Originally presented at the Cleveland Heights/University Heights Public Library

For more than 50 years, Cleveland native Philip Johnson was one of the most influential figures in American design and architecture.

After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Harvard in 1930, Johnson became founder and director of the Department of Architecture and Design of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first museum-affiliated program in the United States devoted to the study and exploration of architecture as an art. It was during his first tenure in the position — he headed the department between 1930 and 1936, and again from 1946 to 1954 — that he and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock mounted their landmark exhibition entitled “The International Style.”

Mr. Johnson was justly celebrated for championing the two architectural movements that most profoundly affected urban landscapes during the second half of the 20th century: the International Style; and the reintroduction of the uses of a wide variety of historic styles in contemporary architectural design. Philip Johnson won the first Pritzker Architecture Prize for lifetime achievement and received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the highest honor of his profession.

Through his designs, writings, and teachings, Philip Johnson played a seminal role in defining the theoretical shape and literal form taken by architecture in the 20th century.