Philip Johnson was a pedigreed, witty charmer from Cleveland who became a fixture of Manhattan’s art world and social circuit. But before Johnson’s rise to fame as one of America’s most influential architects, he delighted in another rise—that of Hitler and the Third Reich. In his forthcoming book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, Marc Wortman explores the architect’s fascination with Nazism.

A new book by American journalist Marc Wortman describes Johnson's role in pushing the Nazi agenda in the US in an in-depth story in Vanity Fair magazine, adapted from the writer's new book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, which examines America's involvement in the second world war.
 
Wortman describes Johnson's growing support for the Nazis in the 1930s and his efforts to import Fascism to America. "Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement."
 
The author claims Johnson took no issue with the Nazi's treatment of Jews or creators of "degenerate art", even when he helped friends at the Bauhaus flee Germany is understand as "the apparent contradiction in their plight only as a momentary falling back in order to leap that much further ahead. "he saw the apparent contradiction in their plight only as a momentary falling back in order to leap that much further ahead."
 
Consumed by the idea then foreign to most Americans that architecture and design were fine arts in their own right, he used his personal funds to establish the new Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture, making it the first major American museum to exhibit contemporary architecture and design. At age 26, he collaborated in curating MoMA’s landmark 1932 show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.” This groundbreaking exhibition introduced Americans to masters of modern European architectural style, such as Walter Gropius and Berlin’s Bauhaus school and the French master Le Corbusier, along with a few American practitioners, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Raymond Hood. The exhibition and the accompanying book would set the course of world architecture for the next 40 years.
 
Wortman writes. "Here was a vision combining aesthetics, eroticism, and war, forces capable of sweeping away the past and building a new world."

The architect's pro-Nazi efforts started to garner attention back in the US. Harper's Magazine listed him as a leading American Nazi in a 1940 article, Life magazine described him in 1941 as “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist.” and the FBI began to track his activities.

Fascist? Me?
Upon the urging of friends, Johnson "knew he had to change his spots," writes Wortman. At age 34, he enrolled at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and sought to erase his pro-Nazi past, even starting an anti-Fascist group on campus. "He went to class and soon became Harvard’s enfant terrible of modernism. He designed and built a glass-walled modernist pavilion as his residence in Cambridge." "Johnson always wanted to be on the winning side," writes Wortman. "The Thousand-Year Reich was not to be, but so far the American century had been turning out just fine."

Years later, in 1978, the journalist and critic Robert Hughes interviewed Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who had spent 20 years in prison for his crimes. Hughes described the meeting in an article in The Guardian in 2003—he had just come across a lost tape recording of the conversation. He wrote:
    Suppose a new Führer were to appear tomorrow. Perhaps he would need a state architect? You, Herr Speer, are too old for the job. Whom would you pick? “Well,” Speer said with a half-smile, “I hope Philip Johnson will not mind if I mention his name. Johnson understands what the small man thinks of as grandeur. The fine materials, the size of the space.”

Johnson went on to design works such as the Glass House, completed in 1949, and New York's AT&T Building, which opened in 1984. He received the AIA's Gold Medal in 1978 and the first Pritzker Prize, awarded in 1979. He died in 2005 while asleep at his Glass House.
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Philip Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was descended from the Jansen family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant. He attended the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, and then studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he focused on history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Johnson interrupted his education with several extended trips to Europe. These trips became the pivotal moment of his education; he visited Chartres, the Parthenon, and many other ancient monuments, becoming increasingly fascinated with architecture.

In 1928 Johnson met with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was at the time designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The meeting was a revelation for Johnson and formed the basis for a lifelong relationship of both collaboration and competition.

Johnson returned from Germany as a proselytizer for the new architecture. Touring Europe more comprehensively with his friends Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to examine firsthand recent trends in architecture, the three assembled their discoveries as the landmark show "Modern Architecure: International Exhibition" in the Heckscher Building for the Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. The show and their simultaneously published book "International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922" was profoundly influential and is seen as the introduction of modern architecture to the American public. It celebrated such pivotal architects as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. The exhibition was also notable for a controversy: architect Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew his entries in pique that he was not more prominently featured.

As critic Peter Blake has stated, the importance of this show in shaping American architecture in the century "cannot be overstated."[citation needed] In the book accompanying the show, coauthored with Hitchcock, Johnson argued that the new modern style maintained three formal principles: 1. an emphasis on architectural volume over mass (planes rather than solidity) 2. a rejection of symmetry and 3. rejection of applied decoration.[citation needed] The definition of the movement as a "style" with distinct formal characteristics has been seen by some critics as downplaying the social and political bent that many of the European practitioners shared.

Johnson continued to work as a proponent of modern architecture, using the Museum of Modern Art as a bully pulpit. He arranged for Le Corbusier's first visit to the United States in 1935, then worked to bring Mies and Marcel Breuer to the US as emigres.

From 1932 to 1940, Johnson openly sympathized with Fascism and Nazism. He expressed antisemitic ideas and was involved in several right-wing and fascist political movements. Hoping for a fascist candidate for President, Johnson reached out to Huey Long and Father Coughlin. Following trips to Nazi Germany where he witnessed the attack on Poland and contacts with German intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence marked him as suspected of being a spy but he was never charged. Regarding this period in his life, he later said, "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity... I don't know how you expiate guilt." In 1956, Johnson attempted to do just that and donated his design for a building of worship to what is now one of the country's oldest Jewish congregations, Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York. According to one source "all critics agree that his design of the Port Chester Synagogue can be considered as his attempt to ask for forgiveness"  for his admitted "stupidity" in being a Nazi sympathizer. The building, which stands today, is a "crisp juxtaposition of geometric forms".

During the Great Depression, Johnson resigned his post at MoMA to try his hand at journalism and agrarian populist politics. His enthusiasm centered on the critique of the liberal welfare state, whose "failure" seemed to be much in evidence during the 1930s. As a correspondent, Johnson observed the Nuremberg Rallies in Germany and covered the invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion proved the breaking point in Johnson's interest in journalism or politics and he returned to enlist in the US Army. After a couple of self-admittedly undistinguished years in uniform, Johnson returned to the Harvard Graduate School of Design to finally pursue his ultimate career of architect.

Among his works is The Glass House, where he lived until his death, the headquarters of AT & T, the National Centre for Performing Arts of India, the Crystal Cathedral in California, the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, the Lincoln Center in NY or Puerta de Europa towers in Madrid.
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