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Philip Johnson, a Fascist?
United States Architecture News - Apr 20, 2016 - 15:30 8883 views
Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed.
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Fascist? Me?
With nearly all of his American Fascist friends and associates under indictment, the 34-year-old Johnson knew he had to change his spots. He enrolled as a full-time student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He stopped in twice in September 1940 at the German Embassy in Washington for reasons F.B.I. informants could not explain, but after that his life as an evangelist for Fascism came to an abrupt end.......Continue Reading
In a new book titled ''1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War'' written by Marc Wortman and released April 2016. In this excerpt from his newly released book, the author writes about Johnson's fascination with Nazism.
Top Image: Philip Johnson with three models that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Early Modern Architecture, Chicago, 1870-1910, which opened in January, 1933. © Bettmann/CORBIS
> via Vanity Fair