M. David Samson
WPI

ABSTRACT

The young Philip Johnson's first career as a historian, exhibit designer and propagandist for modern architecture should be understood as the nexus of an internal conflict. Rather than simply presenting the architecture of others, especially Mies van der Rohe, through texts-the activity for which the young Johnson is best known--Johnson began to think of himself from an early stage as potentially an architect.

Johnson hesitated from 1929 and 1934 between three architectural identities for himself. As a historian, Johnson turned modernism into a bodiless sequence of images whose supporting texts fit them into a continuous flow of historical masterworks. As a nascent and intermittent designer, Johnson attempted to locate the body in space through rich and exciting sequences of wall and void. Third, as a journalist and public figure Johnson attacked existing design hierarchies through rhetoric he considered avant-garde. Two circumstances made Johnson's hesitation between these modes especially tense. Johnson considered himself a leader of a revolutionary cultural youth movement, which made the stakes of his engagement with architecture more fraught than for earlier, more conservative writer/designers such as Ralph Adams Cram or Fiske Kimball. He also found himself, as a recently self-realized homosexual, both attracted to and afraid of architecture's experience of the body in space.

In 1934 Johnson realized it was not possible for him to continue his balancing act between textual and architectural modes, and could not bring himself to choose between them. As a consequence, Johnson chose a new strategy for combining word and action: extremist political activism. Not until 1940 did he put architecture before text, beginning training as a professional architect.