Philip Johnson.

A momentous event, the death of Philip Johnson, at age 98: for now Peter Eisenman can take over. He always said that so long as Philip lived, the competition to succeed him would be premature, and he himself could only be number two (though his own career doesn't seem to have held back, with thousand of pilgrims already on their way to Santiago de Compostela). But it was certainly assumed by the New York architects that Philip was number one, in other words, that he had led modern architecture throughout his career.

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His website points to two revolutions that he fomented: first in 1938, when he published with Henry-Russell Hitchcock The International Style, which put him squarely behind the new functionalism; second in 1978, when he designed the A T & T headquarters in Manhattan, which appeared to put Post-Modernism into action as the style for the corporations. In both cases, it was a question of style, and this aspect in itself has been enough to identify Philip Johnson as above all, a stylist, more concerned with how than what. It's not what ya do, it's the way that ya do it, as Count Basie put it. Not a question for Basie, because he was working in his preferred style--swing, shortly to give way to bebop. It's certainly not easy for a jazz pianist famous for swing to turn over to bebop. It's an interesting parallel, because jazz came in at the same time as the Modern style in architecture, and both have continued, but with convolutions and changes of style, up to the present time. And both face the same problem: is there a future?

The orthodox view of modern architecture still conforms to Johnson's earlier point of view. The International Style was modern because it followed necessity, and necessity was defined through advances in technology. There is no end in sight to the advances that we may expect from technology, so we will happily go wherever it leads. There is just one difficulty, for it is advances in technology, in the computerization of technical drawings, that have permitted Frank Gehry to build Bilbao, which looks more like art than technology. It uses chance to create interest, as a lot of modern art does; as the deconstructive style within architecture does. Philip himself demonstrated that he was equal to the deconstructive challenge, first with the Deconstruction show at MOMA in 1988, and then in subsequent works of his own. He treated deconstruction as merely a change in style, which is to refuse it its apocalyptic status.

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Was Johnson right? Those who like technology in its rationalist guise will be uneasy, for it will open the way to an unknown future. By treating architecture as a question of style, and by demonstrating that he could change his style with the times, Johnson undermined the meaning of style. This is not exactly the same thing as undermining architecture, which presumably can survive changes in style. It does raise a fundamental question as to how appearance relates to reality, how form relates to content. It exposes a certain intolerant view within architecture which views the abandonment of a style as akin to treachery. And it raises the question as to whether architecture is right to follow technology, rather that helping to define a place for technology within culture as a whole.

Whatever we may think about Johnson as a traitor to architecture, there is no doubt that he has been in the thick of the architectural debate for all his working life. We have to admire his intellectual skills, perhaps more that his artistic ones. His pre-eminence was demonstrated when he became the first winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1979, only a year after he had been awarded the AIA's Gold Medal.

For most of his later life he maintained a continual debate by hosting a series of dinners at the Century Club, and almost all of America's senior architects have been educated there. By them at least, he will be missed.