Talk:Philip Johnson

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Discussion

• Why is there no mention of Philip Johnson's Nazi past? See http://jewishworldreview.com/0205/applebaum_stigma.php3, for example.

MSTCrow 03:31, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC) What about Poper Ratzinger's Nazi past? Also, I think that given he left Germany in 1939, give him some credit for waking up from his stupor.131.96.70.164 07:32, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

• I agree that it would be good to summarize this (see also the article "Form follows fascism" in the 1/31/2005 New York Times). I myself had no knowledge of this previously. (Someone added one sentence, but it's clearly not really enough.) —Steven G. Johnson 17:04, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

• Source for recent edits re: Johnson's fascist past is Franz Schulze's biography "Philip Johnson: Life and Work" and Kazys Varnelis's online article "We Cannot Not Know History", at http://varnelis.net/research/johnson.html. I've traded emails with Professor Varnelis and he is a thoroughly credible source as well as a nice guy. --Lockley 02:40, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

• I added some info on this....hopefully, after several edits, I came up with something balanced. (PS, added bullet points to all comments, for some odd reason they are all running together....) NickBurns 20:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Um...

If you see something missing in an article....add it. NickBurns 16:56, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

What would be the best way to work this in?

I wanted to include more than just a one-line mention of his cenotaph for the John F. Kennedy Memorial near Dealey Plaza in Dallas, but I can't find an appropriate place. I added it to the list of noted works, but wanted to add a bit more, such as the fact that he was invited personally by Stanley Marcus and that he waived his fee for the project. It doesn't fit under the heading "Later Buildings" because it isn't a building. I suppose we could change it to later works ... there also was a wonderful quote, haven't been able to pin down a year, regarding Marcus' effect on his career:

• "Phillip Johnson, was quoted as saying, 'I have been the beneficiary for some 40 years of people saying, "Stanley Marcus says you're a good architect." '" — from a Sotheby's offering of items from Marcus' art collection

Anyone have ideas on how this material could be worked in appropriately? Lawikitejana 00:23, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

No mention of the Lipstick Building?

Hahaha! I bet some autistic deletionist purged the Lipstick Building ("non-notable!") from this page. No wonder no one bothers contributing anymore. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.239.233.66 (talk) 20:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

No Mention of Johnson/Burgee?

There's no mention of this firm (other than in credits) nor are any other firms with which he was associated mentioned? --TMH (talk) 20:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Introduction

Since the disruptive editor (now reported) refuses to discuss his edits, I'll start the discussion without him. Obviously there are three editors who agree that stating Johnson was influential is acceptable for the lede. The editor in question, after fishing around (and some bad faith accusations) has settled on MOS:OPENPARA. However, that guideline merely states that the language should be neutral. However, it also states that it should indicate why the subject is notable. Johnson is an architect but beyond that he's an influential architect. Not every architect we find on Wikipedia is influential, just as not every writer is considered one of the greatest writers in the English language, yet the William Shakespeare article states exactly that, in the lede. WP:SUBJECTIVE, under WP:NPOV clearly states that while we cannot state that someone is the "greatest" or most influential, we can, and should, "provide an overview of the common interpretations of a creative work, preferably with citations to experts holding that interpretation." We have those citations and stating why Johnson is notable is acceptable and encouraged. freshacconci talk to me 19:49, 21 December 2016 (UTC) @Theroadislong and Modernist:

Philip Johnson was an enormously influential architect and in particular among other things; glass house and Seagram's building aside; being a founding father of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art; influencing thousands of people over the years...Modernist (talk) 23:07, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

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POV issue

Tagging the section titled "Controversy over early political views." The title itself reads like an apologia, as does the section itself. I'll be working on it but meanwhile I think it needs to be tagged. Coretheapple (talk) 00:18, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

I've made some WP:BOLD changes. I have to say that I was pretty shocked by some of what I saw in that section, which was little more than a whitewash, with some text (such as re Shirer) that was simply not true and/or not supported by the sources. I've removed the tag. Coretheapple (talk) 02:00, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

There are serious violations of neutrality here, and the attacks on Johnson are way over the top. One editor now claims that he was an "unpaid spy for the Nazi regime." How could he be a spy if he proclaimed his political views to everyone? The attacks on Johnson are declared to be "thoroughly documented,", citing a book by the author of another attack on Johnson. The linking Johnson with George Floyd is really beyond ridiculous. I'm not defending Johnson'views; Johnson himself admitted that he was stupid and mistaken. But Wikipedia is not a place for diatribes like this. Please follow the neutrality rules. SiefkinDR (talk) 15:21, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

The charge that Johnson "innovated white supremacy in architecture". during his time as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art is not supported here by any examples or evidence. Unless it's backed up with facts, it should be left out.SiefkinDR (talk) 07:26, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Categories

Hi @Modernist: and @Hmains: and @SiefkinDR: -- I wonder if we could discuss the categories just added and removed -- they are Category:American fascists, Category:Antisemitism in the United States, and Category:American propagandists, all of which relate to this larger question of how to represent Johnson's involvement with American fascists. IMO all three are accurate, and the first one seems richly deserved. The article as it stands is full of POV language and minor factual errors tending to explain away Johnson's political interests -- example, the words "brief venture into journalism and politics" to describe a 7-year period in which this was Johnson's sole interest. Let's put our heads together and find a reasonable way forward, yeah? --Lockley (talk) 19:47, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

• In my opinion those categories are really not needed. Johnson denounced his insane behavior in his early days....As a working architect he became a key figure in the modernist and post-modernist architectural world. His working accomplishments and mature works are the reason he even has this article that we are commenting on. Johnson's stupid past; by his own admission does not characterize his place in our world. The section Controversy over political activities covers the issue; the categories are not required or necessary...Modernist (talk) 21:44, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Non-arbitrary break

@Lockley: Agreed.

1. The defense of Johnson Re: his role in MoMA is OR.
2. Referring to Noam Cohen as a "critic" paints his criticism in a skeptical light (he's a journalist - let's call him that).
3. Referring to the Johnson Study Group as "40 architects... calling themselves the Johnson Study Group" (emphasis mine) casts them as unprofessional.

I've made an edit to address these, along with some style and readability issues, but it was reverted. I've discussed this with Modernist, and will proceed to restore the changes. François Robere (talk) 14:51, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

@SiefkinDR: As noted above, this is OR. The first ref is barely verifiable (no link, author or publication date), self-referential (points back to Wikipedia [1]), and makes no mention of the criticisms in the context of which it is cited; and the second doesn't even mention Johnson. François Robere (talk) 17:01, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

@Modernist: This doesn't resolve the problem of OR, so I made a few edits that do, starting with this one. François Robere (talk) 18:18, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

• • Stop this edit warring! At this time you have no consensus re your recent edits...Modernist (talk) 19:13, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

    @Modernist: I'm not edit warring, and WP:IDONTLIKEIT is not a justification. Do you have anything to say that addresses the issue of OR as repeatedly explained here, on your TP, and in edit summaries? Also, your reversal re-introduced an erroneously-attributed quote. François Robere (talk) 19:51, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

• Read this: WP:STICK, you have no consensus...Modernist (talk) 20:03, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

• • Agree with Modernist, there is no consensus for the changes made above. Edit warring needs to stop. and neutrality rules need to be followed. Thanks for your understanding.SiefkinDR (talk) 21:09, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

I've asked for community input at Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard#Philip Johnson's legacy. Cheers. François Robere (talk) 21:16, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

Mies Van der Rohe and fascism

One editor seems to be questioning whether Mies Van der Rohe, Johnson's business partner, was really anti-fascist. I think that's not very flattering to Mies Van Der Rohe. He lived in Nazi Germany, and I think he knew what fascism was, and if Johnson had been a fascist he would not have been his business partner. It's not proof, but it's logic. Respectfully, SiefkinDR (talk) 11:23, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

• What it is is WP:OR. None of the sources cited, including the one added by Herrikez, calls VDR "anti-fascist". One of the sources doesn't mention VDR, one of the sources doesn't mention Johnson, and the only one that mentions both states that VDR had "an intense love-hate relationship with [Johnson]". Half this paragraph is OR. François Robere (talk) 12:33, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

François Robere SiefkinDR I put those references there because the notion that Mies Van der Rohe was an anti-fascist is debatable at best:

"Starved of work, Mies tried to ingratiate himself with this new, powerful and rich state patron, signing a motion of support for Hitler in the August 1934 referendum and joining Goebbels's Reichskultur-kammer, a progressive alternative to Rosenberg's ministry, which asked for "fresh blood" and new forms to give "expression to this age". Mies was shortlisted to build the state's new Reichsbank, with a fiercely modern, abstract design; and Goebbels even pressed him to design the Deutsches Volk Deutsches Arbeit exhibition."
"Mies seemed to dislike the Nazis more for their poor taste and their starving him of work than for their politics."

