Philip Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906 to Homer H. Johnson, a gregarious, successful lawyer, and Louise Pope Johnson, thirty-two, a reserved and well-born intellectual with a deep interest in art who was six years younger than her twice-widowed husband. Philip was the third of four Johnson children, the others being: Jeannette, the elder sister; a brother, Alfred, who died young; and a sister, Theodate, one year younger. The parents doted on two-year-old Philip with special zeal after the loss of their first boy at the age of five. Philip and his sisters were raised quietly in an upper-middle-class area of Cleveland Heights and at Townsend Farms near New London, some sixty miles to the southwest, where Homer Johnson had been raised as a "farm boy." Jeannette, Philip, and Theodate led close and carefree young lives, spending time together at home with a German governess—who taught them her language—and at the farm and on the travels away from Ohio with their parents. Numerous crossings were made to Europe, and the Johnsons escaped the harsh Ohio winters in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where Homer played golf and Louise founded a small school for her children to attend and gave art lectures to the community. In the 1920s she hired the prominent New York designer Donald Desky to decorate rooms in their house there in a deco style.

Germany was the cultural capital of Europe at the time, and its music, art, and literature were admired and extolled at length by Homer Johnson. This admiration of Teutonic culture was not unusual in upper-class Midwestern families. The family spent vacations in Germany and lengthy times in Paris; all three children attended schools in Switzerland. Louise Johnson, a Wellesley graduate, represented the Victorian ideal of cultural self-improvement. She was avid about the children's intellectual and artistic development, which her husband pretty much left to her. Not remembered by the children for her warmth, the emotionally reserved "club woman" mother ensured that the minds of her three children received exposure to literature and the fine arts. Architecture, i.e., European architecture, was very much a part of the mother's cultural agenda for her children. Louise's first cousin, Theodate Pope Riddle, up in Cleveland and was, along with Julia Morgan of California, one of the country's first renowned female architects, designing country houses and private schools in the East.

Jeannette Johnson Dempsey recalls:

On Sundays in Cleveland, Mother would conduct slide-illustrated "seminars"on artand architecture, includingthe "modern" stuff, for Philip, Theodate, and me in the living room. Philip just soaked it up. His aptitude for the arts was pretty clear to Mother very early.

She and Father adored Philip and spoiled him; he was the replacement for the boy they had lost to mastoiditis, and when Philip developed ear trouble later it caused great anxiety. He was sick a great deal of the time, and with our moving around all the time he never developed any friends.

Before Jeannette was born, Homer and Louise talked about building a new house. The fact that her choice of architect would have been a maverick thirty-four-year-old Chicagoan named Frank Lloyd Wright indicates her questing, vanguard taste. The baby's arrival was too imminent, so they remained in the Tudoresque house that Homer had purchased when they married. But soon Louise chose J. Milton Dyer, Cleveland's best architect and its first graduate of Paris's Ecole des Beaux Arts, to do something in the Art Nouveau style for a new master bedroom. Philip Johnson recalled that "It was an extraordinary thing for those times in Cleveland. She was always way out, in that sense."

The Johnson children were, from their earliest years, at home in Cleveland's art museum and symphony hall. This immersion in the city's fine arts culture, directed with determination by their mother, had a telling effect: Jeannette became a lifelong, prominent supporter of all the arts in Cleveland; Theodate, only a year younger than her brother and often taken to be Philip's twin, studied in Europe to be an opera singer, had recitals there and in New York's Town Hall, and for years, with Philip's support, published the authoritative journal Musical America.

Philip's life as critic, architect, and art collector can be traced to his mother's exaltation of the creative, intellectual life. At one point, before discovering architecture at Harvard, he planned to be a concert pianist. While Philip Johnson would later assert that his mother was distant and cold compared to his warm, outgoing father, she was the key factor in his development into one of the major figures in the twentieth century's world of art and architecture. On a tour of Europe with his mother and sisters, the thirteen-year-old boy burst into tears when he entered Chartres Cathedral, overwhelmed by the soaring space of the thirteenth-century Gothic church. "There was a funeral taking place, and it was years before I realized that everyone didn't have the same reaction as mine when they entered Chartres," he remembers. Jeannette says her sociable father "belonged to all the country clubs in Cleveland, where he liked to claim that he got more new legal business in the locker rooms than he ever could sitting in his office downtown."' The extroverted attorney was well known both nationally and internationally, accepting an assignment from President Woodrow Wilson on a government commission in post-World War I Europe which dealt with reparations to Jews. With her husband in Washington and Europe a lot, Louise Johnson steadily accepted the prime responsibility for raising the children until she wearied of that and took the children and joined him overseas in Paris. There was little entertaining in the Johnson home. Though an active member of clubs dealing with the arts and civic improvement, Louise Johnson was a "loner" socially according to her son, caring more about the hearth and home than society. Homer more often than not contented himself with a social life at his clubs.

The children spent their happiest days during summers at Townsend Farms outside New London, which Johnson today calls his "hometown." The three-thousand-acre farm property had come down to Homer Johnson through his mother's family. There the self-sufficient band of three led a lazy, idyllic life of horseback riding and fishing while Mrs. Johnson devoted herself to flowers and landscaping. Philip recalls her obsession with developing an apple orchard, which his father had to halt because of the cost. Her love of horticulture transferred to her son, who often liked to say, when he was shaping the landscape of the grounds of his place in Connecticut, that he was a "better landscape architect than architect."

His father, with an energy that came down to Philip, commuted the sixty miles back and forth to Cleveland once a week. Though owned by others today, the farm's headquarters is unchanged and still a loose but orderly compound of large and small gabled white buildings beneath towering elm trees. Scattered neatly on several acres around a simple, one-story 1845 Greek Revival house, it is a composed picture of genteel Midwestern rural life, a precursor to what the adult Philip Johnson created in exquisite avant-garde terms on his own spread in New Canaan.

Jeannette asserts that "Philip got the intellectual part from Mother and the gregarious charm from Father." Both parents supported music and helped found Cleveland's art museum. Though he was a joiner, Homer was very independent politically, often drawn to reformist causes. Conservative Cleveland nearly ostracized him after he voted for Democratic reformer Woodrow Wilson, and in his declining years he remained an ardent, outspoken pacifist.

In 1924, when the children were young adults, Homer Johnson bequeathed them an early inheritance. To his daughters he gave important downtown-Cleveland real estate, and to Philip he presented a large block of stock in a Pittsburgh metals firm that Johnson had helped an Oberlin College classmate form. In 1886, while they were both undergraduates, Homer's friend Charles Martin Hall had developed a process which led to the commercial production of aluminum. For his later legal help in setting up Hall's production company, Johnson received shares in the Aluminum Company of America, the company that bought Hall's patented process. The stock wasn't worth much at the time young Philip received it, but in a few years, during the 1920s, its value increased dramatically, so that when Johnson graduated from Harvard in 1930 he was a millionaire and richer than his father.

Homer and Louise Johnson shared a strong belief in the value of the best possible educations for their children. Homer, born in a rural community in 1862, was raised in New London at Townsend Farms but attended college in nearby Oberlin and at Amherst in Massachusetts. Deciding on a career in law, he applied and was accepted at Harvard Law School, where he graduated summa cum laude. Louise Pope came from a well-to-do Cleveland family superior to that of her future husband's. The Pope family's money came from shipping instead of farming, and she was grounded in a privileged urban life with its attendant cultural amenities. She, too, was drawn to the New England educational establishment, graduating from Wellesley in 1891 and staying on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in art history. After study in Italy for a year, she returned to Ohio and taught school until in 1901 she married Homer Johnson.

The pattern of leaving Ohio for education in the East would be repeated with all of the Johnson children. The perception among many of the educated parents in the nation's hinterlands was that the best schooling was found along the East Coast in the oldest universities. For Philip Johnson, his later scholastic sojourn in the Ivy League world would prove seminal and, like that of many other Midwesterners, develop from a temporary leave from home to a permanent relocation in the cultural and financial capital, New York.

Young Johnson attended private schools in Cleveland, New York, and Switzerland. Never spending enough time in any to put down roots, he never established friendships. Bright, spoiled, and inept at sports, his only compan ions were his sisters. The impression is clear that he was favored by his mother, who recognized the brilliance and quickness of his mind. Hackley School near New York was chosen as his prep school, where he came into his own with fellow students and, even more, with his teachers. The outsider became the insider by dint of the ardor and avidity of his high-strung disposition. His conspicuous personality and the brightness of his mind made him a standout, sometimes a show-off, among the other well-scrubbed scions of the rich. His lifelong course of being a pacesetter was more or less set at Hackley. Throughout his life he has always needed a group—students, architects, or a lecture audience—to stand before and lead. Graduating second in his class assured him entry into his college of choice, Harvard.

