Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson
By Hugh Howard, Bloomsbury Press, 352 pages, $28
Odd coupling did not begin with Felix and Oscar. Think of all the rivals shackled together by history: Bernini and Borromini, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. The pairing of frenemies is a time-honoured storytelling device used by biographers to help us understand their subjects more fully. It’s as if we can truly know them only by their differences, their personal grievances and philosophical feuds. The historian Hugh Howard now applies this approach, in “Architecture’s Odd Couple”, to two of architecture’s most outsize personalities, Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.
Even as odd couples go, Wright and Johnson seem an unlikely choice for a dual biography. The two men interacted with so many cultural giants that Howard could have yoked each to any number of others — Wright and Louis Sullivan, Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Then there is the matter of the achievement gap. Wright is one of the greatest architects of all time. While Johnson is certainly an important historical figure, Howard concedes that he was a lesser design talent (despite the book jacket’s claims to the contrary).
Had it not been for Johnson’s gift for publicity, his famous razor wit, his work at MoMA and the public fascination with his Glass House, it is likely that he would be remembered today as just another accomplished member of the Modernist pack. The other difficulty facing Howard is that Wright and Johnson didn’t pal around all that much. Wright preferred to be as far from the East Coast as possible. For Johnson, New York City was the centre of the universe.
So Howard has a case to make. He unpacks the story gradually, giving us a thorough examination of the occasions when Wright and Johnson crossed paths. Along the way, he breaks out to explore that thrilling moment when modernism was taking hold in America. Howard suggests that each architect did his best work as a rejoinder to perceived slights from the other. “They were essential foils for each other, and clearly discernible shifts in the careers of both men resulted when their careers collided,” he argues.
The attraction of a Wright-Johnson pairing becomes apparent as Howard sketches in the details and the congruences pile up. Both men were attention-hungry celebrities who remained active into their 90s. Each designed a career-defining house (Fallingwater and the Glass House). Each had his own signature fashion look. For Wright it was the cape and porkpie hat. For Johnson it was his round black eyeglasses, a borrowing from Le Corbusier. But these are really just surface details, and in the end, it’s their differences that matter more. Wright was a true originator, while Johnson was, ultimately, a very influential tastemaker, who relished his ability to recognise the talent of others.
Despite their shared Midwestern origins, the two men took an almost immediate dislike to each other. Wright was almost 40 years older than Johnson when they began corresponding in 1931. Johnson had just started working as a curator under Alfred Barr at the newly formed Museum of Modern Art, and was busy preparing what would be a groundbreaking exhibition on the new International Style. As the most famous architect in America, Wright (or Mr Wright, as he liked to be called) expected star treatment. But the 24-year-old Johnson, who had an ego to match Wright’s, wasn’t having it.
Even though Johnson was not yet a trained architect, he had already begun to see himself as an arbiter of architectural taste. In his view, Wright was a has-been whose best work was behind him. Yet, despite his belief that Wright had “nothing to say” to the new architectural movement, Johnson felt he had to acquiesce to the wishes of the MoMA board and include him in the show. Johnson would later quip that Wright was “the greatest architect of the 19th century”. Wright would forever bristle at his treatment by the “New York boys”.
Preparations for the show at MoMA did not go well. Johnson saw the exhibit as an opportunity to introduce European Modernists such as Walter Gropius and J.J.P. Oud to the American public. In Wright’s mind, it was his work that should be the centre of attention. Even after Wright agreed to let his models be displayed, the power struggles continued. Angered by Johnson’s lack of deference, Wright threatened to withdraw his cooperation at the 11th hour, just as Johnson was facing a catalogue deadline. Johnson and his co-curator, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, had to enlist the critic Lewis Mumford as mediator to soothe the great man’s wounded feelings. The rollercoaster experience of dealing with Wright proved so exhausting that Johnson ended up checking himself into a sanitarium on opening night.
As fraught as this initial encounter was, Howard argues it was pivotal in Wright’s development, opening his eyes to important changes in architecture. The sparring with Johnson provided the spark for his late-career burst of creativity and ultimately led to the designs for two of his most brilliant and beloved projects, Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum.
None of this was immediately apparent from Wright’s outward behaviour. Wright publicly criticised the show, dismissing the work of the Europeans. Yet all the while, Howard says, Wright was quietly absorbing their style and ideas. Wright soon began to pare away the exterior ornamentation on his buildings, in keeping with Modernist ideas expressed in projects such as Mies’s Tugendhat house.
By 1936, when construction began on Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania, the change was clear. The arrangement of crisscrossing planes, balanced dramatically over a waterfall, would reflect the lessons Wright had learnt “at MoMA, compliments of Philip Johnson”, Howard writes. Wright had fused his own ideas about organic architecture with the Europeans’ Modernist functionality. Having disparaged Wright for years as yesterday’s man, Johnson had to acknowledge that Fallingwater was, as Howard puts it, “something utterly new and different”, and would have a tremendous impact on the direction of architecture.
Howard also makes the corresponding case that Wright influenced Johnson’s development. Johnson had always been an architectural chameleon who drew inspiration from others, especially Mies. Johnson had been grudging in his praise of Fallingwater, but after seeing Wright’s lily-pad columns at the headquarters for S.C. Johnson & Son in the mid-1940s, the younger architect was forced to re-examine his devotion to Miesian purity.
Even as Johnson was helping Mies on his first big project, the Seagram Building, Howard suggests that Johnson’s work was becoming increasingly decorative. Ever the architectural magpie, Johnson had already picked up a warm, Wrightian detail, the herringbone brick floor, and incorporated it into the Glass House, his great theoretical demonstration project. Johnson would continue to stray from his roots, shocking his Modernist fathers with his overt historical references. After Wright’s death in 1959, Howard writes, Johnson took over “the mantle as America’s chief architectural entertainer”.
Wright and Johnson may share a penchant for witty pronouncements and the genes for longevity. But in dwelling on their personal idiosyncrasies, Howard distracts us from his central claim. Did the uneasy relationship between Wright and Johnson really influence their architectural thinking, and the history of architecture in general, to the extent he suggests?
The problem with Howard’s dual biography is that it is too much of a closed system. It’s hard to believe that the innovations of the European Modernists wouldn’t have eventually captured Wright’s imagination without Johnson’s interventions. While the tensions between Wright and Johnson probably did have some effect on their creative outlook, very likely so did plenty of other people and ideas. Sure, Felix may have succeeded in getting Oscar to clean up the kitchen occasionally, but that doesn’t mean he can claim credit for making him a neat freak.
–New York Times News Service
Inga Saffron is The Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic and the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
