A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

THROWING STONES: As many of you heard two days ago, Philip Johnson, the unofficial dean of the American architecture establishment, died Wednesday, or possibly Tuesday night, at the tender age of one jillion. For those of you who believe that one should speak no ill of the dead, Johnson was probably best known for the AT&T building, which reintroduced the purely ornamental sculptural top to the modern skyscraper form. His most well-received work, however, may have been his first: his own home in New Canaan, a small glass box (minimally framed in steel atop a narrow brick-fronted concrete slab) on a low grassy hill punctuated with trees. Although the materials are thoroughly modern, the transparency and apparent weightlessness of the house draw the natural surroundings into and through the structure. Makes for pretty pictures and probably a neat place to do the NYT crossword on a spring morning.

For those of you who don't care about speaking ill of the dead, I will add that Johnson is one of those architects who feed the myth that the only important thing about a building is how it looks from the outside. His glass house is beautiful, but glass transfers heat (and cold), so the house is uninhabitable all winter and on most hot days. Johnson's skyscrapers also (necessarily) focused on the skin of a building, leaving the innards to be carved up by the developers and tenants.

Johnson was also a Big Idea guy (not one Big Idea -- I would say that he was the Madonna of architecture, except that there were others who fit the bill) whose big ideas didn't always translate. The idea of blowing up smaller architectural forms to skyscraper scale, for example, never did it for me -- things that feel perfectly normal when properly scaled to the human body can look grotesque (and childishly simple) when just blown up to 50x scale. The glass house creates two completely different kinds of theoretical problems. One is that you can take the transparency only so far -- even Johnson wanted his toilet hidden in a brick cylinder. The other is that the transparency is false -- easy to build a glass house where distance creates the privacy that walls don't; harder to do it in Park Slope.

One other thing about Johnson: his greatest work was a ripoff of Mies's Farnsworth House, which is superior because of the way it seems to float. There are a ton of other interesting things about Johnson, but I'll stick to the architecture here.