Phillip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (Cleveland, July 8, 1906 – New Canaan, January 25, 2005) was an American architect, among the most influential of the 20th century, theorist of the International Style and Deconstructivism.

He was elected Honorary Academician of the Academy of Drawing Arts and was the first architect to win the Pritzker Prize in 1979.
Philip Johnson's first contact with architecture took place in 1928 during a trip to Egypt, where he showed particular interest in the Egyptian temples of Cairo and Memphis, but it was in 1929 the figure of Alfred H. Barr Jr., professor of modern art at Wellesley College who stimulated Johnson's interest in architecture.
Barr, hired by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, pushes Philip Johnson to join the museum's Junior Advisory Committee, where he meets Henry Russel Hitchcock, a brilliant young historian who graduated from Harvard University in 1927.
As Alba Cappellieri claims in her text Dall'International Style al Decostruttivismo (ed. CLEAN 1996), the first monograph dedicated to the American architect in Italian, Harvard represents the "link" between Hitchcock and Johnson; the two, after Johnson's degree in philosophy in 1930, met in Paris to undertake a trip to Europe, where the International Style project was born.

She died in 2005 at the age of 99 in the New Canaan mansion where she had lived for 45 years with her partner David Whitney, who had died only six months earlier. The two had transformed the building into an open-air art gallery.
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