Cambridge's Harvard, on the Charles River near Boston, with its concentration of scholars, intellects, and bright undergraduates, was an eye-opener for Johnson. Its myriad attractions for the mind were a watershed in Johnson's development, and his restless, varied interests led him down many paths there. Besides considering a career as a concert pianist, he also excelled in Greek literature and mathematical physics. In his third year, however, he settled on philosophy as his major interest. Alfred North Whitehead, the great Harvard philosopher, was Johnson's professor and with his wife became friends with the bright nineteen-year-old. Johnson remembers being inspired by Raphael Demos, a tutor whose work on Plato was required reading.

Philosophy offered a sort of absolute moral ordering that appealed to Johnson and would later characterize his initial architectural tendencies. He lost interest in philosophy before leaving Harvard and turned to modern art and architecture, writing criticism pieces for Hound and Horn, the student avant-garde art publication. Johnson felt the influence of art historian Paul Sachs, who "bred a generation of future stewards of high culture at the pivotal moment when modernism became respectable in institutions." Sachs's students Lincoln Kirstein (who founded, funded, and edited Hound and Horn), Edward M. M. Warburg, and John Walker started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art and opened the country's first modern art gallery in second-floor space on Harvard Square. It was a forerunner of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Warburg and Kirstein would be Johnson's lifelong friends and influential figures in his future as an architect.

All through his time at Harvard—it took seven years for him to get through—Johnson was wrenched with conflicts and spent many months and whole semesters at home in Cleveland, away from Cambridge. Harvard's intense academic world, with its heightened social distractions, exacerbated the incipient homosexual leanings that Johnson had harbored for years. This stress of confusion and concealment led him, in the spring of 1925, to a Boston doctor who counseled him to return home for rest and reconciliation with his sexuality.

Johnson says he spent months alternately crying and devouring mystery novels, but the doctor's prescription worked finally and his severe depression lifted. To the relief of his parents, particularly Homer Johnson, he returned to Harvard the following term. At one point, according to Jeannette Dempsey, he was in love with a beautiful classmate of Theodate's, and he and Jeannette determined that he was heterosexual. But there were slip-backs away from convention, and he eventually made peace with his sexual inclination and went on with life. Despite the parental anxiety about his son's turn away from the norm, Homer Johnson gave Philip a father's support throughout his long life. When his son was beginning his years as director of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture, Homer Johnson helped underwrite an exhibition being mounted by Philip. As a longtime trustee at Oberlin College and also executor of the estate of his client Charles Hall, Homer Johnson had a position to influence the award of architectural commissions at the college, particularly those funded by Hall money. Though Philip was only beginning as an architect in the 1940s, Homer Johnson tried for several years to get him the commission for the 1950 Sophronia Brooks Hall Memorial Auditorium, a memorial to Charles Hall's mother. Arthur Vining Davis, another Oberlin trustee and president of Alcoa Corporation, was influential in getting the job for Wallace Harrison, whose New York firm, Harrison & Abramovitz, had designed Alcoa's Pittsburgh headquarters.

In 1928 Johnson saw a copy of Arts magazine at Harvard and was struck by the illustrations of the work of the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud and an accompanying article by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. He was as taken by the sharp writing of Hitchcock as he was by the crisp, unadorned white buildings of Oud, the best-known Dutch architect designing in the new mode of stripped esthetic purity devoid of ornamentation.

During the Harvard years, Johnson had continued the pattern of summer vacations in Europe begun with his family, but now he traveled alone, or with a friend, and with an increasing interest in buildings, both the old and the very new. In the summer of 1928, a visit to the Parthenon in Athens affected him so deeply that once again he was moved to tears by a monument of architecture. He later asserted that the experience on the Acropolis, along with Chartres and the photographs of Oud's modernist work, was the transforming experience which led to his conversion to architecture. Before his graduation in 1930, Johnson made two friends who were to become pivotal to his cultural and professional life: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Referring to his own development as critic, curator, architectural scholar, and architect, Johnson in later years would say, "It all began with Alfred Barr." Born in Detroit in 1902, Barr came from a line of Presbyterian ministers and educators and like Johnson left the Midwest at a young age for education in the East. After a Maryland prep school and a Master's degree in art history at Princeton, he taught at Vassar College and at Harvard, where he impressed Paul Sachs. In 1926 he went to Wellesley College, where he developed the first course in America devoted to the study of modern art. Like Johnson, Barr had traveled in Europe, but with a more studied attention to the new architecture than Johnson, whose main interest was with historic monuments. Barr had visited architect Walter Gropius's revolutionary Bauhaus school at Dessau, where he was impressed with its comprehensive approach to arts education. Painting, sculpture, photography, industrial design, cinema, and architecture were taught together under one philosophical umbrella. To Barr, it represented an exciting Machine Age extension of ideas for arts integration practiced in the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement by John Ruskin and William Morris.

In the spring of 1929 Johnson met Barr at his sister Theodate's graduation from Wellesley. Louise Johnson, always alert to new trends and a trustee of her alma mater, had written Philip about Barr, whom she described as the Wellesley teacher who knew all about modern architecture. The two were introduced during the commencement weekend and immediately took a liking to each other. Barr's quiet, scholarly enthusiasm for modern art and architecture struck a nerve with Johnson, himself vigilant to the vanguard in art. The undergraduate's enthusiasm and eagle eye for what was happening at culture's leading edge, coupled with Barr's knowledge of what was going on, made them a complementary pair immediately. After talking with Johnson for many hours that weekend, Barr offhandedly asked him, "Do you want to help start a modern art museum?" After Barr's explanation of what he was up to, Johnson's reply was an emphatic "yes," and he excitedly wrote his mother that Barr wanted him to form an architecture department in a new modern museum in New York and that he had "much to learn and quickly!" When he returned to Europe that summer, Johnson planned to concentrate on seeing the new buildings that Barr had described, and he would see them from the driver's seat of a new green Cord convertible, purchased in New York before sailing and stowed in the ship's hold.

Earlier in 1929 three wealthy New York matrons had an idea for a new museum devoted solely to contemporary art and were looking for someone to run it. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Mrs. Cornelius P. Sullivan, and Miss Lillie P. Bliss consulted with Paul Sachs, who told them that they should contact Alfred Barr. When the twenty-seven-year-old was chosen to head the new Museum of Modern Art, he set about creating a unique institution intended to be a symbiosis of all the modern arts behind one intellectual banner of advanced and renewing avant-garde artistic activity. It was to be an institution located in the middle of Manhattan and dedicated, in Barr's words, to "the art of now." No establishment with such a mission existed. Three generations of the immensely wealthy Rockefeller family have been the key philanthropic element in the museum's development. (John D. Rockefeller, the patriarch, made his enormous oil fortune in Cleveland.)

When twenty-three-year-old Johnson started his drive through Europe in the summer of 1929, he went first to Stuttgart, Germany, to see the Weissenhof housing exhibition, a "group show" of European modernist architects exhibiting their designs in a master-planned community of white, flat-roofed housing on a hillside site overlooking the city. He wrote his mother that Weissenhof was the perfect spot for him to begin, "my first view of things by Le Corbusier, Gropius and Oud, the three greatest living architects." Barr had called them the "finest masters among the moderns."'

He then traveled to Dessau, where the Bauhaus school was located in buildings designed by Walter Gropius. Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was director for three years after Gropius resigned in 1930, were part of the roster of artists and architects with progressive social ideas, teaching a new esthetic inspired by machine technology. But it was the style, the appearance of the buildings at Dessau and Stuttgart, that appealed to Johnson, not their sociological "intentions." He was grounded in the visual result of a building, not the how and why of its realization. His appreciation of architecture would always have this basis.

From Paul Klee he purchased his first modern painting before proceeding to Berlin to seek out Mies and Walter Gropius. Gropius was chilly to the dapper, well-heeled Johnson,but Mies, the dour self-educated idealist, was happy to share schnapps and dinner with the spiffy, keen American who spoke German. Carefully following Barr's prescribed itinerary, the high-strung Johnson experienced intellectual and sensory highs throughout the summer, meeting the architects and seeing the buildings on Barr's list. In Holland he saw the lyrically pure geometry of Oud's smooth, pale buildings and became friends with the "charming, outgoing, sensible" architect, the first modernist to have caught his eye back at Cambridge.

