Philip Johnson
Postmodern period (1980–1990)

In 1980, Johnson and Burgee completed a cathedral in a dramatic new style: the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, is a soaring glass megachurch originally built for the Reverend Robert H. Schuller. The interior can seat 2,248 persons. It takes the form of a four-pointed star, with free-standing balconies in three points and the chancel in the fourth. The cathedral is covered with more than 10,000 rectangular pieces of glass. The Glass panels are not bolted, but glued to the structure, with a silicon based glue, to give it greater ability to resist Southern California earthquakes. Johnson and Burgee designed it to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 8.0. The tower was added in 1990.

The cathedral quickly became a Southern California landmark, but its costs helped drive the church into debt. When the church declared bankruptcy in 2012, it was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange and became the Roman Catholic cathedral for Orange County.

Working with John Burgee, Johnson did not confine himself to a single style and was comfortable mixing elements of modernism and postmodernism. For the Cleveland Play House, he built a Romanesque brick structure. His skyscrapers in the 1980s were clad in granite and marble and usually had some feature borrowed from historic architecture. In New York he designed the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media) (1991).

In 1982, working in collaboration with John Burgee, he finished one of his most famous buildings, 550 Madison Avenue, (first known as AT&T Building, then the Sony building before taking its present name). Built between 1978 and 1982, it is a skyscraper with an eight-story high arched entry and a split pediment at the top which resembles an enormous piece of 18th-century Chippendale furniture. It was not the first work of postmodern architecture, as Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry had already built smaller scale postmodern buildings, and Michael Graves had completed the Portland Building (1980–82) in Portland, Oregon, two years earlier. But the building's Manhattan location, size, and originality made it the most famous and recognizable example of postmodern architecture. It was designated a city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2018.

Between 1979 and 1984, Johnson and Burgee built PPG Place, the postmodern headquarters of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. It is a complex of six buildings within three city blocks, covering five and a half acres. The centerpiece is the 40-story tower, One PPG Place, which has a crown of spires at the corners which suggest the neogothic tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. During the 1980s, Johnson and Burgee completed a series of other notable postmodern landmarks. The TC Energy Center (formerly Republic Bank Center, later, Bank of America Center), in Houston (1983), was the first postmodern skyscraper in the Houston skyline. Fifty-six stories high, it has two setbacks creating what appear to be three different buildings, one against the other. The three triangular gables were inspired by Flemish Renaissance architecture. The interior and exterior are covered with rough-textured red granite, which also covers the surrounding sidewalks.

The new building for the Hines College of Architecture (1985) of the University of Houston paid homage to forms drawn from earlier periods of architectural history, using modern materials, construction methods, and scale. The facade of the Hines building resembles, on a larger scale, the neoclassic facades of the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux.

400 West Market (1993) in Louisville, Kentucky, is a 35-story office tower built of reinforced concrete rather than the typical steel. It is topped by a concrete cupola, a vestige of the building's original owner and builder, Capital Holding.

In 1986, Johnson and Burgee moved their offices into one of their new buildings, the elliptical Lipstick Building at 885 Third Avenue in New York, nicknamed because of its resemblance to the color and shape of a stick of lipstick. A feud was beginning between the two architects, with Burgee demanding greater recognition.

As their business flourished and number of clients grew, the feud between Burgee and Johnson continued to grow. In 1988, the firm's name was changed to John Burgee Architects with Johnson as the "design consultant". In 1991, Johnson responded by establishing his own firm. The feud ended badly for Burgee; he was saddled with all of the firm's debts, while Johnson no longer had any responsibility. Burgee was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy and to retire, while Johnson continued to get commissions.
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