The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Philip Johnson

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former is a National Monument; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the "New York Times".

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him a lifetime of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascism, as well as the Nazism of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on Nazi Germany as its soldiers marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would correspond with a friend at the time.

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