BOOK:Philip Johnson-A Visual Biography, Phaidon Publications

Philip Johnson was for many years the most powerful figure in the society and politics of his profession. The impressively illustrated book “Philip Johnson, A Visual Biography” traces his seven decades of larger-than-life influence, innovation, and controversy in the realm of architecture and beyond. The book covers his early travels abroad, when his stocks in Alcoa, an aluminium supplier, soared, enabling Johnson to stay in the best hotels and keep the best company. A passion for great buildings and high society remained with the architect throughout his life. The  book, features early works by Johnson, such as a crisply conceived apartment dating from 1934 for his friend, philanthropist and arts patron, Edward Warburg, right through to his posthumous, postmodernist towers, some of which topped out in the late 1990s. The new book details Johnson’s most famous works, his 1949 home, The Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, for which Johnson drew on his familiarity with and appreciation for the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; as well as his work on The Seagram Building in New York, the Manhattan tower block that one critic called “the millennium’s most important building” which Johnson completed in concert with Mies van der Rohe, in 1958. There are also countless additional designs, including many additional structures for Johnson’s own New Canaan estate  as well as later landmarks, including the postmodernist AT&T Building . The book also takes in Johnson’s prodigious work as a curator and promoter of architectural talent, staging groundbreaking exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, many of which drew both condemnation and praise, yet all of which pushed forward architectural aesthetics in the United States.-Dimitris Lempesis