The new architecture that was so compelling to Johnson is a reductive, abstract language of spare, clear structure with economy and purity in its material expression, fitted to a program of intensively analyzed function. In a building's ideal realization there was a taut "weightlessness" in the sensitive, yet logical, assembly of light, functional building parts. Walls of glass or plaster were referred to as "skins," structure was "skeletal." In terms of form it was to traditional architecture what cubism represented in the context of academic painting. The old and familiar rules of architectural image and composition were jettisoned.

Le Corbusier called the house "a machine for living," and the ambience and details of his strikingly lean buildings with their open decks and steel railings were compared to ocean liners. A sort of consensus of design principles emerged among the Europeans and flowered in the mid-1920s in Germany, France, and Holland in reaction to the dense, eclectic architecture that served officialdom throughout the Western world. Though manifestations of the new esthetic had been appearing on both sides of the Atlantic since 1910—Irving Gill was doing anomalous "modern" work in Southern California before the war and in the same period Frank Lloyd Wright's early prewar work in Oak Park got the attention of Europeans like Walter Gropius—the tenets of the new style coalesced following World War I.

The new philosophy of design encompassed both esthetics and sociology, offering a rational agenda for building configuration to replace the prevailing academic discipline of pictorialism, which for a century had emerged from the ateliers of Paris's Ecole des Beaux Arts. The emerging European modernists felt strongly that the new architecture should represent, in constructed terms, the ideals of an improved way of living for humankind: build economical, functional buildings, standardized where possible, and spend the savings in money to enhance living standards. But to a young patrician connoisseur like Johnson it was the bold, dramatic style of what he was seeing, via Alfred Barr's guidance, that transformed his appreciation of the building art. A building's objective quality was what appealed to the youthful Johnson, not its social underpinnings. This personal response of his—exalting the esthetic, the artistic, and eschewing the sociological—would distinguish and make controversial his future career in architecture. The reformer in him was directed at the physiognomy of buildings, not their social and political relations. He would remain an architectural visualist forever.

Throughout his long career, Johnson has been criticized and derided for the seemingly unprincipled ease of his philosophical shifts of sensibility regarding architecture. Some of the criticism results from his bent for contrary, impetuous change and challenge. But from the beginning he had a nervous, earnest desire to always be ahead culturally, to be au courant, up with the head of the pack, not left in the wake of the zeitgeist. This instinct of his for the artistic high ground irritates some people. They expect him to possess an enduring "faith," accusing him of being an arts dabbler, a dilettante. But as the world has changed through wars and social and cultural turmoil, and rapid turnovers of critical judgment regarding the desired character of the built world have occurred, Johnson has invariably had his ear to the ground and his nose in the wind, divining and interpreting the changing artistic tempers. Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of The New York Times, once called him a "bloodhound" for the way he could anticipate revisionist trends in taste and architectural thought. Johnson puts it like this: "It's like spoor! You can feel it in the air."'

Thus, in his early twenties, with one more year at Harvard to complete before graduation, Johnson returned to America, fired up after a summer of fast-paced exposure to the cutting edge. He immediately got in touch with Alfred Barr in New York and soon met Hitchcock. Before long, Johnson was traveling regularly from Cambridge down to Manhattan, where the new museum was being created by Barr and a small, youthful group. Margaret Scolari, who was to marry Barr, was a graduate student at New York University and recalls that Johnson would join her and Alfred and the coterie of young acolytes for Chinese food in the Heckscher Building on West Fiftyseventh Street, at Fifth Avenue, where the infant museum was first located on an upper floor.

In the late 19706 Marga Barr remembered that the conversation around her future husband was "incredibly exciting and youthful. The ideas came thick and fast and Philip was in the middle of it from the beginning. He was handsome, always cheerful, and pulsating with new ideas and hopes. Wildly impatient, he could not sit down! His rapid way of speaking, that quickness and vibration have not changed at all." Johnson was awed by Hitchcock at the meetings in New York and during his last year at Harvard developed a close friendship with the rumpled, bearish intellectual with such a vast knowledge of architecture, both ancient and modern. The core of the progressive New York cultural establishment, in which young Hitchcock held bona fides, was well formed by the early 1930s after passing through Harvard's intellectual "boot camp" of the 1920s with its radical ideas for an improved world. Only three years older than Johnson, Boston-born Hitchcock was teaching at Wesleyan University and was the recent author of Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, which traced the origins of the modern movement in architecture from the nineteenth century. While the book was well received in academia, it was considered by Barr a little too dry in style for the broad audience that the young museum director was seeking. He was already thinking about a large modern architecture exhibition that would stake out the new museum's turf of inclusion for all the arts. Barr asked Johnson and Hitchcock to tour Europe and gather material for the exhibition.

The two new friends sailed separately for Europe in the spring of 1930 to meet in Paris, where Margaret Scolari and Alfred Barr were married in May. Soon after the wedding, and with Barr's coaching, the pair began a detailed tour of the continent's new architecture in Johnson's convertible. With Johnson's money and elegant car and Hitchcock's knowledge of where to go, they crisscrossed the continent. As they carefully inspected and discussed the buildings and met their architects, the two started an amplified rewriting of Hitchcock's book. The new volume was to be titled The International Style: Architecture since 1922, employing a term coined by Barr as a designation for the new style. The book was intended to have a broader appeal than Hitchcock's earlier volume, with many more photographs and a more "popular" writing style.

Though Johnson was knowledgeable for his age, not unfamiliar with the new architecture, the deliberate, scholarly Hitchcock was the pair's leader. He was older, had his Master's from Harvard, and already had written an impor tant book featuring modern architecture. In 1993, Johnson remembered that for the new book he did "all the dirty work. I was the 'advance man.' Russell was nice enough to list my name, but it wasn't an equal collaboration by any means. I was learning so much and did the work gladly and wrote to all the architects making arrangements for meetings. It was hard to collect photographs because these architects, besides being poor, weren't publicity-minded, so I sometimes had to go there and take the pictures." When Hitchcock died in 1987 Johnson would say of his longtime friend: "Of our generation, he was the leader of us all. He set a new standard of architectural scholarship and accuracy of judgement which has yet to be equaled." Over twenty books on architectural history bear Hitchcock's name and form the armature around which subsequent scholars of many periods work.

Johnson, attracted to the raw and radical newness of the European buildings, and Hitchcock, though the more settled and methodical historian, came to a similar conclusion that summer that the new architecture's value was its style. Johnson's verve and Hitchcock's scholarship made them a complementary pair to document the modern Europeans, and Johnson's fluency in German and French was no small asset; it gave them an access to the architects whose personal stories fleshed out the book.

They worked as a team. As Hitchcock directed the tour, Johnson drove and did the legwork, lugging a large German view-camera and lining up drawings and interviews with Mies, Oud, Gropius, Breuer, and Le Corbusier. The architects, some down-at-heel, were happy to receive the young, openhanded explorers speeding around the continent examining architecture of the future from Johnson's sleek, open-top car. Oud was warmly hospitable, Le Corbusier was self-absorbed and detached, and Mies van der Rohe, in Johnson's hyperbole, was "starving in a Berlin attic," but the phlegmatic German made the most profound impression. The elder architect liked conversing with Johnson after several schnapps. Of all the buildings he saw that summer, Mies's rigorously abstract designs appealed to Johnson the most. Mies had designed two hypothetical glass-sheathed towers which stunned Johnson with their audacity. In Johnson's eyes there was about Mies's buildings an objective sureness, an authority of pure rational form rendered with elegant materials, that made Johnson a disciple of Mies's for almost three decades. His sharp eye and intellect recognized the greatness and intuitive artistry of the withdrawn German, twenty years his senior, who possessed an almost spiritual philosophy of reductionist, structure-generated forms. A significant anecdote about Mies concerned his first visit to Italy. "He found that he did not like the endless Mediterranean sun and he openly longed for the 'grey heavens' of Germany."

Before the summer ended, Johnson had visited Mies's newly completed Tugendhat house in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and was so enraptured by the spacious, flowing, luxuriously appointed residence that in a letter to Hitchcock he compared it to the Parthenon and called it "unquestionably the best looking house in the world." Before Johnson returned to New York, Mies agreed to design the interiors of the New York apartment Johnson had just rented.

