![]() Light as a cloud, it acts as a bit of sunny optimism amidst the auto-dealerships and strip malls of Dallas. When there wasn’t enough money, he designed this chapel, which was finished five years after his death. Johnson was commissioned to build a cathedral for this LGBT congregation, which had been decimated by AIDS. Bush.Ĭhapel of Hope, Dallas, TX, 2010 (posthumous) One of the towers was for Pennzoil, the other was for its sister, Zapata Oil-the business founded by future president George H. Houston’s twin towers, with their angled roofs and shared atrium, are the apogee of modernist commercial design, and that was the idea: to forego building the tallest, and instead build the most distinctive. But the real magic is the Crystal Court at the base, a glorious public atrium featured prominently in the credits of none other than The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The sheer gridded-glass stalk remains a principal landmark on the Minneapolis skyline. Widely imitated (I’m looking at you, Trump Tower), IDS introduced the zig-zag corner, making it possible to have enough corner offices to please law firms with long partner lists. The materials are exquisite-marble, wood, curved glass-and if it is not the very best place for the display of art, it is among the most opulent. ![]() Connected to the main building by an umbilical glass hall, it is a tic-tac-toe grid of nine circular, domed rooms, with a fountain in the center square. This gallery for pre-Columbian art, an addition to the Dumbarton Oaks museum in Georgetown, is a true hidden gem, with practically no visible exterior. And the Four Seasons, the immaculate cafeteria that begat the so-retro-as-to-seem-quaint Power Lunch, was his alone. ![]() Yes, the vision came from Mies, but much of the detailing was Johnson. Johnson was the co-architect, with Mies, of the sine-qua-non of modern office towers, and his contribution is routinely undervalued. (Fortunately that didn’t happen, or it would reside in a different section of this list.) Johnson once dreamed of putting a dome over it. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, New York, NY, 1953Īlthough MoMA’s sculpture garden has been shaped and reshaped and compromised by the museum’s various building campaigns, it remains the model of a modern urban oasis. Love it or hate it, Johnson’s 1949 Glass House-which he designed for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut-helped dictate a typology for the “modern glass box” we know today. (In a particularly PJ maneuver, Johnson managed to complete the Glass House before Mies could get the Farnsworth built.) Either way, you cannot understand Johnson without understanding this place apart from the world, where he shaped his ever-shifting vision. Like much of Johnson’s work and life, it is polarizing: Mies van der Rohe, in particular, detested it, thinking it a poor derivation of his own Farnsworth House. Johnson’s home, and the New Canaan estate on which it sits, is a unique and uncompromising exercise in modern design executed over more than half a century. ![]() In this spirit, we asked Lamster (who should know: He worked on this book for nine years) to consider the output, listing what he considers to be Johnson’s most successful buildings, and the ones that haven’t exactly held up under the 21st century’s exacting lens. ![]()
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