Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
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. (TFS, 2024)
Minneapolis, MN: 80 8th Street S
73%
IDS Center. 1973
This building's strict gridded orderliness has the same relationship to the right angles of, say, Mies van der Rohe as a Robert Morris box does to the geometries in Piet Mondrian. That is, it's not presenting interrelating units of shapes and colors whose total order it's our task to glean through visual contemplation; rather, it proposes iterative, self-similar patterns that are more so (in artistic terms) symbols or representations of ideal forms than they are physical structures. One experiences the IDS Center not visually but conceptually, as a real space which is coyly, constantly reminding you of its pretensions to some sort of geometrical transcendence. The upshot is that it's aesthetically productive to contemplate the nonidentity between the actual and the ideal, actual things and their referents. The downside is that this is a fundamentally pessimistic mode of design, as it predicates itself on — satisfies itself with making jokes about — the unachievability of any sort of unity. There's visual pleasure to be taken in Johnson's grids and swallowing spaces, but it's like they chide you for delighting in them, let alone taking them seriously. (TFS, 2025)