John Johansen’s Restless Spirit

by Kevin C. Lippert from NANOARCHITECTURE: A New Species of Architecture by John M Johansen, published by Princeton Architectural Press

On first meeting, John Johansen is an unlikely prophet of a new millennial architecture based on the latest revolutions in science and technology. [Approaching his 95th year] it seems a more propitious moment for him to bask in the current admiring rediscovery of ...many elegant houses he built in the 1950s, than to be taking to the pulpit of experimental design based on nanotechnology, bioengineering, magnetic levitation, self-regulating structures, composite materials, and other developments more likely to be found in the pages of Popular Mechanics than the newsletter of do.co.mo.mo. It's a surprising twist for [a nonagenarian] and former outspoken defender of the high-modern faith.

But the career of John MacLean Johansen, born 1916, the son of two successful New York studio painters, has been nothing if not full of surprising twists and turns. A 1942 graduate of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus-in-Boston, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Johansen began his career at the apogee of American modernism. However, unlike most of his classmates, including Paul Rudolph, Philip Johnson, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and I.M. Pei, Johansen's dedication to the modernist gospel was not deep-seated, and even early on he proved himself a restless experimenter. In truth, alternative voices were never entirely exiled from Harvard: Le Corbusier was a frequent visitor, and the venerable Frank Lloyd Wright urged students in his lectures-from which faculty were excluded-to "leave Harvard immediately" before they were corrupted. The influence of Alvar Aalto's organic romanticism could also be felt moving up the Charles River from MIT.

The young Johansen was attracted to it all: in a kind of Borgesian catalogue he lists as early influences Wright, the "haunting austerity" of Gropius (who was to become his father-in-law), the "humble, almost childlike innocence" of Marcel Breuer, and the sculptural elementality of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp. To this list he later added: the thin-shell structures of Felix Candela and Pier Luigi Nervi, the strut construction of Buckminster Fuller, the rationalism of Mies van der Rohe's steel frames, Andreas Palladio, Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, Italian Renaissance painting, systems theory, Japanese Metabolism, chaos theory, and more. Throughout his career, Johansen has been a kind of architectural omnivore, always fascinated by the stylistic, intellectual, and technological currents that have swirled around him.

Harvard Five

In spite of his wide-ranging interests, Johansen's earliest works were nonetheless straightforward postwar modernism. After Johansen graduated from Harvard he spent the remaining war years building woodframe Navy barracks and subsequently working as a researcher for the National Housing Agency. After the war, he was employed briefly as a draftsman for Breuer, and joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he worked "on loan" on the United Nations project under Wallace Harrison. In 1948 Johansen moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where several other Harvard colleagues - including Breuer, Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and Landis Gores - were already encamped. This loose-knit circle, more social than professional, came to be known as "The Harvard Five."

Neo-Palladian phase

Over the next ten years, Johansen built a series of elegant modern houses typical of the period. Johansen calls this his "Neo-Palladian" phase. Certainly the possibility of European travel after World War II provided a source of inspiration and delight for Johansen and his peers, especially given the antihistoricist stance at Harvard. Johansen wrote in Architectural Forum in late 1955 of "a new interest in the architecture of the past," and of the "timeless importance" of the abstract qualities of space and mass that he found in the Italian Renaissance-qualities hardly inconsistent with the kind of "domesticated" Yankee modernism already pioneered by Gropius and Breuer, and under further development in the hands of Johnson, Rudolph, and others.

The houses of this period - like the Goodyear House of 1955 and the Villa Ponte or Warner House of 1957 - were formally inventive, engaged their sites in clever ways (Villa Ponte literally bridged a stream), made use of luxurious materials, and were accomplished in their knowledge of the stylistic and tectonic developments of their day. They were also well received - the Warner House was a Record house in 1958 - and Johansen's residential practice flourished.

biomorphic liberation

Johansen found the simplicity, balance, and order of these Neo-Palladian designs "exhilarating," so it makes the out-of-Ieft-field appearance of his "Spray-Form" projects thin-shelled concrete structures - that resemble nothing if not flowers - that much more startling. Commissioned by the American Concrete Association as part of an ongoing series of demonstration projects, the British critic Reyner Banham hailed them as symbolic of a conversion to the religion of technology; Johansen remembers them more as an effort to distance himself from "the modern box" as well as experiments symptomatic of his "insistent spirit of investigation."

Spray House #2 of 1955 typifies these projects. Intended as a residence for Johansen and his family, the house was framed by steel rods bent into shell-like shapes that were fastened together at a central point. These rods were then covered with smaller rods, and again with paperbacked steel mesh. Concrete was to be sprayed directly onto the armature, making a rigid shell approximately 8 inches thick; the resulting shell was to be coated outside with plastic for waterproofing, and inside with sprayed insulation and paint. Clear plastic would fill gaps between the shapes to create windows. Floors, walls, and ceiling would form one continuously smooth surface, like the inside of a seashell. Radiant heating coils would be embedded in the walls; furniture, steps, and shelves were similarly to be incorporated into the structure itself. The great advantage of this construction process was that no formwork was required, resulting in both more organic forms than traditional poured concrete would allow, as well as lower cost.

