daring Johnson was to have lived in an all-glass structure so close to such a well-traveled road. The other buildings both inspired and disappointed the architect. "When Johnson took liberties, he was very original, such as in the Sculpture Gallery," Hollwich says. The interior of the Sculpture Gallery is a sunken, beautifully lit, and infinitely superior cubist variation on Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim. "But when Johnson copied, he was not free." "Da Monsta," the 1995 gatehouse composed of red and black warping blocks (and a leering quality that earned it its name), was inspired by his longtime friend Frank Stella. Hollwich describes it as "terrifying."
The California architect Ron Radziner—who with his partner, Leo Marmol, restored Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs—counters, "Johnson realized that some buildings were more successful than others. It was more about exploring than it was about perfection." This was often a criticism leveled at Johnson: What he regarded as experimentation others viewed as inconsistency, even dilettantism. He never honed an easily recognizable style in the way Mies did 50 years ago, or Gehry does today. "Did he miss out now and then? Of course he did," wrote one of his biographers, Peter Blake, of the 200 or so completed structures Johnson designed. "Out of this very impressive number, some 20 or 30 are first-rate—a record that very few can match."
