Philip Johnson
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
1979 

Philip Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906, and in the years since has become one of architecture's most potent forces. Before designing his first building at the age of 36, Johnson had been client, critic, author, historian, museum director, but not an architect. 

In 1949, after a number of years as the Museum of Modern Art's first director of the Architecture Department, Johnson designed a residence for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut for his master degree thesis, the now famous Glass House. 

He literally coined the term "International School of Architecture" for an exhibition at MOMA. 

Johnson organized Mies van der Rohe's first visit to this country as well as Le Corbusier's. He even commissioned Mies to design his New York apartment. Later, he would collaborate with Mies on what has been described as this continent's finest high-rise building, the Seagram Building in New York. 

By the fifties, Johnson was revising his earlier views, culminating with a building that proved to be one of the most controversial of his career—the AT&T headquarters in New York with its so-called "Chippendale" top. 

Joining forces with partner John Burgee from 1967 through 1987, their twenty year output has been nothing short of phenomenal. 

The list of projects fills a volume, but suffice it to say, ranges from numerous high-rise projects such as International Place in Boston; Tycon Towers in Vienna, Virginia; Momentum Place in Dallas; 53rd at Third in New York; NCNB Center in Houston; PPG in Pittsburgh; 101 California in San Francisco; United Bank Center Tower in Denver; to the far flung National Center for Performing Arts in Bombay, India; Century Center in South Bend, Indiana; a Water Garden in Fort Worth, Texas; a Civic Center in Peoria, Illinois; the Crystal Cathedral in California; and a Dade County Cultural Center in Miami. There are many, many more. 

Since 1989, Johnson, semi-retired, has devoted his time mainly to projects of his own, but still is a consultant to John Burgee Architects. His most recent design is for a new School of Fine Arts for Seton Hill College in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. 

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Citation from the Pritzker Jury 

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 for the purpose of encouraging greater awareness of the way people perceive and interact with their surroundings. 

The first award is being given to Philip Johnson, whose work demonstrates a combination of the qualities of talent, vision and commitment that has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the environment. As a critic and historian, he championed the cause of modern architecture and then went on to design some of his greatest buildings. Philip Johnson is being honored for 50 years of imagination and vitality embodied in a myriad of museums, theaters, libraries, houses, gardens and corporate structures. 

 

photo of carter goes here

Photo at left: President Jimmy Carter greeted Jay Pritzker, President  of the Hyatt Foundation, and the first Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Philip Johnson at the White House.

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Architecture and Civilization 

by Lord Clark of Saltwood (the late Kenneth Clark)
an address at the presentation ceremony 

Architecture is one of the most important of all human activities. Yet it is also one of the least considered. How many people can describe the buildings that surround them in their hometowns? Yet the renown of a city may depend on its architecture. A huge, straggling mass of steel and concrete at the southern end of Lake Michigan would never have entered the world's consciousness were it not for some of the most magnificent buildings of modern civilization, extending just a few miles along the lakeside. 

A great historical episode can exist in our imaginations almost entirely in the form of architecture. The Court of Louis XIV produced a remarkable and entertaining literature. But the number of people who are familiar with it is smaller than those who can recognize a photograph of the Courtyard at Versailles, and perhaps even smaller than those who have walked wearily round that enormous complex of buildings. Very few of us have read the texts of early Egyptian literature. Yet we feel that we know those infinitely remote people almost as well as our immediate ancestors, chiefly because of their sculpture and architecture. When an expositor of classic Greece sets out to symbolize his subject, he is less likely to choose a photograph of the Hermes of Praxiteles than one of the Parthenon. 

Yet in spite of its influence on our lives, modern architecture remains largely anonymous. We can name the authors of books, the painters of pictures and the singers of songs. However, if the average man were asked who built the National Galleries of London and Washington or Rockefeller Center, he would probably remain silent. This was not true of the Renaissance. Everyone knew that Brunelleschi had built the Pazzi Chapel, and that Bramante had 

been chief architect of St. Peters, and so on down the scale to relatively inconspicuous buildings. In the present age, the names of only a few architects have entered the minds of even quite cultivated people. In conversation the names of PhilipJohnson, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier might be heard occasionally. But the names of other great contemporary architects, like Kevin Roche and Luis Barragan, are known only to a small group of enthusiasts. It may be undesirable to personalize architects, but at least this could mean that more people take pride in their work. It never occurs to the average man to enter a building and ask the name of the architect—and rightly, because probably no one in the building would know. This indifference has a way of undermining architecture. It obliges architects to live in the closed world of their own profession, whereas they should live in an open world of popular interest and approval. The stories of the building of the great gothic cathedrals—how, as the chronicles tell us, "high and low (they) harnessed themselves to the carts that were bringing stone and dragged them from the quarry to the cathedral," may have in them a touch of legend, but basically they reflect a deep feeling of the period, which is incredibly different from our time. 

Modern technology relieved us of this kind of physical cooperation, but it has not relieved us of the responsibility for watching and studying the progress of great architectural projects, which today transform our cities often before we realize what has happened. For this reason alone, all who care for their environment shouldjeel deeply gratefulfor the international Pritzker Architecture Prize. For by its stature and truly generous scale, it willfocus public attention on a branch of human endeavourby which our civilization will bejudged in thefuture. 