— The Guardian

"12. Many at the Bauhaus were disillusioned when they learned that Mies had been the only one to sign a motion of support for Hitler and National Socialism in 1934."

— Archdaily

Of course, after they kicked him out, I am sure he was against the regime, I just do not see any indication that it was for ideological reasons Herrikez (talk) 13:15, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Most Germans supported Hitler in 1934, as the elections showed, because of the utter economic and political chaos and because they didn't know what he was all about. He wasn't pro-Hitler when they closed the Bauhaus and forced him to leave. He certainly wasn't pro-Hitler in the United States, and he certainly wasn't a fascist. See the article on Mies in Wikipedia.SiefkinDR (talk) 16:57, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

No one says he was, but was he "anti-fascist"? And if he was, does it have anything to do with Johnson collaborating with him? You need sources if you want to say either. François Robere (talk) 18:20, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Revision needed of 4th paragraph of lead

The fourth paragraph of the lead needs to be revised to be more specific about by his involvement, since he was involved with two very different groups, followers of Huey Long and those of Father Coughlin. It also needs to state exactly what he did for those movements. It's too vague. Cordially, SiefkinDR (talk) 15:42, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Summary and excerpts from Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House, 2018. Ch. 6-7:

• Johnson quits his job in 1934 to launch a political movement with Alan Blackburn (uniforms and flag included), which he finances as they travel across the country to build a following.
• Lawrence Dennis, an overtly racist and anti-Semitic author, becomes "Johnson’s unlikely intellectual guru and political Svengali".
• Gets criticized in newspapers of the day; some of his colleagues fear that his involvement might harm the museum.
• Following Huey Long, the corrupt "kingpin" governor of Louisiana: "Secretly, Johnson had grander ambitions. He was not interested in just being a member of Long’s “brain trust.” When interviewed in 1942, Johnson’s former secretary Ruth Merrill told the FBI that Johnson believed “the fate of the country” rested on his shoulders, and that “he wanted to be the ‘Hitler’ in the United States.” His desire to join Long as an adviser was a means to that end. “By joining with Huey Long he could eventually depose Huey Long from control of the country and gain control of it for himself,” Merrill told the FBI. Whether that meant assassination or a bloodless coup was unstated."
• Runs for the Ohio legislature; after being rebuffed by the GOP he wins the Democratic primary, but quits.
• Allies with Charles Coughlin, successful populist preacher and radio broadcaster.
• Spends thousands of dollars ("something close to 40 percent of his annual income") on one of Coughlin's politicians.
• Designs a 50 ft, two stories tall stage for Coughlin's anti-Roosevelt address in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.
• Buys airtime and starts a radio show, and an associated youth movement, with popular messaging and anti-Semitic subtext: "Johnson and Blackburn’s party, an alt-right avant la lettre, was composed of hard-core reactionaries, pro-Nazi German-American Bundists, Klansmen, and members of the Black Legion, an Ohio-based secret society that took the Klan as its model... Johnson tried to convert this group into his own version of the SA, the brown-shirted paramilitaries he knew from the streets of Berlin. Borrowing Nazi intimidation tactics, he had his group march on the Communist party headquarters in Toledo. The Communists responded by cutting the radio station’s power line during one of Johnson and Blackburn’s programs."
• In 1937 goes on vacation in Germany and "befriends" Nazi ideologue Werner Sombart at a party for Nazi economist Hjalmar Schacht.
• Goes to London, tries to meet with founder of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley.
• Reconnects with Dennis, then with German diplomat Ulrich Freiherr von Gienanth, from whom he wants a pass to events in Nuremberg.
• Writes about "race suicide" for "pro-fascist journal The Examiner".
• Participates in a program run by the "Vereinigung Carl Schurz, a private organization that disseminated Nazi propaganda to foreigners."
• Connects with Nazi propagandists K. O. Bertling and Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, German ambassador to the US.
• Returns to the US, has lunches with the German embassy's political and press attaché, Heribert von Strempel.
• Johnson would claim to the FBI that his meetings were purely social-intellectual, but "a more plausible scenario is that Johnson was exchanging information on the activities, politics, and membership of American fascist circles, and discussing the means by which the Germans might disseminate their propaganda. According to records captured after the war, the Nazi diplomats were specifically interested in obtaining mailing lists and names of individuals who might be sympathetic to their cause. Johnson, who had built a network of nationalist supporters in both Ohio and New York, was in a position to deliver precisely that type of material. Indeed, Johnson had been keeping confidential lists of would-be supporters since April 1934, when he instructed his private secretary, Ruth Merrill, to take names at the first fascist gathering at the duplex apartment he shared in New York with his sister."
