We may think we know all there is about the most famous display of architecture to be mounted in the the U.S., the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark show, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. But there’s always more to dig up about this ultra-influential event and the fertile period from which it emanated, as we find in Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson.
This October, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute’s Museum of Art in Utica, New York, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its Philip Johnson-designed home with an exhibition commemorating the work of the illustrious Modernist and Postmodernist architect.
A former business partner of acclaimed architect Philip Johnson recently unveiled an archive of nearly 25,000 sketches, tracings, and renderings from between 1968 and 1992, a sparsely documented period of Johnson’s prolific career.
New York City’s legendary Four Seasons restaurant, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has embarked on the restoration of its famed Philip Johnson-designed interior in the Seagram Building, completed in 1958. Phyllis Lambert, the architect and patron who convinced her father, Samuel Bronfman, owner of the Seagram Company, to choose Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Johnson as the architects of his new headquarters building on Park Avenue, guided the selection of Belmont Freeman, FAIA, as the new architect for the restoration of this culinary outpost.
"After 50 years, you shouldn't do the same thing," says Philip Johnson, FAIA, describing his recent design for a multidomed, Byzantine-inspired addition to the Robert C. Wiley House, a chaste, Modernist box he designed in 1956.