Whatever Johnson learned from either, he ruthlesslessly picked and chose. Johnson’s key contribution was the legendary Four Seasons Restaurant, an oasis of excess amid rectilinear Miesian splendor. It’s a commanding band of glass and black steel, rigorous elegance in built form. The Bauhaus leaders would be pillars of Johnson’s early career he studied under Gropius at Harvard, and collaborated with Mies on what would be his high-Modern calling card: The Seagram Building in New York, finished in 1958, Mies’s first American skyscraper of many.
For all his apologetic shrugs in the post-war aftermath, as late as 1964, he wrote to a friend about how Hitler was “better than Roosevelt,” with all his poor-pandering ways (as offensive a racist as Johnson was, he was equally classist). He was so enraptured, he went back to see the Fuhrer’s wild rantings at the Nuremberg rallies in 1938. In 1932, Johnson traveled to Potsdam, Germany, to hear Hitler speak at a National Socialist rally. Johnson’s early career in the 1930s included a stint as the lead designer of public rallies for Father Charles Coughlin, a Rush Limbaugh-esque figure with a popular radio show and a disdain for Jews, Mexicans, and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Which is why wiping away his name might be less useful than keeping it around for real scrutiny. Over the years, none really stuck, owing as much to Johnson’s public persona - he was a case study in how far charm could go in papering over transgression - as to a general ambivalence over laying our icons low. Johnson’s imprint is far too large, and frankly, too significant, to just go away. But naming rights in architecture - which, idealistically, is the practice of crafting the built environment for a social and aesthetic good - should be reserved for the virtuous, the Study Group argues, which Johnson is not.Įven so, erasure is not reckoning. Much more than Gauguin’s paintings, which still hang prominently in most of the museums that own them, often accompanied by labels amended to include his various offenses, Johnson’s buildings aren’t going anywhere. (See: His 1984 AT&T Building in New York, later known as the Sony Tower, to pick just one.)
The movement’s dissolution, largely, is on him, too, as built elegance gave way to postmodern schmaltz, which Johnson himself embraced and helped proliferate. More than anyone, American Modernism is Johnson’s progeny, shepherded from its origins in European proletarian goodwill to the safe haven of American corporate egomania, Johnson’s natural home. Johnson’s built legacy is far from universally great - as someone who spent a year working in one of his later buildings, the 1992 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s headquarters in Toronto, I know of what I speak - but he cuts an outsize figure in American culture all the same.
So the recent call for the removal of honorific mentions might be met less with “why” than “finally,” or more to the point, “why, finally, now?” That’s an easy enough answer, if you’ve been paying attention the past few years, as social justice movements have toppled monuments and put asterisks beside the names of long-untouchable artists as towering as Paul Gauguin (a syphilitic pedophile), Pablo Picasso (an abuser), and Edgar Degas (an anti-Semite).
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