The man who shaped modern America

"Hitler was, unfortunately, an extremely bad architect." Philip Johnson, who had reviewed Mein Kampf in 1939 when he was perturbed by the prospect of America committing "race suicide", what with the disturbing number of Jews in positions of power and so on, never troubled to get very much more critical of fascism. Confronted by the warning that a 1994 biography by Franz Schulze would be controversial, the homosexual architect merely commented: "Well, sex and Nazism can do that." Dorothy Parker thought that a man need merely be "handsome, ruthless and stupid". Johnson was handsome, ruthless and cynical. To which might be added "manipulative" and "publicity hound".

"Hitler was, unfortunately, an extremely bad architect." Philip Johnson, who had reviewed Mein Kampf in 1939 when he was perturbed by the prospect of America committing "race suicide", what with the disturbing number of Jews in positions of power and so on, never troubled to get very much more critical of fascism. Confronted by the warning that a 1994 biography by Franz Schulze would be controversial, the homosexual architect merely commented: "Well, sex and Nazism can do that." Dorothy Parker thought that a man need merely be "handsome, ruthless and stupid". Johnson was handsome, ruthless and cynical. To which might be added "manipulative" and "publicity hound".

Philip Cortelyou Johnson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 98, was born into a Cleveland family so wealthy that he did not trouble to graduate from Harvard's architecture school until he was 36. By that time, he had already become an American taste-maker. A student of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, Johnson made his name with an exhibition on the International Style in architecture which, with the art historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, he organised in 1932 at New York's then brand-new Museum of Modern Art. Researching this exhibition in Germany, Johnson took time off to attend a Hitler rally in Potsdam and was impressed.

Johnson had no great interest in the social purpose of modernism, but as an adroit promoter of fashions in building, he saw the momentary potential for stripped-back, hard-edge architecture among the style-conscious socialites who comprised MoMA's influential committees and populated its cocktail parties. "Remember, son, I'm a whore," was a line he used on many people, including me. Thus, with Johnson as an assistant, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius' successor at the Bauhaus (who had left Germany after failing to sell modernism to the Nazis) used utopian design principles to create one of the almighty monuments to US capitalism, the 1958 Seagram Building on Park Avenue.

There was something of the lofty grandeur and perverse psychology of New York about Johnson. His very first building had been a little pleasure pavilion, a Glass House, for himself in New Canaan, a prosperous Connecticut enclave of country club/artistic types where his neighbours included Marcel Breuer, who designed the "Bauhaus" chair, and Eliot Noyes, another Gropius student, who created the corporate identities of both IBM and Mobil. Johnson's protogé, Peter Eisenman, in an introduction to Johnson's own Writings (1979) said it was the "ideal model of a more perfect society". More realistically, if more characteristically cynically, Johnson later said the great thing about the minimalism of Mies was that it was "easy to copy".

In a 1961 London speech Johnson said: "You cannot not know history." So, when in 1975 he was approached by the AT&T Corporation to design its headquarters, Johnson produced a towerblock with a Chippendale open pediment. The first monument to that delirium of kitsch known as post-modernism, AT&T showed that while Johnson may have been the first to introduce the glass box to architecture's repertoire, he was also among the first to break it, designing himself a role as an impresario of synthetic po-mo outrage, to go with his old-money ways, his Corbu glasses and bowties.

Curiously, Johnson's virulent anti-Semitism of the thirties did not survive the client environment of the post-war decades. But the more thoughtful critics never forgot Johnson's misalliance with fascism. Following his enthusiastic attendance at a 1938 Sommerkurs für Auslander in Berlin, a sort of away-day for would-be Nazis, he was invited to witness the invasion of Poland. Of this dire event he noted: "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy."

Another witness was the journalist William Shirer, later author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . Shirer had to share a hotel room with Johnson, a daunting task for the politically and sexually squeamish. In Berlin Diaries , Shirer wrote: "An American fascist ... none of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis."