It is an important building on many levels:
- For breaking the International Style's stranglehold that choked skylines the world over, a movement Johnson himself chronicled and curated particularly in a MoMA exhibit as far back as 1932, those rectilinear glass boxes that elegantly reflected the austerity and practicality of a post-World War era.
- For the sheer number of historical architectural movements and buildings it references.
- And for the moment in time it captures on two fronts: The realization of Postmodernism as a bona fide theory on a grand public scale, and the culture of corporate power it, frankly, buries before the building is even finished.
Philip Johnson was witty, charming, irascible, mean-spirited, mercurial, celebrity-driven, the most sought-after architect in the 80s. His buildings are in Houston and Pittsburgh and Boston and DC and Minneapolis and Dallas and all over Manhattan and Europe for that matter. And they are statements, each and every one. He was also, apparently, immortal, working every day until his last at the age of 98. He molded the idea of 'starchitect,' that an architect's one great work necessarily made him (usually a him) a great architect. I wonder.
He was responsible for some truly great buildings. His PPG Place in Pittsburgh is a Neo-gothic monument to the company's plate glass roots and a siren call to Pitt's Cathedral of Learning a few miles away. His own Glass House in New Canaan, CT is positively Greek in its simplicity. And working with his mentor, Mies van Der Rohe, he produced the interiors for the now legendary Seagram Building on Park Avenue, particularly The Four Seasons Restaurant which put or at least kept the building on the map.
But his 101 California Street in San Fransisco looks dangerously serrated and top-heavy, his telescoping elliptical Lipstick Building in Manhattan promised far more than it delivered, its one trick underwhelms, and his AEGON Center in Louisville is a little too reminiscent of something Albert Speer may have designed for the Reich, a stylistic and philosophical flirtation Johnson notoriously indulged in the early 30s and that shadowed him the rest of his long life.
That brings us to some middle ground here.
In the late 70s, the largest corporation in the world was AT&T. Some said their influence and control of communication in the US and internationally made them as powerful as a fourth branch of the US Government.
Their original home at 195 Broadway was a 1908 wedding cake of a building that, still standing, boasts the largest number of exterior columns of any building in the world.
In a gesture to cement their visibility, AT&T commissioned Philip Johnson to design a building that would set the company apart from every other company by setting it apart from every other company building. They decidedly did not want another glass box. They told this to Johnson, the man who had helped design the best of them, The Seagram, which remains, arguably, the purest and most successful corporate statement in the Modernist Movement.
The Modernists hoped to develop an architectural vocabulary that would define the 20th Century in the way Classical and Gothic defined theirs. They took Louis Sullivan's credo 'form follows function' to its most fundamental ends. It was van Der Rohe who said, "Less is more." Using the new materials at their disposal, concrete, glass and steel, Mies van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, the architects most associated with defining and articulating Modernism, designed dozens of carefully proportioned, simple and simply beautiful glass boxes whose ornamentation relegated to the forms themselves and the richness of materials. The curtain-wall construction, copied ad nauseam throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s (and often by less inspired architects, think of the nearest office park near you) changed city skylines all over the world.
The masters called theirs The International Style. And it was Philip Johnson who personally brought them to light in America through his position as MoMA's first curator of architecture in the 1930s. He made himself a king-maker. But Philip Johnson himself was not an architect until about the age of forty. The man who was known towards the end of his life as The Dean of Architects, the man whom every good contemporary architect, Daniel Liebeskind, Richard Meier, the late Zaha Hadid, called 'uncle,' the man quoted regularly among architects ("A room is only as good as it makes you feel."), the first winner ever of architecture's Oscar, The Pritzker Prize, studied philosophy as an undergrad at Harvard. He went back to school at 36, and ended up designing hundreds of projects and over 50 of the most recognizable buildings in the world.
What kept Johnson young was his restless mind. Having reached the apex of Modernism with The Seagram Building, he quietly sniffed the air for the next emerging style. It has been said of him, he was responsible for no innovations himself. He just cleverly, presciently timed his association with a new style to make you think he invented it. And the next style in the air was Robert Venturi's 1960 treatise against the severity of the International Style. Venturi countered 'less is more' with 'less is a bore' and called for a post-Modern movement, a reaction to the Modern. Postmodern buildings might have ornamentation particularly through one or more classical references. These classical references are often fragmented, without function, and or wildly out of scale. The effect is often one of whimsy. And enough with the black or silver metal. Let's bring some bold color to the drawing boards.
The movement makes its debut small, in homes, then shopping malls. And you're seeing them now in your mind's eye, from your youth if you're around my age, the Greek columns, the oversized crown molding, the oddly placed window. Vegas and later Atlantic City were fertile grounds for Postmodernism with their themed hotels and casino floors. College campuses used the form to find cohesion between their earliest buildings and their contemporary counterparts. And European cities find it a problem-solver for the same reasons. But it was Philip Johnson who put the movement in encyclopedias.
Out of the twenty-five renowned architects AT&T asked to submit proposals, only Philip Johnson failed to do so. They chose him anyway. In 1978 he disappeared into his studio and on January 8, 1979, he emerged on the cover of Time Magazine no less holding his model.This, would be no Seagram Building.
For the largest corporation in the world, a stone tablet, rising unbroken for 37 stories, controversial from the word go for its lack of setbacks, the selfish way it occupied the sky. For one of the most powerful corporations the world had ever known? Pink granite. Miles of it. At the bottom, the opposite of form follows function. A seven-story entry arch. Surrounded by a sort of breezy loggia.
But it was the topper that took the world's breath away in some kind of collective audible gasp. Entirely ornamental, it was a pediment in the Greek tradition, but pierced by a fragmented oculus, its Roman allusion. Almost immediately, people noted a resemblance to the chair back and highboy ornaments used by Thomas Chippendale in his iconic furnishings. Just as immediately, The AT&T Building was nicknamed The Chippendale Building.
Because Postmodernism suggests wry little winks and nods to history, the designs can bear capriciousness. That top is more than capricious, it is a complete flight of fancy. And the building has more oddities at first glance, like the set of three oculi near the base at each side of the building. I see them and think, "Why?" But the building as a whole is actually a careful documentation of some of the great design throughout history.
Built in thirds like a Greek column, the building has a clear base, the shaft in the tallest rise of the building, and the capital, here the fragmented pediment. The massing of windows in the shaft may seem arbitrary. But there are three columns of them. The two outside sets further divided into thirds (with a sliver column to the side of each). And the center set of windows is broken into nine small columns, three threes in fact, three being the Palladian ideal, the Vitruvian ideal, the liturgical ideal.
Because the windows are set back, the granite cladding on the steel beams--it's really just a conventional Modernist building 'tarted up in that season's drag,' one critic said--flows uninterrupted up and down the length of the building, adding to its verticality, but emerging at the base to look like actual columns, like the columns in the original AT&T Building six miles south. And while the pediment is the showstopper, the base is where Johnson exercises his vast knowledge of architectural history.
In a bargain for additional height, Johnson promised the city public space. He put it at the bottom of the building.
The bottom of the AT&T Building resembled an Hypostyle Hall, an Egyptian temple of a dark and quiet forest of tall columns lit from above (hence the three oculi and four tall openings above them on each side) representing the marsh at the beginning of time, primeval, the columns rising like the great papyrus, and here in Johnson's iteration, a room of contemplation, a retreat for the Mad Men and Women hustling up and down Madison Avenue. 
The entrance is monumental, and all built on a scale to house the enormous statue of many names and many homes. Sculpted in 1914, The Genius of Telegraphy was hoisted atop the old AT&T Building at 195 Broadway in 1916. By then, AT&T had spun off its telegraph division as Western Union and immediately the sculpture was renamed The Genius of Electricity. But at 24-feet, second in size after the Statue of Liberty and covered with 40,000 sheets of gilt, everyone called him Golden Boy. He appeared on phone books for decades. In the 1930s, he was renamed The Spirit of Communication and stood his aerie perch until Johnson gave him indoor ground floor digs in 1984.
The archway incorporates the height of the statue and the added height of a clerestory window, the huge center oculus that. moonlike and full, seems to hurl itself up the building to some lesser phase at the top.
The base, too, thoroughly references Brunelleschi's early Renaissance masterpiece, the Pazzi Chapel in Florence, its entrance, an archway flanked by columns, its interior, multiple oculi, a vaulted ceiling, and the delicate opened columned walls of a cloister. That Johnson would recreate this solemn environment with exactitude, but on an enormous scale, to house the god of AT&T no less, was utterly ridiculous. But if you recall, that is indeed one of the four major tenets of the movement.
In its tripartite structure, the bottom holds the classical elements of three major civilizations, Hypostyle, the Greek description of an ancient Egyptian room of columns, like the Palace of Athena and dominated by a Roman arch. That it hurtles through the centuries to recall the architect of the Renaissance, in every sense of that phrase, is a stroke of genius. But consider that it continues on through the fabric of time to tie this aesthetic journey into that of its home town and the other, earlier end of the 20th Century, and keep your head from exploding. Because it does all of the above and then reminds us of the base of the 1913 New York City Municipal Building and its Neoclassical A-listers McKim, Meade, and White who were taking the classical elements popular in the moment of time just before theirs and stretching them into one of the world's first skyscrapers while Johnson is taking a skyscraper and stretching long-forgotten classical elements back into it.
