Modern Architecture

Philip Johnson, the aristocratic, often-outrageous dean of American architecture, who helped launch every major building style from the 1930s onward and who made his controversial mark on numerous American skylines, is dead at age 98. Johnson died Tuesday night at his home in New Canaan, Conn., his lawyer, Joel Ehrenkranz, said Wednesday. The cause of death was not known. An architect, curator and patron, the Cleveland native brought glass-box modernism to America, then led the postmodern revolt against that style with a skyscraper shaped like a Chippendale highboy. He then championed another...

he Illinois Institute of Technology's chief claim to architectural fame rests with Mies van der Rohe, who was responsible for the plan of the Chicago campus, conceived between 1939 and 1941, and for 22 buildings, the last dating from 1956. Following Mies's retirement from his post as head of the school's architecture department in 1958, other architects added to that number, but the last of their efforts was realized in 1971, and in the intervening three decades, no work of any consequence has appeared on the campus. That was the case until 2003, when complexes by two internationally recognized...

Four years ago California architect Frank Gehry put the gritty Spanish city Bilbao on the world culture map with a curvy, photogenic branch of New York's Guggenheim Museum. In the same captivating design he also dramatized -- and somehow legitimized -- the Guggenheim's bold expansionist strategy. Now, the parent museum is returning the favor. Laid out on the spiraling ramps of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterly New York Guggenheim are hundreds of models, drawings and photographs covering three decades of Gehry's work.

LOOK up%u2014and anywhere in the U.S. the building, if it is relatively new, and certainly if it is of steel, will bear traces of Mies van der Rohe. In a time of confusion, he was a purist. In an era of innovation, he was a disciplinarian. He found shapes for the new possibilities of glass and steel, and the architecture of the world has never been the same since. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died in Chicago last week at the age of 83, never realized the extent of his fame. "It is bad to be too famous," he once remarked. "Greek temples, Roman basilicas arid medieval cathedrals are significant...

In the year 1923 there appeared in Paris a little volume on architecture that seemed written almost entirely in italics and capitals. "There exists a new spirit," it said. "A GREAT EPOCH HAS BEGUN." Its title was sweeping: Towards an Architecture%u2014as though existing architecture did not merit the term. The book was signed by a brilliant, owlish young man who called himself Le Corbusier. Vain as he is, Le Corbusier himself would hardly claim to have invented modern architecture singlehanded, but his slim book and his later work to a large degree plotted its course. "Corbu's" personality and...

In the still predawn hours, the old man sleeping in a room in St. Joseph's Hospital, Phoenix, Ariz, was heard to sigh deeply, and then he was dead. So last week departed Frank Lloyd Wright, 89, three days after a successful operation to remove an intestinal block. With his passing, the U.S. lost its greatest architect%u2014a lone, yeasty genius who devoted his life to working out his own unique vision of what architecture could be in a democratic society. "If this were an age like the Renaissance." said Architect Eero Saarinen. "Frank Lloyd Wright would have been honored as the Michelangelo of...

About four miles from Spring Green, Wis., the hills splay into two soft ranges to let a fast stream flow toward the Wisconsin River. Facing southwest over this valley a big, long house folds around the summit of one hill, its roof lines parallel to the line of ridges, its masonry the same red-yellow sandstone that crops out in ledges along the stream. Under snow the house melts easily into the landscape. Its name is Taliesin, a Welsh word meaning "shining brow." Its history is one of tragic irony. Its character is one of extraordinary repose. It is the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest...