page_title: Philip Johnson
section_title: Early life and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition
hierarchical_section_title: Philip Johnson / Early life and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Philip Johnson
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: Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, the son of a lawyer, Homer Hosea Johnson (1862–1960), and the former Louisa Osborn Pope (1869–1957), a niece of Alfred Atmore Pope and a first cousin of Theodate Pope Riddle. He had an older sister, Jeannette, and a younger sister, Theodate. He was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He grew up in New London, Ohio and attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University where he focused on learning Greek, philology, history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Upon completing his studies in 1927,  he made a series of trips to Europe, visiting the landmarks of classical and Gothic architecture, and joined Henry-Russell Hitchcock, a prominent architectural historian, who was introducing Americans to the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other modernists.  In 1928 he met German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition
  In 1930, Johnson joined the architecture department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he arranged for American visits by Gropius and Le Corbusier, and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe.  In 1932, working with Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., he organized the first exhibition on Modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. The show and their simultaneously published book International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922  played an important part in introducing modern architecture to the American public. His flirtation with fascism and the Nazi party was documented in Marc Wortman's 2016 book 1941: Fighting the Shadow War. It was excerpted by Vanity Fair magazine. When the rise of the Nazis in Germany forced the modernists Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe to leave Germany,  Johnson helped arrange for them to come to work in the United States.
  In 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he left the Museum of Modern Art for a brief venture into journalism and politics. He was a Nazi sympathizer and supported the populist Governor of Louisiana Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. Johnson traveled to Germany and Poland as a correspondent for Coughlin's radically populist and often anti-Semitic newspaper Social Justice.  In the newspaper, Johnson expressed, as the New York Times later reported, "more than passing admiration for Hitler". Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and, sponsored by the German government, covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. Many years later he told his biographer, Franz Schulze, "You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd," and told of being thrilled at the sight of "all those blond boys in black leather" marching past the Führer. Schulze dismissed these early political activities as inconsequential, concluding they merited "little more substantial attention than they have gained" and his politics "were driven as much by an unconquerable esthetic impulse as by fascist philosophy or playboy adventurism". 
  In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius.  In 1941, Johnson designed and actually built his first building, a house that still exists at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house, strongly influenced by Mies van der Rohe, has a wall around the lot which merges with the structure. It was used by Johnson to host social events and was eventually submitted as his graduate thesis; he sold the house after the War, and it was eventually purchased by Ha
caption: Johnson, by Carl Van Vechten January 18, 1933
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