That, my friends, is important. It is carefully considered. It is the conversation every artist has with the ages out of respect and deference. As a jumping off place into the unknown.
That it never worked was most definitely a fault of the architect, but the deck was stacked against him. In 1982, halfway into the construction, two years before the doors opened, AT&T divested itself of nearly half of itself, spinning off the local exchange part of their business, Ma Bell, into the Baby Bells of 1982. It was that or be forced to do more to avoid Anti-Trust penalties. AT&T was indeed a monopoly, convincing us some monopolies like utilities were necessary to keep service uniform. It was a lie. Shrouded in mystery. As was the bottom of this building. Stone-like but really steel, and dark and darkly inscrutable like the machinations that happened behind the carefully packaged windows upstairs, it turned out not to be so comfortable a place to take a break. It made people nervous.
Golden Boy was moved out early on. He never quite worked on the ground. His room, big as it was, turns out? Not quite big enough. He seemed stuffed in there. And the only good view of him was from across the street, where the unfortunate paning of glass made him look jailed, not imprisoned as much as in a holding cell awaiting arraignment, Indeed, he was moved on to three subsequent facilities like a Menendez brother.
AT&T had to take a tenant almost immediately and Sony occupied half the building from the outset. In 1996, Sony commissioned the very accomplished architect Charles Gwathmy to 'adjust' the troublesome base. Gwathmy sealed in the open spaces with windows and Sony shops, but he left the building recognizable.
Sony purchased the building in 2002 and ten years later, sold it for $1.1 billion to two property investment firms, Olayan and Chetsfield. In October of 2017, the new partners announced plans to have the Norwegian firm Snøhetta design millions of dollars of renovations. Like Gwathmy, the people over at Snøhetta are no slouches. They were given the commission to design the new Library. At ALEXANDRIA! And their NYC resume includes designs for the new layout of Times Square and the 9/11 Museum.
And here is where the firestorm erupted.
Philip Johnson died in his Glass House in Connecticut in 2005. He's not around to advocate for himself. So his acolytes have taken to the streets, screaming witty epithets like, "Keep your hands off my Johnson!"
The bulk of Snøhetta's renovations are centered around the base, which is where the public in NYC interface with a skyscraper. As obvious as that may sound, its importance cannot be overstated. Snøhetta proposes stripping away the granite from the bottom seven stories of the building, exposing its dirty little secret, its a Modern skyscraper underneath. They further propose to replace the granite cladding with a seven story 'curtain of glass,' ribbon-like to suggest a lightness, movement. We know, for sure, statistically, scientifically, people go in spaces they can see clearly from the sidewalk. Whatever food festival/vertical retail combination ends up in there will do well until tastes change as, of course, they will.
But gone forever will be that rather startling array of references, gone will be that soaring interior that made you feel something. Even if it was creepy, so creepy they filmed a Batman in there, you felt something. And look carefully, gone will be the illusion of columns that run the length of the building into the sidewalk. They were an illusion, but they gave the building roots, sea legs, a presence on the street. As proposed? The building looks like it could pancake down on itself at any second. It won't. But I wonder we are trading one anxiety for another. And thrown to the gutter is Johnson's greatest premise, that a building in NYC has to have a good top and a good bottom, and they must refer to one another. I mean, better to change all the rest of the building and leave the bottom than have thirty granite stories floating un-moored to a glass shed.
I'm not the fan of Postmodernism I once was. I remember being tickled by it, and its historical elements piqued my interest enough to read up on them and understand the arc of architecture, how it is, I believe, the art form that most informs us of the culture that created it. But think of that moment in time, the 1980s and 90s when Postmodernism had its day. I find its playful references cynical now. It was a cynical time. A 'Me Generation' where selfishness needed cynicism to justify itself. I think Johnson's worst excesses were his cynical, selfish ones.
And too many Postmodern designs were executed as overwrought and bulky, like this nonsense in Tokyo:
In the way its cousin could be, by the way, the earlier response to Modernism known as Art Deco. I love Art Deco for putting up a fight, salvaging ornamentation in its streamlined way, the way it does so elegantly and subtly at Rockefeller Center. But I hate it at places like the old General Electric Building blocks away where its array of marbles and finishes gives me claustrophobia and vertigo.
Both movements were a way out, though. Imagine living in Rome in 77AD and thinking if I see another arch I'm going to feed myself to the lions. Or living in Northern France in 1318 and seeing another pointed arched stained glass window going up. Philip Johnson showed us there was an end to the endless glass boxes of Modernism. The man who brought us Modernism delivered us from it. In this building.
It deserves respect.
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