Description

A “easily written and honest-minded” (Wall Boulevard Journal) biography of architect Philip Johnson — a finalist for the Nationwide E book Critic’s Circle Award.

Whilst Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was once nonetheless one of the recognizable and influential figures at the American cultural panorama. The primary recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA’s founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as considered one of The us’s top architects together with his well-known Glass Area in New Caanan, CT, and his debatable AT&T Construction in NYC, amongst many others in just about each town within the u . s . — However his so much herbal function was once as a consummate energy dealer and shaper of public opinion.

Johnson offered Eu modernism — the graceful, glass-and-metal structure that now dominates our towns — to The us, and mentored generations of architects, designers, and artists to observe. He outlined the technology of “starchitecture” with its flamboyant homes and famous person designers who esteemed aesthetics and elegance specifically different issues. However Johnson was once additionally a person of deep paradoxes: he was once a Nazi sympathizer, a fashion designer of synagogues, an enfant negative into his vintage age, a populist, and a snob. His purchasers ranged from the Rockefellers to televangelists to Donald Trump.

Award-profitable architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster’s The Guy within the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson’s debatable and forever contradictory existence to inform the tale of an enthralling but deeply wrong Guy. A rollercoaster story of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this E book probes the dynamics of American tradition that made him so robust, and tells the tale of the constructed setting in brand new The us.