A popular architect’s Nazi past overlooked. (Short Video)
Ed Driscoll’s made a great ten-minute video about the trendy fascism and boutique socialism in the background of one of America’s elite architects, Philip Johnson.
Though he’s best known for ugly, brutal skyscrapers and Bauhaus modernism, Johnson’s own home, the Glass House, is famous for its transparency:
But as Driscoll points out, transparency is something that was missing from Johnson’s own life. Johnson’s opinions in the thirties swung easily from a radical-right dalliance with Nazism back toward the radical left and back again. His tour of the radical -isms settled down after the war, and his new radical -isms were mostly architectural: modernism and, later, postmodernism. The switch seems to have maintained his reputation. Only a few critics like Anne Applebaum and Hilton Kramer ever got around to telling the truth about Johnson.
Meanwhile MSM figures like Susan Sontag and Charlie Rose weren’t interested in pulling back the curtains on Johnson’s Nazi dalliances, but were content to help him maintain his spot in the avant-garde. As with Robert “Sheets” Byrd, as with postmodernist Nazi Paul deMan, a flirtation with (or seduction by) evil can be overlooked by the Progressives…if they judge you’re now sufficiently useful to Progress.
Listen toward the end of the video for Johnson’s reply when asked in 1993 if he would have been willing to design buildings for Hitler. The irony of Johnson’s flirtation with Nazism is that Hitler hated modern architecture, and drove many famous modern architects out of Germany–like Johnson’s co-conspirators in the Bauhaus movement, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius.