Fallingwater in Bear Run, built by Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images



Frank Lloyd Wright was a true original creator of buildings both flawed and brilliant, a devout believer in his own genius, nature-loving, mid-western, New-York hating, who sought to realize an American pioneer spirit, one that broke with the old world of classical columns and pediments. He would speak with quasi-biblical language about the truths he claimed for his life and architecture. He was, arguably, America’s greatest architect.





Philip Johnson was mostly at home at his table in the Four Seasons restaurant off Park Avenue, a space of sophistication and great cost created to his designs. He was urbane, Europhile, plagiaristic, fascinated with the superficial. Sociable, political, an operator both Machiavellian and Mephistophelean. The critic Paul Goldberger called him “the greatest architectural presence of our time”, which was roughly right – a presence rather than an actual architect.





Johnson and Wright both were attention-seekers and masters of self-promotion. Both lived long, Wright to 91 and Johnson to 98, and each reinvented his career more than once. They liked dressing up, Wright in cape and porkpie hat, Johnson in fedora and fine suits. Both made it on to the front cover of Time magazine alongside images of their most famous works – Wright’s house Fallingwater, dramatically suspended over a waterfall, and Johnson’s “Chippendale” skyscraper for AT&T, a tower that looked like 18th-century furniture. They both had unfortunate sympathies for Nazi Germany, Johnson more than Wright.





The civil war was only two years over when Wright was born and Johnson survived nearly two years after George W Bush invaded Iraq. Between them they possibly shaped American architecture more than anyone else.





At the beginning of this period Wright looked spent, a man whose remarkable buildings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had changed the course of architecture, but who was now skint, under-employed and widely thought to be dead. Johnson, independently wealthy, was an ambitious young… he wasn’t sure what, but definitely ambitious and probably in an architectural way. At the age of 27 he curated the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, which brought the modern movement in architecture to the attention of the American public.





Frank Lloyd Wright, who built his most celebrated works in old age. Photo: Keystone/Getty Images



Its stars were mostly European – Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, the Dutchman J J P Oud – but the museum wanted a stronger American presence, so Johnson approached Wright to take part. Wright disliked the machine-inspired work of the Europeans and bridled at the way Johnson wanted to present him, which was as a distinguished ancestor, someone who paved the way for the younger generation, rather than a still vital force. He fought and argued before agreeing to take part, then attacked the “objectionable” show in public and private.





This started a relationship that was often antagonistic and mistrustful, intermittent and never close. Wright thought Johnson a “propagandist” and a “highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity.” Johnson considered Wright a man of the past, the “greatest architect of the 19th century”. There would be some softening: Wright seemed to respect at least Johnson’s enthusiasm for architecture and his willingness to take a stand and Johnson would come to praise Wright’s “arrangements of secrets of space”.





Philip Johnson’s ‘Chippendale’ skyscraper for AT&T.



Wright had the second (or possibly third or fourth) act of his American life, as he built his most celebrated works in old age. Johnson made himself famous with a glass house he built for himself in Connecticut, and became a potent architectural godfather, who could first make pure modernism America’s dominant style, before apostatising in favour of ornamental, kitschy, classically inspired post-modernism.





Philip Johnson in 1965. Photo: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images



Wright didn’t like the first version of Johnson’s architecture and he would have hated the second; the older man’s influence on the younger’s designs was limited. The narrative arc of their relationship is therefore stunted. Howard promises more as he describes the contemporaneous gestation of Manhattan’s two most significant post-war buildings, Wright’s white, spiralling Guggenheim Museum and the black, oblong Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe with some help from Johnson. But this showdown of philosophies lacks a culmination, as Wright died before his museum was completed.





The most interesting themes here are those of surface and depth, illusion and substance. Wright claimed profundity, with some justification, but still used stunts, theatre and salesmanship to advance his cause. If Johnson made an art of anything it was at playing with appearances, at exploring what human truths might lie in the harlequinades of cultural posturing. Unfortunately these themes are not fully explored.





To read the stories of these two fascinating individuals, there are other accounts of each that tell them better. Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson is published by Bloomsbury

Source: Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson – review