Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was an American architect and curator, born in Cleveland, Ohio. After studying at Harvard, he became the first director of the architecture department at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1930. In 1932 he organized the museum's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition with Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Alfred H. Barr Jr.; the book he wrote with Hitchcock that year, The International Style, gave European modernism that name in English.

He returned to Harvard to study architecture and finished in 1943. His own Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949), is a single room with glass walls on a steel frame. He worked with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building in New York (1958) and designed its Four Seasons restaurant. In 1979 he received the first Pritzker Architecture Prize.

From 1967 to 1991 he practiced in partnership with John Burgee, and from the late 1970s their designs borrowed historical forms, a direction known as postmodernism. The AT&T Building in New York (1984, now 550 Madison Avenue) is a pink granite tower topped by a broken pediment, a triangular gable with a gap at its peak. The partnership also built the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California (1980), and PPG Place in Pittsburgh (1984), a glass office complex with Gothic-style spires.