When Hitchcock and Johnson returned home in the fall of 1930 the two had visited France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland, with Hitchcock visiting England and Johnson going to Austria and Czechoslovakia. The manuscript for The International Style: Architecture since 1922 was finished in a rough form. Alfred Barr was anxious to put together an exhibition to accompany the book's publication. It would be a unique and comprehensive survey of the best recently designed modern American and European buildings.

Johnson was now officially director of the museum's nascent Department of Architecture, using his apartment as office and paying a secretary out of his pocket, a practice he would continue during all his years with the museum. When arrangements for Mies to design the exhibition fell through, Johnson designed and organized it, with help from Barr and Hitchcock. It opened at the Museum of Modern Art's temporary space in the Heckscher Building in early 1932 and featured the Americans Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Hood, Howe and Lescaze, Richard Neutra, and the Bowman Brothers." The Europeans included were Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and Walter Gropius. Models, plans, and large photographs of several different building types, primarily single-family housing and schools, were shown. It was the American public's first exposure to such landmark European buildings as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, and Gropius's Bauhaus.

The exhibition, Modern Architecture—International Exhibition, stirred the New York architectural scene. It began modestly as a succes d'estime, with a meager amount of lukewarm comment from the media and only some thirty-three thousand people attending the exhibition during its six-week run. But the ultimate impact on the United States was broad. While a few buildings embodying the imported esthetic had been built in the United States—buildings such as Howe and Lescaze's high-rise Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (1930) and Richard Neutra's Lovell House (1929)—International Style modernism's appeal to the American architectural profession really began with the museum's epochal exhibition and endured for forty years.

For several years following the book and the exhibition, Johnson was busy mounting other exhibitions, writing catalogues, and delivering lectures while maintaining a colorful, fast-paced social life in Manhattan's elite, Upper East Side salons as well as in the offbeat world of poets, artists, dancers, and musicians. When he wasn't adventuring downtown he developed a lifelong relationship with beautiful Eliza Bliss, niece of one of the museum founders. It was a nimble duality of social and cultural positioning for which he was to display an enduring knack. The Rockefellers, Goodyears, and Blisses were museum confidants and solicitors of his artistic opinions. The creative denizens of Harlem and Greenwich Village were beneficiaries of his openhanded largesse and cultural adventuring. But always paramount in his life alongside his protean wanderings in New York's Bohemia was the lasting friendship with Marga and Alfred Barr.

Abruptly, on Christmas Day in 1934, Johnson began a five-year odyssey away from the special niche he enjoyed at the Museum of Modern Art among New York's cultural cognoscenti. The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash in 1929 was devastating the country, and Johnson and his intellectual friends were casting about in idealistic ferment for radical solutions to what they saw as their country's flawed political system. Johnson remembers that most of his intellectual and artist friends were leaning toward communism, while Johnson was listening to a right-wing writer and fellow Harvardian named Lawrence Dennis, whose Is Capitalism Doomed? espoused a populist fascism for the United States' ills.

Johnson was no stranger to Populism, the political philosophy supporting the rights of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite, which had a history in the United States, particularly the Midwest. Anti-Semitism was definitely an element in Populism, focusing on the financial power of "international Jewry and the Rothschilds." Economic Populism was the issue with Johnson, not the racism that was a certain factor in Populism. Anti-Semitic prejudice, outside Populism, certainly existed throughout the country, even among the Jews themselves: "Some of my best friends are Jews" and "He's a great guy even though he's Jewish," and "We are German Jews, they are Polish."

So it wasn't such a stretch, under the circumstances of economic strife, for Johnson to literally and figuratively buy into Dennis's ideas, spending money and time with the authoritative figure. He was not náive about the fascistic system of a centralized political dictatorship merging government and capitalism. He was aware of what was going on in Germany and was impressed by its turnaround from postwar chaos through the National Socialist German Worker (Nazi) Party and its charismatic demagogue, Adolf Hitler. During his summer vacation in Europe in 1932, Johnson was invited by Helen Appleton Read, a New York art critic for the Brooklyn Eagle, to go with her to a Nazi rally where Hitler spoke to a large crowd in a field in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. Johnson was magnetized by the drama of the event.

His emotions were engulfed by the feverish theater of the scene: the martial songs, the flags, the marching phalanxes of handsome young troops, the precise Teutonic orchestration, climaxed by the appearance of Hitler with his riveting harangue. This was something totally new. fear-and-paranoia politics rendered in a grandly scaled form of visual power that, in the hands of the Germans, was overwhelming and operatic in effect. Johnson's critics, as well as Johnson himself, are still assessing the effect of this mesmerizing political pageant on him.

When Johnson left the Museum of Modern Art in late 1934, he was joined by Alan Blackburn, a friend from prep school and Harvard whom Johnson had brought into the museum administration. Blackburn was a practical-minded organizer who served a purpose that others would fulfill throughout Johnson's life: the dedicated, methodical backup for his interests of the moment. Before the sudden departure from the museum, Johnson had begun independent design work, including Miesian apartment interiors in a Beekman Place building for his adventurous friend Edward Warburg, one of several Jewish friends who remained loyal following Johnson's fling with Nazi politics. Warburg felt that Johnson's "wires got crossed" in Germany through acquaintances he made there.

Warburg grew up in a Gothic mansion on upper Fifth Avenue but since college had been identified with modernist causes. With chagrin, one of his brothers described Eddie's chaste new Beekman Place apartment this way: "The whole place was so antiseptic that you have the feeling you're in a dairy. When you go into the bathroom, you don't expect the usual fixtures, you expect to find a separator."

The Warburg apartment brought Johnson his first notice as a designer in a 1935 House and Garden article, a modest beginning of publicity for one who was to be the most written-about architect of his time. Later, he and Warburg secured a U.S. visa for Josef Albers and his Jewish wife Anni, the Bauhaus artists and teachers desperate to escape Germany after the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Through Johnson's letters and influence, the Alberses located at a new, experimental school in a former religious retreat in the mountains near Ashville, North Carolina. Speaking little English, Anni and Josef Albers joined the small faculty of intellectuals at Black Mountain College in its first year, he as head of the art department and she as instructor in weaving. Josef Albers pumped energy into the avant-garde school with his Bauhaus teaching principles; Texan Robert Rauschenberg studied under Albers after the war and considered the time at Black Mountain as the defining experience in his beginnings as an artist. Before closing in 1956, the school's tiny, loosely structured art department, with students like Robert Motherwell, Jacob Lawrence, and Cy Twombly, served as lodestar for the postwar New York School in painting.

Johnson's attempt to find a teaching job in the United States for his first architectural hero J. J. P. Oud was unsuccessful. His second and most lasting design meister, Mies van der Rohe, soon came to the United States, through his and Alfred Barr's efforts, and settled in Chicago. Meanwhile, in bizarre juxtaposition, Johnson was being coached in fascist dogma. This duality, Johnson's need to be a leader and a follower, was manifest early and became an enduring aspect of his long life.

It was ironic that as Johnson was receiving the first public recognition of his talent as a designer, the contrarian in him spun him in the opposite direction to pursue a perverse political grail devoid of art. Johnson and Blackburn's abandonment of the Museum of Modern Art, the flagship of culture on which they served, to organize a right-wing political party was front-page news in New York and Cleveland. Jeannette Dempsey says that it caused embarrassment to the family and her husband turned his back on her brother. Johnson and Blackburn impetuously headed down to Louisiana in Johnson's big Packard to meet Governor Huey P. Long, described by some as the nation's "down-home fascist."

The backwoods Populist was an odd choice for veneration by Johnson. Long, nicknamed "The Kingfish," gave fist-pounding "share the wealth" speeches, taunting the nation's big names and demanding they use their riches to feed the hungry: "What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller going to do with all that grub? We got to call Mr. Rockefeller and say, come back he-ah!" With Johnson's refined, privileged background, it was a peculiar juxtaposition indeed. More puzzling was his sudden espousal of radical social causes after shunning them in the European modern architecture movement.

Johnson recalls that "It was the depths of the Depression and the country was going to pot and no one could do anything about it. FDR seemed powerless. People were hungry on the streets of the richest country in the world. It was absurd." But Long's shirt-sleeved staff turned the eager Ivy Leaguers back—they never saw Long—and Johnson and Blackburn later drove across the country's highways in a futile quest for support for their hazy cause. Johnson returned with Blackburn to Ohio and tried running the family farm from the two-story white frame Johnson home on New London's Main Street. He put a modernist mark on the old house by knocking out two facing walls in the living room and installing large, floor-length plate glass. Restless in the rural village, Johnson involved himself in the politics of the fifteen-hundred-citizen town, getting on its park board, trying to organize a milk strike by dairy farmers, and signing up, then backing out from, running for the Ohio legislature. Huey Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge in 1935, and Johnson and Blackburn's Young Nationalist Party sputtered out in a few months. Blackburn married a local girl and returned to New York.

