About the Author

Franz Schulze is the Hollender Professor of Art Emeritus at Lake Forest College. His many books include Philip Johnson: Life and Work and, as coauthor, Chicago's Famous Buildings, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

Architectural critic, curator, and imagemaker of corporate America, Philip Johnson has had an amazingly diverse career spanning over six decades. Neither an innovator nor an imitator, Johnson has designed his share of architectural icons: the Glass House in Connecticut; the Seagram Building (in collaboration with Mies van der Rohe) and AT&T's Chippendale headquarters, both in New York; and the Dutch-gabled Republic Bank Center in Houston. This critical biography explores Johnson's early childhood in Cleveland; his years at Harvard, where he comes to terms with his homosexuality; and his brief involvement with the politics of Hitler in the 1930s. Schulze traces Johnson's passion for architecture, first as an influential critic and curator and later as an architect with a wealthy clientele. This immensely readable account of a complex, sometimes contradictory, yet always compelling man is highly recommended.-H. Ward Jandl, National Park Svc., Washington, D.C.

In a candid, revealing, major biography of one of the prime forces in American architecture, Schulze views Philip Johnson less as an original than as a pluralist who primarily followed, ratified and refined forms invented by others. The spoiled son of a prominent Cleveland family, Johnson (born in 1906) championed the geometrical International Style as architect, critic and Museum of Modern Art curator in Manhattan. Later he strived to free himself from the strictures of orthodox modernism. Schulze, biographer of Mies van der Rohe, divulges Johnson's tormented confrontation with his homosexuality while at Harvard. Johnson's plunge into right-wing politics between 1934 and 1945-including his fervid infatuation with Hitler, support of demagogue Huey Long and publication of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles in Father Charles Coughlin's hate-sheet Social Justice in 1939-comes under close scrutiny. In the 1990s, Johnson issued public apologies for his political past, yet his disdain of parliamentary government, his devotion to Nietzsche and his antirationalism, as revealed here, may fuel the debate over his life and his place in architectural history. Photos. (Nov.)