Art
Master Builder
From museums to skyscrapers, architect Philip Johnson has forever changed the Texas landscape. Not bad for a New Yorker.
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Dominique de Menil became Johnson's connection to a network of wealthy Texas women who succumbed to his chatty urbanity and became devoted clients. Ruth Carter Stevenson, daughter of Fort Worth publishing magnate Amon Carter, met the architect in the late fifties at a luncheon at the de Menils', and he quickly agreed to design the memorial museum her father had mandated in his will. Although the Amon Carter Museum, finished in 1961, has long been overshadowed by its downhill neighbor, Louis Kahn's sublime, barrel-vaulted Kimbell Art Museum (1972), Welch persuasively argues that the earlier building represents a true watershed. Coming on the heels of Johnson's collaboration with Mies himself on the definitive International Style box, New York City's Seagram Building (1959), the Amon Carter Museum was a daring break with Miesian orthodoxy. With its classical front porch of tapered limestone columns, set on an Acropolis-like height overlooking downtown, the Fort Worth museum was a visual expression of a Johnson dictum that would become the rallying cry of postmodernism: "We [architects] cannot not know history." Perhaps more important, in proving that an out-of-towner could design an attention-grabbing memorial to no less a Texas icon than the man known as Mr. Fort Worth, Johnson paved the way for Kahn and the succession of East Coast and foreign architects who would land Texas' plum civic commissions for the rest of the century. And as in Houston, Johnson became an important behind-the-scenes player in Fort Worth's cultural life, arm-twisting nationally prominent architects to take local jobs and recommending a New York chum, the late Ric Brown, for the Amon Carter Museum's board; Brown would go on to become the Kimbell Museum's revered founding director.
The Amon Carter Museum was a precocious prelude to the postmodern revolution. But Pennzoil Place, the postmodern shot that was heard around the world, hardly began as a calculated assault on modernism. Developer Gerald Hines was a mechanical engineer from Indiana who had begun building modernist low-rises along Houston's Richmond Avenue in the late fifties. Needing a second major tenant for a downtown high-rise planned for the Pennzoil Company, Hines asked Johnson to design a building with some sort of dual image that would satisfy the vanity of both tenants. Johnson produced a number of conventional designs, one of them quite Seagram-like; Hines and Pennzoil chairman J. Hugh Liedtke, a blunt Oklahoman, turned them down flat. Then, studying a site plan an associate had transected with a diagonal line, Johnson had an epiphany: Reflect the dual tenancy with two trapezoid-shaped buildings, mirror images set diagonally across the city block, sharing the same lobby, the towers dramatically separated only by a ten-foot-wide slit. When Johnson presented Liedtke with the model for this design, Liedtke objected to the twin towers' flat tops. Johnson snatched the sloped roof from the model's lobby and placed it on top of one of the miniature towers. "Yeah, that's it!" exclaimed Liedtke, a three-word critique that would transform cityscapes around the world.
As much minimal sculpture as architecture, Pennzoil Place earned a chorus of praise led by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who called it "the building of the decade." Remarkably, Pennzoil Place combined commercial success with its critical triumph; using the garrulous Johnson as the centerpiece of his marketing campaign, Hines quickly sold out his trendy building. The numbers weren't lost on developers worldwide, who eagerly sought cutting-edge architects—previously deemed too outré and pricey for bottom-line commercial work—to deck out their towers with exotic "party hats." Johnson, who was awarded this country's most prestigious architecture award, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, when the AIA met in Dallas in 1978, and who soon appeared on the cover of Time magazine cradling his model of the yet-unbuilt AT&T Building, became the leader of a pack of celebrity architects whose signatures on new office buildings commanded the same kind of premium that prestige clothing designers were getting for slapping their name on the rump of a pair of jeans.
Johnson's next bold stroke was the 1983 Transco Tower (now the Williams Tower), a deco-style shaft somewhat reminiscent of the Empire State Building but lacking its urban context; rising 64 stories from Houston's Galleria neighborhood (it is the nation's tallest building outside a city center), Transco symbolized the oil-fueled hubris of Texas' early-eighties building boom. Far more original, however, was Johnson's RepublicBank Center (now the Bank of America Center), completed the next year just a block away from Pennzoil Place. Three red granite tiers of steep, spiky gables inspired by sixteenth-century Dutch Gothic municipal buildings, the 56-story tower provides a striking complement to the dark glass abstraction of Pennzoil Place. Just a year later, however, the Crescent, Johnson's multi-building, mid-rise hotel-retail-office complex built for Dallas oil heiress Caroline Hunt, proved that historicizing could be a hit-or-miss affair. A bizarre attempt to paste ironwork filigree copied from a nineteenth-century Galveston villa over massive, French Second Empire facades, the Crescent ended up looking like a steroid-enhanced version of the ersatz châteaux endemic to the Dallas suburbs—a fitting monument to the collapse of the oil economy and the end of the building boom.
With his gift for reinvention, Johnson just kept on going. In 1995, after telling the Reverend Michael Piazza that he couldn't possibly design a new cathedral for his burgeoning congregation, Johnson granted the Dallas minister a few minutes to tell him about his church. Half an hour later, Johnson had enthusiastically agreed to design the 2,500-seat Cathedral of Hope for the world's largest gay and lesbian congregation. As planned (the project is halfway toward its $22 million fund-raising goal), the Cathedral of Hope will be an expressionistic, almost windowless concrete ark, a climactic monument to inclusion by the architect who so well expressed the aspirations of the state's elite.
The Cathedral of Hope may not be Johnson's last word in Texas, but it probably can be regarded as the coda to an epoch: The half-century Welch revisits with such panoramic perspective suddenly begins to look like the Texas Renaissance. The year the de Menils' house was finished, 1950, was also the first year the census found more Texans living in cities than in the countryside, and the state's wealth still came in great part from the land—agriculture and oil. The same peculiar combination of cultural insecurity and risk-taking élan that drove Johnson, a Midwesterner who has always seemed to fear nothing more than discovering that he has become passé, drove the generation of Texas patrons with whom he so strongly empathized. Today's new Texas fortunes are derived from information-age industries like high technology and the media, the insecurity is less gnawing, and the splendid cultural infrastructure built by the up-from-the-dirt generation is now taken almost as a birthright. But those museums and trendsetting skylines didn't just sprout from the soil. Welch's book is a timely reminder of how much our cultural landscape was transformed by the restless intellect and Zelig-like presence of Philip Johnson.
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