Architecture. Philip Johnson Architect: The First Forty Years.

Metropolitan Art Society, [1980?]. 29 illustrations of famous buildings by Johnson, most with his comments. Buildings include The Glass House; Eric Boissonnas House; Robert Leonhardt House; Museum for Pre-Columbian Art; Kline Science Center, Yale University; IDS Center, Minneapolis; Fort Worth, Texas, Water Garden; Pennzoil Place, Houston; Garden Grove Community Church, California; AT&T World Headquarters; The New Cleveland Playhouse; RepublicBank Center, Houston; 580 California Street, San Francisco; Transco II, Houston; and others. Stiff illustrated wraps with French flaps, light soiling to cover, otherwise fine.

Philip Johnson (1906–2005) was a pivotal and polarizing figure in 20th-century American architecture, famous both for championing European modernism and for later orchestrating the Postmodern movement. After serving as the founding director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art—where he co-curated the influential 1932 International Style exhibition—Johnson earned his architecture degree from Harvard in his mid-30s. He gained immediate acclaim for his minimalist, glass-walled residence, the Glass House (1949), and went on to collaborate with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on New York’s iconic Seagram Building (1958). Never bound to a single philosophy, Johnson famously pivoted in the late 1970s toward Postmodernism, designing the AT&T Building (now 550 Madison Avenue) with its iconic Chippendale-style pediment. The inaugural recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979, Johnson left a complex legacy defined by his immense influence as a tastemaker, stylistic chameleon, and master builder.