The second of my three book projects this year, the Philip Johnson Tapes, Interviews by Robert A. M. Stern has just been published. My role in this project was to take a set of raw tapes of interviews that Stern conducted with Johnson in 1985 and turn them into a coherent, readable narrative. According to the readers who’ve seen the book, I was successful. A beautiful design by Pentagram and a huge amount of photo-archive research and fact-checking by Stern’s office made this something I am quite proud of.
Expect some Johnson-related events in the near future as well as more work on Johnson from me. A critical analysis of the architect’s role and work is in the future, I suspect…
congratulations!
Well done, Kazys — I can’t wait to see it. I’m especially looking forward to the critical analysis of his work. The symposium at Yale two years ago intended to serve more as a celebration of his life as it were. It’s time to open some of that up. It’ll also be nice to see Johnson admitted as a subject of appropriate historical study (given the whole “historical distance” issue).
Thanks, Molly!
In fairness,
Thanks, Molly!
In fairness, I do think that the symposium had many critical moments as will Emmanuel’s edited book. I mean there were the eulogies by Kipnis and Scully, those were uncritical, but Reinhold’s talk or Joan’s talk or Mark J.’s or Charles J.’s (poorly presented, but highly critical talk). Mark W. and Peter E. gave presentations that were harrowing in many ways. But yes, PJ needs to be taken up with a more thorough and critical analysis. Thanks for the encouragement. Historical distance is the topic of my next post. Stay tuned…