The contrast of this series of failed ventures with Johnson's achievements in New York as curator, scholar, and man-about-the-arts was striking, baffling, and depressing to those close to him. Apart from the egregious moral aspect, Johnson's stray wanderings constituted a record of failure and misjudgment in realms outside the reach of the high-strung esthete that Johnson so clearly was. But oddly enough he returned once more to Germany in 1939 as war enveloped Europe. Curious to see the political spectacle again, he finally "saw" and returned to America shaken by the appalling implications of the Nazi "new world order."

Today Johnson is hard put to rationalize this still agonizing and strange interlude. He offers: "There was this strong desire to change the world. Most of my friends wanted to do the same thing but through communism or socialism. I went the other way and I cannot explain it or atone for the fact. "'8 From advocating changing the world artistically through architecture, he had inexplicably shifted to a course of radically addressing the nation's domestic problems politically. In both spheres he was drawn to foreign ideas and leadership that were revolutionary and absolutist. The pull of these disparate magnets of art and politics was conditioned by a pervasive steeping in German culture at home and abroad during his youth, and by a weakness for authoritative certitude of the broad-stroke variety. Friendships in Germany played a part.

Sensing finally the enormity of where Hitler's Germany was going, and chastened by the pursuit of a poisonous political quarry, he came back to New York and soon applied to Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) to study architecture. In his absence a striking Museum of Modern Art building had been completed at 11 West Fifty-third Street, designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, and he could have regained his position there. But his life as critic and neophyte designer had been on hold during his political maladventures, and he yearned to regain his bearings and return to his original passion, architecture. He wanted to be a creator of modern buildings, not just their connoisseur. He still enjoyed friendship and counsel from Alfred Barr, who urged him on to become a real architect. Referring to Johnson's conflicting roles as designer and critic, the grand old architect Frank Lloyd Wright said, "Philip, you can't carry water on both shoulders! "'9 So in the fall of 1940, at age thirty-four, he nervously returned to Harvard, putting the recent past behind him, and started a new life. But his abject failure at politics and the accumulating darkness in Europe would haunt him forever. It's doubtful that he knew what Theodore Roosevelt had once written to the poet Edward Arlington Robinson, that a "devil masters each of us," but that "it is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts."

Johnson recalls that the train trip from New York to Boston was nervewracking. Here he was, feeling that he was approaching middle age, having left the lofty position of Museum of Modern Art curator for a disastrous exploit, the implications of which would magnify and cling to him. He was still an intellectual of repute and a self-styled scholar on matters of modernism, but with a paltry résumé in the matter of design, presumptuously enrolling in the nation's leading school of architecture with a group of college kids. And there was the problem of drawing ability: he had none. "I never could draw. It has always been a terrible handicap!" he recalled fifty years later. But Marcel Breuer, a Gropius colleague and Bauhaus émigré, who now taught architecture at Harvard under Gropius, respected Johnson's reputation as a champion of modern architecture, International Style; it preceded him quite handsomely. The Harvard carpet was out for "our friend," Mr. Philip Johnson, and his acceptance as a graduate student in architecture was engineered smoothly without the requisite test. No one mentioned the recent political aberration, and when Johnson confessed to Breuer that he couldn't draw a line, the Hungarian architect asked Johnson to move his hands and fingers, then observed, "They work all right, I don't see any problem."

Johnson immediately rented a two-story house on Cambridge's Memorial Drive and before long was entertaining lavishly by penny-wise Harvardian terms. Carter H. Manny Jr. was an architecture undergraduate much taken with Johnson and wrote home about lunch at Johnson's, "Has a maid and the whole works ... beautiful china, silverware, etc.... but he is too much an aristocrat architect, caring nothing for practicality or cost" and "This guy must be made of money, for he spends it like a drunken sailor." There were doubtless others there with Johnson's wealth, but no one else showed or shared it with his panache: everything was first-class for the younger students that gravitated to the gregarious champion of modern architecture. I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Paul Rudolph were Gropius's students at the time who came to know Johnson in Cambridge and later developed celebrated practices in New York, often competing with him for prestigious design commissions. Also enrolled were future architecture notables Ulrich Franzen, Eliot Noyes, John Johansen, and fellow Ohioan Landes Gores, whom Johnson later drew into his first architectural office as a partner. A young patrician Houstonian, Hugo V. Neuhaus Jr., a Yale graduate, was among this group, as was Thomas M. Price, who would later be Galveston's foremost modernist architect.

With characteristic brio, Johnson charged into academic life, adapting his seniority smoothly into the student fabric. In 1992, John Johansen recalled:

He was an unusual character as a student—there was his age and his experience at the Museum of Modern Art—he was certainly more of a scholarof the modern movement than any of the rest of us. He fitted in very well however, didn't stand above or to the side of us in the studios, though the wealth showed through in the off-campus entertaining that he loved to do. We didn't see him as having much talent and didn't take him seriously as a designer. Dealing with ideas and esthetics and getting a degree—and having fun doing it—seemed to be his main objective.

Johnson soon started an unusual project: for his graduate thesis, he got permission from Breuer and Gropius to design and build a house for himself there in the middle of Cambridge. The many hours of tedious drafting required for a studio thesis were circumvented with the extraordinary idea. With no shortage of confidence or money, Johnson hired draftsmen to prepare construction drawings, and the house on a corner of Ash Street was completed in 1942.

Houston architect Anderson Todd, a professor of architecture at Rice University, recounts that while a Princeton undergraduate he was a visitor to Cambridge one weekend for a date with a Barnard student. While wandering through the Graduate School of Design studio on a Saturday afternoon he paused to study an unusual drawing on one of the drafting tables. A voice behind him said, "What do you think of it?" Without turning Todd asked, "I think it's great but what is it?" Philip Johnson replied, "It's my house. Do you want to come see it? I'm moving in today." Todd declined, explaining that he had a date that afternoon. Johnson asked, "Is she rich?" Todd nodded. "Is she pretty?" Another nod. "Then bring her along!" Johnson declared. Later in the afternoon Todd and his date went to the sparkling little house on Ash Street, and while Todd helped Johnson's manservant unpack boxes, Johnson served cocktails to the charmed Barnard woman.

Johnson's house soon became a social focus of the architecture faculty and young students who were lucky enough to be included in its soirees. According to Johansen, the house made Philip Johnson Harvard's most popular "salon-keeper." Drinks and hot hors d'oeuvres, served by the servant, were as plentiful and tasty as the gossipy chitchat. Johnson's role as munificent elder among equals has stayed with him all of his life, possibly filling something missing from his friendless youth. Ulrich Franzen remembers how the small, spare dwelling, modeled after one of Mies's courtyard houses, had a big impact on the Harvard intellectuals. "It was very simple and very beautiful," he recalls. The structure, a flat, wood-framed rectangular box with a wall of glass along one side facing a high-fenced, street-side courtyard, was an exciting thing for the tradition-bound area of Cambridge around Harvard Square, or, for that matter, anywhere in urban America. The anonymity of the blank wall of striated plywood on the street was a polemical statement in a city with a heritage of colonial boxes of brick and clapboard set in a greensward. Franzen goes on, "It was the first time that I saw someone walk into a glass wall. The person fell to the floor more or less unconscious and I remember Philip looking very annoyed and saying something like 'damn fool!'"

When Johnson graduated in 1943 he sold the house for $24,000, close to what it cost him to build. Many people, including Gropius, did not much like the house, either through pique over the "splash" caused by a rich, bright graduate student or, in Gropius's case, because of personal differences with Mies, Johnson's hero, or even abhorrence of Johnson's political past. Johansen added, "The house was stunning, it shocked us that he had that kind of money! I remember someone saying, 'What good luck! He'll never do it that well again!'" Yet even today, a half-century later, Johnson bemoans the shallow roof overhang on the house's sides and rear: designers' regrets die hard.

After Harvard and before joining the wartime army, Johnson designed a modest, modern equipment barn for his family at Townsend Farms. He is rueful that it was the only building that he was asked to do in his hometown area." ForyearsCleveland never asked me back. I had been politically naughty," he recalls.z' Most of his time in the service was spent doing menial jobs like "peeling potatoes and the other things that army privates do," Johnson says, but he looks back on the experience with an appreciation of the broadening effect that lower-echelon military life had on his outlook. He believes his prewar political activity, which caused the FBI to start a file on him, prevented his being promoted above the rank of private.

