The Hollow Man: The fabulous career of architect Philip Johnson

Film auteurs love a heroic architect, but the reality is often funnier.

With the movie The Brutalist opening this weekend in a few locations for Oscar-qualifying, it’s worth taking a look at one of the most prestigious commissions of the era won by a postwar architect: Philip Johnson’s 1969 JFK memorial in Dallas:

And a ground view:

Hopefully, only rarely do French tourists mistake it for a gentlemen’s public convenience.

Philip Johnson was hugely famous and influential in elite cultural circles for most of his long life (1906-2005). A rich kid and social butterfly, he became the first curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1930-1934, where he played a big role in introducing Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe to America and coining the term “International Style.”

But in late 1934, he quit MOMA to become a right-wing extremist journalist, writing for Father Coughlin’s publication. The Berlin regime hosted him on a trip to report on the German invasion of Poland in 1939, to which he gave thumbs-up. Johnson’s secretary said he had delusions of becoming “the Hitler in the United States.”

What happened next is beyond the paywall.