backstory: Philip Johnson

The decision was in response to letters sent to Harvard and to the Museum of Modern Art on November 27 by the Johnson Study Group, a collective of architects, designers, educators and artists calling for both institutions to eliminate the architect’s name from all titles and spaces due to the architect’s “widely documented white supremacist views and activities.” The group observed that the “demand for removal relates specifically to the role that naming plays in public institutions.”

While my mention of Wilson was an observation for me, my mention here of Johnson hits a little bit closer to home since the Neuberger Museum of Art building was designed by him. Roy R. Neuberger, after whom our building is named, likely met Johnson through Nelson Rockefeller, who conceptualized the SUNY system and who approached Roy about donating his collection to found our museum. Some people have expressed disdain for the Neuberger building, mainly due to its decidedly 1960s brick monolithic qualities, a brutalist rendition of Johnson’s theories on processional space. But I like it. I always have. And I agree with the Johnson Study Group’s observation in their letter that while naming positions the honoree as a “model,” there is still a “role for Johnson’s architectural work in archives and historical preservation.” The Neuberger building was in fact documented and featured in an exhibition facilitated by Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 called Architecture for the Arts: The State University of New York College At Purchase, which documented the novelty of Purchase College’s architectural plan designed by Edward Larabee Barnes and modeled on Thomas Jefferson’s academical village.

As we think through how we fit into various histories and stories being told and retold through changing ways of viewing and thinking, the first priority for me is getting out the facts. These are the Johnson facts as I know them.