After doing the required army time, Johnson returned to New York and set himself up as an "independent designer," first as a one-man office in a Lexington Avenue apartment, later in larger quarters on East Forty-second Street. At Alfred Barr's insistence, he resumed his job at the Museum of Modern Art directing the Department of Architecture. Also at the museum was returned war veteran Eliot Noyes, a bright, attractive Harvard acquaintance of Johnson's, who was to be the museum's first Director of Industrial Design. In 1940, with the help of Johnson and architect Wallace Harrison, Barr had lured Noyes away from Gropius and Breuer's Cambridge office to work in New York at the museum. During the war, Noyes became a glider pilot stationed in Washington and occupied a Pentagon office next to Thomas Watson 1r. Watson would become head of IBM and Noyes's leading client when Noyes left the museum and started his practice in Connecticut.

All of Johnson's acquaintances at Harvard were soon established in New York, beginning or furthering their careers in architecture. Looking back, it was a hopeful time in America's cultural and financial capital as the nation shook off its wartime attitudes, and plans for resumption, renewal, and expansion of prewar ideas found life in the art and architecture world. The public, with a lingering postwar energy, was primed for the Now. Critic Robert Hughes observes that postwar America "fell in love with modernism." After the army, Johnson reconnected in New York with his old network of prim, monied culture, along with the offbeat Bohemia of Manhattan creative life. As before, Alfred Barr remained the articulate, eagle-eyed bridge between the two.

Johnson made new friends among the advancing postwar cultural elite, both up- and downtown. One was the sculptor Mary Callery, whom he met at an East Hampton cocktail party in 1947. Callery had left a studio overlooking the Seine in wartime Paris as the Germans advanced and returned to New York. With her was an important collection of paintings: "more Picassos than anyone in America" was the word at the Museum of Modern Art. Callery was also acquainted with New York architects, meeting Wallace Harrison, who was in Paris in 1927 with his wife Ellen Milton Harrison, a Long Island childhood friend of Callery's. Wally and Ellen Harrison were introduced to her Paris artist friends Henri Matisse, Alexander Calder, Fernand Lèger, and Aristide Maillol, Wally Harrison became a lifelong friend of Calder and Lèger's and a robust advocate of the best art for the big buildings he would later design. Harrison recalled that Mary Callery was "the most elegant and beautiful woman he had ever met." He remembered the vision of her "in a green dress, wearing an emerald the size of your fist."

Tall, blonde, and striking, Callery was born in New York in 1904 and raised by wealthy parents in Pittsburgh and Manhattan. Besides being worldly, smart, and talented, she was fun and had money. When she and Johnson met, her elongated, figurative bronzes were being exhibited and receiving critical acclaim at the best New York galleries like Curt Valentin and Sidney Janis. She embodied both of the social poles that Johnson was drawn to: cultured old money and avant-garde creativity. Johnson had already heard about her trove of paintings through the alert Alfred Barr, and she and Philip immediately became very close friends, enjoying each other's company as often as possible over drinks and dinner. Twice married and divorced, and with a strong, independent, slightly Bohemian streak, Mary was one of a number of bright, attractive women that Johnson has held in close affection throughout his life. Of no small significance in her appeal to Johnson was the fact that after Johnson introduced them, she carried on a casual, romantic affair with Mies van der Rohe, his hero of the time. Mies designed a studio for her in Huntington, Long Island.

Certainly Mary Callery had a way with artists and architects, particularly men. Rumors of her liaisons with Lèger and Pablo Picasso followed her to New York. In the early 1940s, when Callery returned from Paris, architect Wallace Harrison had become a major player in the city's corporate architectural world. He was a Rockefeller intimate through his wife Ellen, whose brother was married to Abby Rockefeller, the oldest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. Harrison was the Rockefeller "court architect" and would, with a number of partners, undertake many large projects for various members of the family, beginning with Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, continuing with the United Nations Headquarters in the 1950s and Lincoln Center in the 1960s, and ending with Governor Nelson Rockefeller's enormous South Mall complex in Albany in the 1970s. Harrison would include the work of Lèger and Calder and other leading artists in his buildings and commissioned Mary Callery for a sculpture above the proscenium of the new Metropolitan Opera in Lincoln Center. In the late 1940s, Johnson's social chum became the cohesive figure responsible for Johnson's introduction to a Texas patronage that would be crucial to his fame and the architectural history of that state.

With his Harvard classmate Landes Gores now in his office to translate design sketches into working drawings, Johnson began getting a few commissions to design houses near New York City, the first for some people named Booth, who, Johnson remembers, "just walked into the museum one day and asked me to design a house for them in Westchester County. We talked about how much money it would cost, they said they couldn't afford it and they were right." Its construction was not completed as drawn.

Another was for Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Farney, who were introduced to Johnson by his sister Theodate. Their 1947 house is located on a dune facing eastward to the Atlantic in Sagaponack, Long Island. Crisp, boxy, and wood-sheathed, the symmetrical H-shaped house is raised on wooden log piers above the sand and reflects aspects of Miesian design ideas and Breuer's Harvard teaching. Like many of Johnson's early houses, it has been altered.

While he was being asked to design a few residences, Johnson was also writing the first book about Mies van der Rohe, who was teaching and living in Chicago. In the late 1930s Johnson and Barr were instrumental in getting Mies out of Germany and into the United States. He was Barr's choice, and failed candidate, to design the new museum building on West Fifty-third Street. Then, through Barr, he was considered for a chair in Design at Harvard, something Mies quashed because Walter Gropius also wanted the job. Loyalty to the former Bauhaus head wasn't the issue; Mies felt the school should simply hire him. Soon Barr scored for Mies by convincing Mrs. Stanley Resor, a museum trustee, to hire Mies to design a summer house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That got him to America. It was 1937 and the German master of Sachlichkeit, little known in the United States, sailed away from Nazi Germany to reconnoiter and sink roots in America's huge, varied world. In only a few weeks, he traveled west to see the Resors' site facing the Tetons and started a design for them. Mies was received warmly by the formidable, "anti-European" Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in Wisconsin, and also accepted the director's post at the School of Architecture of the Armour Institute in Chicago (later the Illinois Institute of Technology [11T]), all without being able to speak a full sentence of English.

Meanwhile in New York, drawings were signed "Philip Johnson, Designer," and Johnson had run afoul of New York State's building authorities since he did not have a license to practice architecture in the state. Legally he was not a real architect. He was told that he could no longer operate an architectural office without accreditation, so in late 1950 Johnson and Landes Gores packed up and moved his small office to a two-story red-brick building on the main street of the quiet, colonial-era Connecticut village of New Canaan. Gores already lived there. (After moving, Johnson failed the New York licensing exam repeatedly until, with tutoring, he passed it some years later.) The idyllic little town, an hour's drive north from the city, was already home to a handful of young Harvard-educated architects beginning their way as artist/professionals.

Eliot Noyes had moved his family out of New York and started an architectural office in New Canaan in 1947 with an IBM contract. He had discovered the charms of bucolic New Canaan from the air while looking for land to purchase for his family's house. He landed his rented plane and picked out some property from one of the numerous plots of rolling, open land around the village and soon started construction on a simple flat-roofed house, whose design was derived from the Harvard-Bauhaus teachings of Breuer and Gropius. Years later Noyes would recall that he was afraid to show the model of the house to his New Canaan neighbors: "There were no modern houses here then."

Boston-born and personable, Noyes set up a small office as architect and industrial designer and, according to Johnson, became the "lodestar" that drew the Harvard group of architects one by one out of New York. In Johnson's case it was a favor returned: Noyes's interest in modern architecture began many years before in the early 1930s at Harvard before the German émigrés arrived and made their mark. Johnson, an articulate and well-traveled fellow undergraduate and still a philosophy major, impressed Noyes back then as he expounded on the merits of the European modern architecture he had seen and the lack of important, relevant design at Harvard.

Following Noyes to the Connecticut countryside was his and Johnson's former teacher Marcel Breuer, who continued to commute to a New York office. In 1947, Breuer built a small frame hillside house marked with a dramatic cantilever. It was publicized widely with stunning photographs by Ezra Stoller. Next came Johnson's partner Landes Gores and John Johansen, both of whom joined Breuer and Noyes in building modern houses that conceded nothing to the semirural colonial fabric of shuttered, two-story white clapboard. "Packing boxes" was the natives' term for the flat-roofed intruders. The last to come was Johnson, who was drawn to New Canaan because Breuer, his erstwhile Harvard mentor, was there. Soon all would have client houses to design in the area.