Although "gunite" - sprayed concrete - was invented in 1907 by Carl Ethan Akeley, who needed a way to spray aggregate onto mesh to build dinosaur models, the technology was, and is, more commonly used for building swimming pools. Le Corbusier used it at Ronchamp (1950-55) with an effect on the architectural world as electric as Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim today, and was most likely the inspiration for Johansen's explorations in crustacean forms. It is also likely that Johansen was aware of the highly publicized thin-shell structures of Felix Candela and the ferro-cimento structures of Pier Luigi Nervi. Whatever its origin, the biomorphic appears as a liberation for Johansen, and, although Spray House #2 was never built, he used the idea for a series of projects that followed in rapid succession, including the United States Trade Pavilion at the International World's Fair in Zagreb (1956), a church in Norwich, Connecticut (1957), and a restaurant and motel compound in Mt. Kisco, New York (1957). It seems likely that his spray-form houses influenced the architect/artist Frederick Kiesler, who developed a series of versions of his own "Endless House," a similar biomorphic shell structure. Palladio, Carl Jung's theory of archetypes, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, Italian Renaissance painting, systems theory, Japanese Metabolism, chaos theory, and more. Throughout his career, Johansen has been a kind of architectural omnivore, always fascinated by the stylistic, intellectual, and technological currents that have swirled around him.

Johansen succeeded in having one of his shell projects built: the Zagreb Trade Pavilion. It was not, however, a happy experience: Johansen complained that the Yugoslav concrete, and workers, were of low quality, and the structure consequently required secondary support. Whatever the failings of the project, it did attract attention in Europe: in London, the Archigram group went so far as to label Johansen's "stomach-like" shapes "Bowellism, "For the boys in Archigram," wrote Archigram member Michael Webb, "(Johansen) was our genuine American hero: each successive project a radical departure not only from conventional practice, but even from his own previous oeuvre.”

Classical modernist

While Johansen's experiments in biomorphism garnered him notoriety among the European avant-garde, it was his reputation as a classical modernist that procured him the commission to design the American Embassy in Dublin in late 1956.

institutional commissions

If Johansen was looking for the Dublin Embassy to bring him institutional commissions, his wish was soon granted: on the heels of the Dublin embassy followed Clowes Memorial Hall - Opera House on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis (1964), the Orlando Public Library (1966), the Morris Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, Maryland (1967), and the Goddard Library of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (1968).

These buildings fit neither the modern nor biomorphic molds of Johansen's work to that point, but mirrored new tendencies in the architecture of the period, of which two stand out:  First was the so-called New Brutalism, pioneered by Le Corbusier, codified by the critic Reyner Banham, and imported into the United States by Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, under whom Johansen taught at Yale from 1955-60. The second was the bias toward engineering and systems theory seen in the work of Archigram, R. Buckminster Fuller, and others. All were symptomatic of the breakdown of modernism and the expansion of architecture to include broader social, technological, and even political agendas. Johansen's buildings of the immediate post - Dublin period reflect these influences: like many of his peers, Eero Saarinen, often criticized for his eclecticism, comes immediately to mind-Johansen was warily feeling his way, and would later write that his buildings of this epoch suggested "no clear direction of design”.

BRUTALIST BUILDINGS

The Library at Clark University is the most successful of Johansen's brutalist buildings. Johansen called it his "first modern building," meaning the first where he "presided" over the design of the building, "letting it exercise its growing confidence and will and assert its purpose. The spiritual overtones were a direct nod to Louis Kahn's dictum "what the building wants to be" - Kahn was on the faculty at Yale with Johansen until 1959 - as was Johansen's strategy to let the form  emerge through the revelation of the constructional process.

Johansen was already taking pains to distance himself from "classicists" like Johnson and SOM and "picturesque designers" like Kahn and Rudolph. He self-deprecatingly includes himself-at least his earlier work-in this category, and, willing to leave it all behind, states his "new position," one concerned "not with gestural form and with masterworks of architecture, but rather with processes, with action, with behavioral patterns, and how most simply all these may be accommodated. This new position is concerned with an 'organizing idea' or an 'ordering device.'

The idea or device will derive from motivating processes of personal and of societal behavior, and of highly industrialized building techniques.

