Philip Johnson's Later Years: Hillary Lewis

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HILLARY LEWIS GOT TO KNOW the architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005) in the last 13 years of his life, when he left corporate modernism and postmodernism behind and his buildings turned more shapely and almost totally abstract. Lewis, who wrote two books with Johnson during this time, has curated a show of his later work, "Philip Johnson: Architecture as Art," opening this weekend at the Kreeger Museum, a building that happens to be one of Johnson's '60s masterworks. She spoke with Express recently about the radical changes that show up in Johnson's later designs.

» EXPRESS: What's so different about the work Johnson did in his late '80s and '90s?
» LEWIS: It was a new direction in Johnson's career that was purely sculptural. It was a remarkable time of his seeing architecture as art. Most architects might not even be comfortable saying that, but Johnson felt that art was at the heart of all things.

» EXPRESS: In your exhibition essay, you refer to Johnson as a "self-proclaimed 'formalist,'" as if it took guts for him to say such a thing. Why is that?
» LEWIS: Ain't that the heart of the matter? Since the postwar period from the Bauhaus going forward, there is a mentality that architecture is a way of solving types of spatial problems and that formalism is inappropriate because you're proposing not a spatial solution but a set of formal conditions. I know many practicing architects. If you tell them their work is sculptural, they will squirm and look at you as if you've insulted them.

» EXPRESS: Having co-curated the landmark "International Style" show at MoMA in 1932, he could be mistaken for a stickler for functionalism.
» LEWIS: It's particularly interesting because he was so exposed to and aligned with the great masters of 20th century architecture — especially from the early experience of putting together that modern architecture show. But he was criticized for decades because he departed from modernism's basic forms and basic tenets. He's an outlier in many respects. He wouldn't have disagreed that you can transform society with architecture, but he was more interested in the artistic aspect.

» EXPRESS: There are obvious signs of Frank Stella, Frank Gehry and German Expressionism in his later work.
» LEWIS: He loved talking about sources. He was approaching architecture in a pre-20th-century manner. Stella was a close friend of Johnson and [his partner] David Whitney. He saw a model of a piece Stella was working on and said, "I'm going to do something like this." There's none of this worrying about stealing ideas. And Gehry was a close friend. Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao literally made him cry. He would look at it and say, "This looks like German Expressionism to me."

» Kreeger Museum, 2401 Foxhall Road NW; opens Sat., through July 31, $10; 202-337-3050.

Written by Express contributor Bradford McKee
Photo courtesy Robert Walker