The reunited college modernists, separated by the war after Harvard, shared a belief in the future of modern architecture. They were cordial competitors and came together with their wives for evenings of talk, food, and drink, with accordion music often provided by Noyes, the congenial catalyst for the gathering of talent. New Canaan clients joined the high-spirited gettogethers, which were often dominated by Johnson's witty intellect and brittle repartee. He was the peripatetic ringleader of the quiet, leafy New Canaan scene of ambitious young architects and their brave wives and adventurous clients. Though the architects and their clients felt they were "in front" with modern design, none knew they were unwitting players in a broad popular revolution. The war's upheaval of old ways—social, political, and cultural—affected the timeworn conventions of all architectural design, houses as well as high rises. The insular little town of New Canaan was soon to become, quite ingenuously, the cusp and reference point for modern design for much of the United States.

Prior to moving his office to New Canaan, Johnson was busy performing the juggling act at which he thrived: mornings in his small office on East Forty-second Street, then uptown ten blocks in the afternoon to the museum, where he headed its Department of Architecture as a "noble obligation," and finally evenings out on the town. Johnson wrote the Mies book with the master's cooperation, traveling often to Chicago to interview him, studying his buildings in progress on the IIT campus and looking at the plans for unbuilt projects, particularly a steel-framed glass-walled house to be built near the Fox River outside of Chicago for a lady named Edith Farnsworth.

Johnson's book was published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition there of the German-American's work. After completing the book Johnson spent a year preparing this major exhibition of the German master's work, which Mies himself designed. The personal wealth Johnson enjoyed afforded him a freedom none of his peers in the creative world had, though he never for a moment chose a life of leisure: working, creating, instructing, and planning filled his time and would always. His after-hour social life was varied and active as ever, seeing Mary Callery several times a week for cocktails and art-world gossip. Soon after he introduced Mies to Callery, she was on Mies's arm at the opening of his big exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

After Johnson's move to New Canaan Noyes soon talked him into looking for sites for a house and arranged for a realtor to show him around. "It was the first piece of property that was shown to me," Johnson recalls, "five acres of tall, dense scrub and large trees sloping down from an old stone wall on the road. There was an open, flat area on a bluff looking west with a grand view of the broad Rippowam Valley. I liked it immediately and didn't look any further." He bought it an hour later.

Landes Gores recalled visiting the site on Thanksgiving Day with Philip, his sister Theodate, and Pam Gores:

Philip's excitement was easily understood once we passed through the opening in the tumbled down old farmer's wall along Ponus Street and the indifferent woods, doubtless third growth and principally of ash. At once we were struck by the distant prospect of what we would later recognize as High Ridge in North Stamford.

But we had seen nothing yet, Philip avowed, the place for his house was definitely not near the road, though this was the highest point. Down a long slope, the land flattened out, and, beyond another farmer's wall with a central gap, a virtually flat promontory stretched well over a hundred feet in each axis. For panorama the view yielded nothing to the prospect from higher up, but the topographical setting had gained a hundredfold. All three projecting faces consisted of gigantic rock chunks. The prow was virtually treeless, curiously so against the dense, spindly thicket all along the downslope. Beyond the rock ramparts rose a profusion of mature hardwoods below the dropoff to the Rippowam River valley that was so sharp and commanding, we gasped, inwardly at least: Philip had surely hit the jackpot this time.

For several years Johnson had been making rude little sketches of a plethora of schemes for a country house, briefly considering New Jersey for its location. The designs derived from the European court-house designs of Mies van der Rohe. For two years Landes Gores worked from time to time on almost eighty schemes, most of them under Johnson's direction. Out of twentysome clearly distinguishable approaches emerged the final scheme, an indication of the thoroughness of Johnson's search for the correct solution for his own house, and the uncertainty of a forty-year-old novice with more creative knowledge than creative means. But he had time and money to burn devising his personal statement.

According to Gores the idea of a house with glass exterior walls had intrigued Johnson since 1945, when he bought the property, but its technical feasibility eluded him until he saw Mies's all-glass scheme in early 1946. Most of the earliest sketches for his house beginning in 1945 employed glass walls with masonry, either as enclosures or dividers, in compositions of dual elements. Masonry arches, a modernist anomaly, appear in several sketches. In 1946, after his hard look at Mies's steel-and-glass design for Miss Farnsworth, Johnson focused on an all-glass design and spent several weeks with Gores on plan and siting considerations before a final resolution was reached. Construction began in early 1948 with New Canaan's best contractor.

Professor Eugene George, a native of Wichita Falls, Texas, and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, was a Harvard GSD student in 1949. He recalls that his heroes in architecture were Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, and especially Marcel Breuer, his favorite professor in the GSD. He went down to New Canaan with three others to see Breuer's and Noyes's houses. "We called up Johnson and asked if we could see his house," George recalls.

The New Yorker and other magazines were already running glass-house cartoons and we were interested in seeing it. Johnson said, "Come on over!" The place was not finished; site work and landscaping and the little brick guest house were not complete but Johnson was living in the glass house and very cordial to us. It was a wet and bitter-cold day-he cautioned us to not track mud on the stone steps-and it was my first experience with radiant floor heating, which warmed the brick herringbone floor. The impression I had inside was being protected in the midst of a forest. It was sort of a "fireplace in the woods"; the brick cylinder dominated the transparent box. All the Mies furniture was in place and Johnson immediately credited the German master as inspiration for everything that we saw.

He confided in us, "After the steel framework for the house was erected, I got up on the roof and shifted my weight back and forth, which caused the steel columns and beams to rack and move back and forth with my weight. I thought I had made a big mistake until the glass was installed and everything stiffened up."

Finished, it was two structures: one a transparent, rectilinear cage near the bluff's edge, framed in steel, raised slightly on a brick stylobate, with glass doors centered on its four facades. The other piece was an opaque, all-brick linear block, off-axis with its vitreous companion thirty yards away. A centered slab door and three large round windows marked its west and east facades, respectively. It served as a guest house and housed mechanical equipment, a not unfitting adjunct role for the mute, menial structure. Before the glass house was finished, Johnson asked Mary Callery up to New Canaan on New Year's Eve 1948, the day he moved in. "We had a martini or two or five and toasted the new year and my new place and Mary ended up spending the night, sharing my platonic bed. She was my first and favorite guest," he recalled many years later.

When people saw the two completed buildings, the all-glass dwelling created a sensation in both the popular and professional press: it was simultaneously icon and iconoclast. While the derivation from Mies van der Rohe was obvious, it was too simple a conclusion to describe Johnson's glass house as a knockoff. The design for both Johnson structures was static and centered in a classical way, unlike the asymmetry Mies employed in his residential designs. What was dynamic in Johnson's composition was the arrangement of parts on the site: the glass house, guest house, a sculpture podium, the diagonal connecting paths, and the entry drive. A brick cylinder containing the fireplace and a bathroom was located off-center in the glass-walled 56' x 32' x 10'-6" space as counterpoint to the taut orthogonality of the bold, matterof-fact one-room house. Freestanding cabinets of walnut articulated the bedroom and kitchen parts of the completely unfettered plan.

In 1950, the British journal Architectural Review published an eight-page article simply entitled "House in New Canaan, Connecticut" and generously illustrated it with plans and photographs. Johnson wrote the commentary for the piece and referenced no less than nine sources for the design. This was the age of the heroic, authoritarian creator exemplified bythearchitect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. No architect credited his design's antecedents. It was an attractive and unique trait of Johnson's to credit his sources, now a common practice among critics and many architects. For the article he summoned up names as varied as nineteenth-century German NeoClassicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Le Corbusier, Russian abstract painter Kasimir Malevich, and the classical historian Choisy, in addition to Mies van der Rohe. It could be read as a designer's full disclosure or scholarly name-dropping. When Howard Roark's model, the venerable old individualist Frank Lloyd Wright, who kept a covert, squinted eye on European design developments, was asked if the motifs in the paintings of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt were not the source of Wright's geometric glass designs, he replied that "the exposure to Klimt had 'refreshed' his work."

In October 1949, House and Garden gave Johnson's house a ten-page spread. It was the second article about Johnson in a national periodical but the first of the hundreds of major pieces that would be written about him during the next fifty years. After noting how the house "of timeless elegance and classic simplicity" astonished the residents of Connecticut's Fairfield County, it made the first reference in print to Johnson's personality and unique view of modern architecture: "Philip Johnson is a man who combines warmth and sensitivity with a restless intellect, impatient of bromides." It went on prophetically, "His interest in architecture being scholarly as well as creative, he feels no compunction about looking backward for inspiration."

