page_title: Philip Johnson
section_title: Further development
hierarchical_section_title: Philip Johnson / Modernist period (1949–1979) / Further development
caption_attribution_description: Title: Architect Philip Johnson standing in front of Visvaldis Paukulis of Architects Design Group, Incorporated, and Erwin D. Canham, vice president of Boston Public Library's Board of Trustees, at approval of design of proposed addition to Central Library building Creator: City of Boston Date: 1967 February 1 Source: Mayor John F. Collins records, Collection #0244.001 File name: 244001_0314 Rights: Copyright City of Boston Citation: Mayor John F. Collins records, Collection #0244.001, City of Boston Archives, Boston
context_page_description: Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed for AT&T, and 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago.
  In 1978, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and in 1979 the first Pritzker Architecture Prize.
context_section_description: Following the Seagram Building, Johnson built several smaller projects in a more personal, expressive style, with ornament touches and features far from the sobriety of the modernist style; the Synagogue of Port Chester New York, with a plaster vaulted ceiling and narrow colored windows  (1954–56);  the Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska with an array of symmetrical arcs (1963); (the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana with a mushroom-shaped roof covered with wood shingles (1960). In 1960 he also built a severely modernist monastery building for in the expansion of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C.
  In the same period, Johnson won commissions to coordinate the master plan of Lincoln Center, New York City's new arts center, and to design that complex's New York State Theater, built in a massive and unadorned modernist style. He also undertook his first foreign commission, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld art museum in Bielefeld, Germany, with a modernist facade clad in dark red stone, and a modernist colonnade of slender pillars (1968).
  In 1967 Johnson entered a new phase of his career, founding a partnership with architect John Burgee.  Johnson and Burgee won commissions for a series of new skyscrapers.  including the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1973), and the two matching towers, facing each other like bookends, of Pennzoil Place in Houston, Texas.  The two towers of Pennzoil Place have sloping roofs covering the top seven floors and are trapezoidal in form, created to leave two large triangual areas on the site, which are occupied with glass-covered lobbies designed like greenhouses. This idea was widely copied in skyscrapers in other cities. 
  In the late 1970s Johnson applied landscape architecture to two significant projects in Texas. The Fort Worth Water Gardens opened in 1974, creating an urban landscape where visitors experience water in distinct ways. And in 1977 Johnson completed the spiraling white chapel and meditation garden at Thanks-Giving Square in Dallas.
caption: Johnson with plans for his Boston Central Library addition
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