• In 1939 gets acquainted with Viola Heise Bodenschatz, well-connected German-American author of pro-German pamphlets, asking for advice on "distribution". They would later travel to Germany together.
• Meets Friedrich Auhagen, an intended "freelance propaganda agent" paid by the Nazis. Auhagen, Johnson and others then found the "American Fellowship Forum" - a propaganda organization - in New York, with Dennis as a keynote speaker at the inaugural event. The organization publishes a journal, Today's Challenge, the first issue of which ends with George Sylvester Viereck's "Can the Jewish Problem Be Solved?".
• "The class of philosopher-fascists represented by Dennis and Johnson... made no direct claims to Nazism, but were clearly interested in transforming the American political system into a form that would be sympathetic to German National Socialism... They were also in a position to operate as a kind of think tank for the fascist cause, providing intellectual backbone to influential members of the isolationist movement—both those who merely wished to maintain America’s independent posture and those who sympathized with the Nazi state outright."
• "While Johnson cloaked himself behind a veneer of respectable intellectualism, he was not only aware of but actively supported the more brutal representatives of the fascist cause in America. Though he would later deny it, he admitted to the FBI that he attended several American Nazi Party rallies at Madison Square Garden... Johnson also became a financial benefactor of the Christian Mobilizers, a virulently anti-Semitic organization of street brawlers run by another Dennis protégé, Joseph E. McWilliams, a soap-box demagogue who built his following with attacks on Roosevelt, the “Jew Deal,” and the “Jewspapers” that supported it."
• Reconnects with Coughlin, who by now was printing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and inspiring violent mobs, and offers himself as a "no-fee foreign correspondent for the coming summer of 1939".
• Meets "Paul Palmer, a fellow traveler in fascist circles who was the editor and proprietor of The American Mercury"; seeks to buy a share "to transform it into a mouthpiece for his own brand of fascist propaganda".
• Writes a favorable review of Mein Kampf for the Examiner .
• Goes to Germany; meets with Nazi propagandists Richard Sallet and Werner Assendorf, and attends Otto Dietrich's press conferences.
• While in Czechoslovakia he meets a past acquaintance: a Jewish architect named Otto Eisler, who was just arrested by the Gestapo. Despite his connections with Nazi authorities, he makes no attempt to help except asking a mutual friend, Jacobus Oud, if a visa can be arranged. Decades later he would describe the meeting as "one of the worst moments", but "even after the war, [he]made no effort to learn of Eisler’s harrowing story of escape to Norway, capture... and survival of Auschwitz."
• "There was nothing illegal about Johnson speaking privately with Nazi officials in 1939. Those conversations would have become unlawful only had Johnson accepted financial remuneration from the German government—an act that would have made him an unregistered agent of a foreign power. It was on this charge that his friends Fritz Auhagen, Viola Bodenschatz, and Lawrence Dennis would be arrested in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks and America’s entry into the war. But for Johnson money was never an issue: he was insulated by his own wealth. Indeed, he was the ideal vehicle for the Nazis, a man willing and able to finance their interests out of his own pocket."

François Robere (talk) 15:05, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Use of boldface

Boldface style is used in this article to emphasize the names of Johnson's buildings, which is against Wikipedia's MOS:BOLD and MOS:NOBOLD guidelines. However, I can see how the use of boldface for that purpose is helpful for the reader, so I let it be as a reasonable exception to the MOS guidelines. However, I removed boldface style from the image captions since that use of boldface was not so helpful. All but one (if I counted correctly) of the images are Johnson's buildings, so there is no good reason for boldface in the captions, and boldface was used irregularly in the captions anyway. So, I recommend sticking to the MOS guidelines of no boldface in the image captions. Biogeographist (talk) 20:27, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

ID'S Center, Minneapolis, MN

The IDS Center is one of the most striking examples of Johnson's work. The Crystal Court and the 51-story octagonal "shape shifting" façade are the Centerpiece of the city. I am stunned that there is no mention of it in this article. 2601:447:C802:7560:C42B:736D:3100:A075 (talk) 22:49, 20 October 2023 (UTC)