The neighbors did not appreciate the numbers of sightseers who began to invade their village. They came every weekend to stretch a look over the high stone wall on Ponus Ridge Road at the extraordinary transparent dwelling standing in lonely splendor with its masonry partner on the bluff facing the valley and wooded hills. Modern house tours became an annual, moneyraising event beginning in the spring of 1949 when seven houses by Noyes, Breuer, Gores, and others were shown to over a thousand visitors. Four years later the seven original houses had quadrupled, and New Canaan became "the place to see" among the architecturally literate. A joke made the rounds about a lonely Texas rancher who went to New York's Time Square one Sunday to meet people and found the streets empty. He asked a policeman where everyone was and the officer replied, "The Catholics are in church, the Protestants are on the golf course, and the Jews are up in New Canaan looking at modern houses." While Jewish clients have been leading patrons of vanguard architecture, there is an acrid irony here: New Canaan at the time still had restrictions against non-Anglo-Saxons. The tight, tucked-back hamlet reluctantly received media coverage and the subsequent sightseers, with the center-stage Glass House receiving most of the attention. Critics recognized it early as a classic, a modern landmark.

Johnson enjoyed entertaining at his house. Nancy Millar O'Boyle of Dallas recalls that in the early 1950s, while she was still at Smith College, the young Dallas architect Enslie Oglesby was in New York and suggested that the two drive up to New Canaan to see Philip Johnson's house. It was summer and they put the top down on Nancy's convertible for the trip up the Merritt Parkway. Oglesby used a pay phone on New Canaan's Main Street to call Johnson. "Hello Mr. Johnson, I'm an architect from Texas and I would love to see your house." Johnson replied, "Of course, come on out. It's very kind of you to call, most people just drive in and gawk!" Oglesby and O'Boyle went out to Ponus Ridge and were received with great hospitality by Johnson and invited to join the group there enjoying a poetry reading."

Nina Bremer, a longtime New Canaan resident and owner of one of Eliot Noyes's first houses, recalls being with Johnson and George Howe at an informal party at the Breuers one evening in the early 1950s. Howe was the esteemed Philadelphia architect who, with William Lescaze, designed the landmark modernist PSFS Building there and was then chairman of Yale's Department of Architecture. When Johnson and Howe left the Breuers to have dinner at Johnson's house, they took Nina Bremer with them. She recounts that Philip had made the place magical with dozens of votive lights placed next to the glass walls, had classical music on the phonograph, and had a dinner of perfection served by two waiters. Johnson, in his forties, and Howe, in his sixties, spent a good deal of time at dinner talking about their psychiatrists.

Johnson continued his curatorship at the Museum of Modern Art by commuting to and from Connecticut. He was "hot" now, proving himself to the public, if maybe not completely to himself, as a serious, possibly important, architect, a builder of buildings, not just a theorist. There was a lot of talk about the exceptional place he had built for himself in New Canaan, and because of this and the social contacts at the museum, he gained important commissions in the 1950s from MoMA and the Rockefellers. For this, he received criticism. There was truth enough that he obtained the museum commissions via his connections there, but with his intellect and enthusiasm Johnson has had a lifelong affinity for connecting up with wealthy people of taste and ambition. The museum affiliation was secondary.

As the publicity mounted around his exceptional dwelling, Johnson began to entertain there, conducting what has been described as America's only architectural salon. Students, architects, and critics like Yale's Vincent Scully visited there often for food, drink, and chat, continuing Johnson's familiar penchant for hosting.

Dallasite James Reece Pratt, a student at Harvard's GSD in the 1950s, was a part of several groups who traveled frequently down to New Canaan from Cambridge and New Haven. "There was a wonderful richness in the Glass House," Pratt recalls.

I remember first going there in 1952 with the Master's Class on a crisp fall day at the height of the leaves and being enthralled with the reflections of red, wine, orange, green and yellow leaves bouncing around in the glass, contrasting against that black frame with the real leaves beyond.

Another time, a warm summer night, I remember eating crème brûlée at a party for the historian Nikolaus Pevsner and watching the sky turn red from inside that transparency until the light faded and the flickering images of the guests grew stronger in the darkening glass. Philip of course had lighted the surrounding green podium to prevent the glass walls from going completely black. I went outside, and as I stood looking back in at the tableau vivant, fireflies looped around me.

On that trip to New Canaan, Pratt visited Johnson's second-story offices on Main Street. "I was impressed by [their] absolute order. There was nothing out, everything was in drawers, behind doors, and put away. Not a scrap of a sketch do I remember, only an impression of space as a light minimalist abstraction with many cupboards and drawers. There were only two people there."

Soon Johnson was at work on a 1950 addition to the museum, a sevenstory black-steel and glass Miesian infill north of the West Fifty-third Street facade; it was demolished in 1981 for museum expansion. The outdoor space for sculpture between the original building and West Fifty-fourth Street was replaced by Johnson in 1953 by the highly praised Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He designed a serene urban space, or rather a series of spaces, subtly defined by groups of trees (European weeping beeches and birches, and Japanese andromedas), linear pools of water, and a fourteen-foot-high brick wall on West Fifty-fourth Street. The composition of the parts harks back to the sliding planes of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. The floor of the 80' x 200' space is paved with large slabs of a boldly marked grey-and-white marble ("It was cheap,"Johnson says) and articulated by level changes which make the space seem larger than it is. Being three feet lower than the museum's lobby floor gives the visitor a subtly orienting overview of the richness of the design. When Johnson is reminded of his claim to being a better landscape architect than architect, he says, "It is all the same art."

One day in the late 1940s on the museum elevator, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III asked Johnson to recommend an architect for her proposed town house, to be built for guests across midtown on East Fifty-second Street. When Johnson began listing names, Blanchette Rockefeller interrupted, saying, "Philip, you are an architect, why don't you design the house?" And he did.

Later, in 1957, he designed a private art gallery for Nelson Rockefeller. There were other jobs for the museum down the line, the most notable being the 1964 East Wing and extension of the Sculpture Garden.

Two exceptional Texans who often visited New York in the late 1940s were Dominique and Jean de Menil of Houston, recent French-American émigrés of impeccable social and cultural pedigree. She was a Schlumberger and a meditative intellectual, whose father and uncle pioneered and developed the world's most sophisticated system for subsurface oil discovery. Jean, also an intellectual, was a passionate and charming outgoing Parisian who, with his wife, shared an enthusiasm for modern art. Artist friends of the de Menils in New York and Paris were numerous. One was Johnson's friend Mary Callery, who was closely connected to the Paris and New York art worlds. In 1948, Callery was asked by Jean de Menil to recommend an architect for a modern house he planned to build for his growing family in Houston.

Mary Callery lived and worked in a converted garage in Manhattan in the East Thirties below Murray Hill, and it was there that Philip Johnson and Jean de Menil met and were charmed by each other. The architect, competent in French, had an exceptional background in the European culture of art and architecture but had no résumé as an architect. What he had was a bright, engaging, and confident personality and a grounded position in New York's contemporary art world, of which the Museum of Modern Art was the center. Being a trustee at the museum was a goal of Jean de Menil's. In addition, word of Johnson's revolutionary new house was creating a stir in the New York circles to which de Menil gravitated. Both men had magnetic, enthusiastic, and outspoken personalities; each had something the other wanted. Mary Callery's art-filled studio was a perfect setting for the meeting.

Johnson recalls, "Mary had wonderful taste, the place was immaculately laid out, and the living part where we had cocktails was lovely. Her bedroom was upstairs but the lower level was like the converted lofts you see today, but with all these wonderful paintings she had brought back from Europe. I recall many Picassos and a number of Lègers and a Matisse. Her tidy studio was in the rear and it was all attractive and neat. She was very beautiful, you know."

Soon plans were made for Johnson to visit Houston to meet Dominique. When asked later if he had been excited about doing something so far away from New York, he replied without hesitation: "You bet I was excited-my first important house and in Texas to boot!" The trip to the Southwest and the growing relationship with Dominique and Jean de Menil would lead to a half-century saga of architectural triumph and controversy for Johnson in Texas, the state which epitomized brash independence and bold ventures, a myth and state of mind far removed from the refined East Coast world of art and academia that had sustained and nurtured the forty-one-year-old transplanted Midwesterner.