ANTIESTABLISHMENT AD-HOCISM

"Architecture as we knew it," concludes Johansen, "is no longer effective in its solutions, nor even compelling in its esthetic expression." Certainly evocative of the antiestablishment rhetoric of May 1968, and inspired by his readings of media critic Marshall McLuhan and cybernetics guru Norbert Wiener, Johansen declared his new Mummers Theater "not a building as we have known it, but a fragment." Indeed, Johansen found his formal inspiration in the complex beauty of electronic circuit boards, with their "components and subcomponents" plugged into a "chassis" and connected by "circuiting systems" superimposed at different levels to avoid cross-circuits. The Mummers Theater reflects these subdivisions by dividing its component programmatic elements - a school and two theater spaces-with their "subcomponent" support spaces (offices, backstage), and joining these with "circuitry," both circulation, such as ramps, stairs, and bridges, and mechanical systems, like ductwork and plumbing. Materials reinforce these subdivisions: component pieces are blocks of raw poured-in-place concrete, while subcomponents are of brightly painted sheet metal. It seemed to the critic Michael Sorkin "a bubble diagram come to life," and the resulting "ad-hocism" presages the neoexpressionism of Hans Scharoun and Frank Gehry, and certainly seems the progenitor of the color-coded, inside-out Pompidou Center (1971- 76).

EXPERIMENTATION AND electromagneticS

The sense of spirit exhibited in the Mummers Theater all but disappeared in Johansen's work in the period from 1973 to 1987, when he shared an office in New York with Ashok Bhavnani; many of the buildings of this time, such as his Roosevelt Island housing projects (1975- 76) were nondescript, and Johansen, now in his sixties, clearly felt betrayed by the "trivialities" of postmodernism. But, perhaps not coincidentally, Johansen's spirit of experimentation seems to have taken refuge in his sketchbooks, in a series of conceptual, unrealizable projects. Although many were no more than doodles based loosely on scientific ideas, they provided the seeds for the conceptually rich projects that followed. The sketchbook projects of this period range from the whimsical, if not frivolous-for example, the Pavilion of Earthly Delights, a "gravity-free spatial adventure" where "rising passions set up an electromagnetic field that neutralizes gravity"- to the visionary, like the Simulated Cloud of 1985, proposed first as a chapel for the Miami Beach Resort Hotel and then as a "free-floating," helium-supported conference center - a clear antecedent to Diller + Scofidio's much-publicized Blur Building of 2001. 

Architecture for the Electronic Age

As early as 1966, Johansen wrote, in The American Scholar, of "An Architecture for the Electronic Age," in which he identified numerous influences of electronics on architecture. These included: the imitation of electronic equipment in the forms of architecture; the adoption of the organizing principles of electronic systems (as in the Mummers Theater project); the use of computer graphics and image processing (which, in hindsight, seems particularly prescient); a communications explosion, leading to more dispersed societal and building patterns; the rise of television (and subsequently computers and electronic games), which have "retrained the perceptive habits" of younger architects; and finally cybernetics, which can eliminate the need for humans in certain roles. Almost twenty years later, Johansen repeated his belief in a "technological imperative" for architecture, but now found in technology not only a practical or mimetic function, but a poetic one as well: it provides an "inspirational spin-off" and "romantic excursions into no-esthetics and fantasies of the future" drawn from "science fiction, or more correctly, technology-fiction.

holistic - ecological world view

By the late 1980s, Johansen was trumpeting a "New Modernity," one based on a more holistic reading of science and technology. In an eponymous article, published in 1989, Johansen urges a rejection of the mechanistic model of Cartesian and Newtonian science in favor of a "holistic and ecological" world view, a "systems view of life."

Influenced by his reading of systems theorist Frijtof Capra, Johansen called for an architecture where "all functions, services, structures, equipment, and aesthetic effects (are) designed as an inseparable whole." The machine is replaced as a paradigm by the organism: function is no longer determined by structure, but structure is now determined by process. The house is no longer a machine for living, but lives itself. Johansen imagines buildings less as "static and lifeless mechanisms," but more as self-organizing and self-regulating, like "programmed walking robots, approaching the nature and characteristics of living systems." To do this will require new materials - Johansen envisions carbon-plastic composites, structural foams, and sprayed-on membrane skins of "adjustable permeability to light, temperature, and air" -  kinetically controlled by a central nervous system.

Computer monitoring sensors will allow self-regulating buildings, up to and including structure: cables supporting buildings might be adjusted in real time to accommodate stylistic and intellectual concerns of their time, it is these latest, most fantastic, projects - many undertaken in Johansen's ninth decade - that promise to be his most lasting contribution to the architectural canon. They speak of a man who has tirelessly refused to abandon his optimistic faith in the processes of science "search, exploration, invention, deductive thinking, problem solving" - undertaken in the pursuit of transforming ourselves and the world. Johansen also recalls Stirling "extolling the rear undesigned sides of buildings" at dinner parties Johansen hosted during his Yale days; Stirling had been a visiting critic at Yale in 1959 at Rudolph's invitation.