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Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was an eminent, though in many ways controversial architectural figure in the middle and later years of the twentieth century. Of all his designs, perhaps the best known today to the general public is his Glass House, constructed in Connecticut in the late 1940s and still a popular public attraction. It is this very personal achievement
that the psychoanalyst Adele Tutter has taken as her base for an extensive exploration of Johnson's life and work.
Tutter addresses herself with careful detail to Johnson's early background: in particular, to the influence of a rather distant if prosperous father and an extremely attentive, dominating mother. His inevitable but stormy Harvard education was interrupted by a period of European travel, during which his acquaintance with Alfred Barr, director of the incipient New York Museum of Modern Art, led in 1930 in his appointment as chair of the Department of Architecture at that institution. Tutter also details his attraction to National Socialism, which included a fascination with Hitler and an adherence to the pro-Nazi Father Charles Coughlin, to whose blatantly anti-Semitic journal he contributed. In 1939 he traveled to Poland to witness the German seizure of Warsaw. “It was,” he wrote, “a thrilling spectacle” (p. 90). These sympathies persisted at least until American entry into World War II.
A major factor in Johnson's architectural life, Tutter emphasizes, was his intense, though often ambivalent, attachment to the great German master Mies van der Rohe. Tutter surveys in detail the mixture of this connection, parallel in many ways, dependent and resentful, with Johnson's relationship with his father. Despite Johnson's design of a major MoMA exhibition of his work, Mies was dismissive of the Glass House, and Johnson never quite forgave him. The repeated changes in his style, both among the additional buildings added to the Glass House property and the large, commercial edifices he executed in the c