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Philip Johnson
American; 20th-century

St. Louis, MO: 700 Market Street
79%

700 Market. 1974

It’s easy to see that a Johnson building like AT&T or Detroit’s weird gothic skyscraper is “postmodern.” (Both, to be sure, are lovely, silly notions.) This sculpture in downtown St. Louis — more like his Glass House in its measured commitment both to structure and to playful conception — resists such neat classification. Yeah, the way it cleaves its rectangular footprint with that tall slab of brick is a shitpost about “formalism,” and its spliced offset central rotunda is certainly a joke on the severity of its two main masses. But Saarinen mixed brick and steel and glass not dissimilarly, and how these columns elevate a form so impossibly, imposingly big is reminiscent enough of Mies. On the one hand, you could say that this building is interstitial, style-wise; on the other, that Johnson’s perverse sense of weight and balance led to a structure whose guile, capaciousness, surety, and heft belie style altogether. (2024)