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Philip Johnson's Acceptance Speech

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions. Who among us, I would ask, does not feel more religious after experiencing Chartres Cathedral, the Friday Mosque in Isfahan, or Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto? Even more important than painting and sculpture, it is the primary art of our or any other culture. 

At the same time, the pursuit of architecture comprises a host of delicious occupations. It is the necessary expression of all social considerations — no new society without new kinds of buildings. All reformers, the Fabian socialist as well as Franklin Roosevelt, always commissioned new architecture. Next, there is a myriad of new technologies all expressed in building techniques and, therefore, in architecture: the elevator; the steel cage; and long before, the balloon frame; and long, long before that, the beautiful brich of Assyria and Rome. Great technologies breed great architecture. There are no visionary utopias in the minds of philosophers that do not enter the realm of architecture. 

It is also the most difficult of all the arts. How often I have envied my colleagues who write, paint, or compose music. They live where they like, they work when they want — no recalcitrant materials, no leaky roofs, no stopped-up sewers. They tear up their mistakes. 

And yet, and yet, what thrill can be as great as a design carried through, a building created in three dimensions, partaking of painting in color and detail, partaking of sculpture in shape and mass. A building for people, people other than oneself, who can rejoice together over the creation. 

It is no wonder to me that whole civilizations are remembered by their buildings; indeed some only by their buildings. I think specifically of Teotihuacan in Mexico, a people whose very name is lost, who had no wheel, who wrote no books, who had no iron or bronze tools, no donkeys, no horses. Yet they flourished for more than a thousand years and built a great and unforgettable city. It was a religious city with pyramids that outclass the Egyptian, with a ceremonial avenue wider than Park Avenue. This was a pedestrian causeway with many stairs crossing the processional and lined by religious pavilions; a neolithic monumental congeries of structures that have defied time and science; courtyards and pathways and sloping walls that spek to us a thousand years after the Teotihuacan people disappeared from the earth without a trace. The art of architecture is the only human activity that can produce that miracle. 

The ghost city of Fatehpur-Sikri in India also comes to mind; built of red sandstone in 15 years by the 16th century ruler, Akbar the Great, and deserted by Akbar thirty years later. A city without street but build of contiguous courts, colonnades, terraces, pavilions endlessly unfolding. Preserved as if built yesterday, it was a sacred and cermonial city built for a saint. Only the art of architecture could create this wonder for Akbar. 

But today architecture is not often acknowledged as basic to human activity. Industry and science take up our energies. Our thinking is dominated by the word — in prose or in poetry. Our philosophy is semantic, our metaphysics irreligious. Our values beautifully inherited from Calvin and John Stuart Mill are utilitarian, our hopes consumerist, materialistic; our way of thinking non-mythic, rationalistic, pragmatic. We eschew old-fashioned words like God, soul, aesthetics, glory, monumentality, beauty. We like practical words like cost-effective, businesslike, profitable. 

Architecture tends in our times to serve these ends. An unprofitable skyscraper simply would not be built. An unbusinesslike drafting office would soon destroy an architect's practice. Architects no longer build Taj Mahals, Versailles, or even extravaganzas like the Grand Central Station...they would cost too much. 

Yet ars longa vita brevis. Values can change. Art, myth, religions can bloom once again. We may, for example, want to rebuild America. We surely can if we want to. We can do anything. We have the skill, the materials, the labor force. Heaven knows, we have the need: our ugly surroundings, our inadequate housing, our sad slums are testimony. We can, if we but will; architecture, as in all the world's history, could be the art that saves. 

But things can change; architects are ready. Here in the West we are blessed with a great artistic heritage. In this century alone, we have Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Lutyens, Mies van der Rohe, and our young architects may be better than teh. They have the good fortune to work in a period of great change, a change in direction upsetting all the presuppositions of the last century. New understandings are sweeping the art. New breezes are blowing. The atmosphere is electric. 

It is at this moment that The Pritzker Architecture Prize is founded. What a symbol of impending change! Our Pulitzer Prizes and our Nobel Prizes are never granted to a visual artist of any kind, much less an architect. Up until tonight, we artists have felt we were second-class participants in society. Scientists, writers, medical doctors are all important people held in high regard in our society. Up to this night, we were not; from now on, architects can feel prouder. 

I, for one, realize the Prize is not for me; the Prize is for the art of architecture, the art we used to call the mother of the arts. Within our purview are the great arts of design, decoration, ornament as well as social housing, city planning and structural design. Maybe we can, as in other centuries, join painting and sculpture once more to enhance our lives. 

The effect of the inaugurationof this Prize might be a chain reaction toward the type of Renaissance of which our world is capable but is, up till now, wanting. Let us rebuild our ddwellings, our buildings, closer to our hearts' desires; let us shape our surroundings in a way that this generation will be remembered, as others have been, as great builders. 

In the name of all the architects of the world, may I thank The Hyatt Foundation for this Prize to our art which will give us hope that we will be able to create human surroundings fitting to a great world.