Yale and the Museum of Modern Art Team up to Honor the Late Philip Johnson

Yale and the Museum of Modern Art Team up to Honor the Late Philip Johnson
An American cultural icon and one of the 20th Century's most celebrated architects, Philip Johnson (1906-2005), will be honored in a three-day symposium, February 16-18, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Yale School of Architecture, two institutions with which Johnson was closely associated.

A legendary public figure, Johnson derived his reputation as much from the ideas he expressed through his writing and teaching and the exhibitions that he mounted as from the buildings he designed.

Of the latter, the one with which he is most generally identified, The Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut, was his primary residence from the time of its construction in 1949 to his death in January of this year.

Johnson first came to public attention in 1932 as the curator of a landmark exhibition at the newly established Museum of Modern Art, which is credited with introducing Americans to modern European architecture.

Together with the book, "The International Style: Architecture since 1922" (co-authored by Henry-Russell Hitchcock), Johnson's efforts heavily influenced American design for more than a half-century.

Long a champion of the work of the German modernist Mies van der Rohe, Johnson collaborated with him on the landmark Seagram Building in Manhattan.