Philip Johnson

In this essay, I propose a shift in emphasis in the interpretation of Philip Johnson's architecture of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reexamination of his buildings and writings, I bring the notion of queer oppositionality to bear on the role of architects in promoting ideas of American democracy in the post-Second World War period. My argument is twofold: first, I argue that Johnson purposefully deployed his “queer eye” as a form of wicked cultural critique to ridicule the hypocrisies of democratic mythmaking and the mass-marketed social taboos and political fears of the age. Second, I argue that Johnson used history and the aristocratic traditions of European architecture to expose the fiction that the United States was the heir to and chief guardian of the whole body of Western civilization in the aftermath of the war. I further argue that Johnson's aristocratic posturing vis-à-vis culture and power was, like Camp, part of a vanguard queer sensibility that undermined mainstream views about the relationship between the two as popularized in architecture and visual culture.KEYWORDS: modern architectureamerican culturequeer studiesvisual culture

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Civilization · Democracy · Interpretation (philosophy · Mainstream · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Queer · Sensibility · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Architecture

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