Man of the ‘House’

Through a sometimes rocky half-century relationship with Houston, architect Philip Johnson designed the city’s most famously restrained modern mansion and its most imposing Reagan Era skyscrapers. A new book details how an erudite New Yorker made an indelible mark deep in the heart of Texas.

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson, the late icon of modern and postmodern architecture whose many feats include New York’s Lipstick Building, gave Houston its design pedigree. He contributed such buildings as Williams Tower and the University of Saint Thomas’ Chapel of Saint Basil. Now, in an exhaustively detailed new biography — The Man in the Glass House, whose title references Johnson’s famous home and masterwork in Connecticut — author Mark Lamster traces Johnson’s rise, and how Houston luminaries such as Gerald Hines became his most important patrons. 

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