Feb/Mar 2009
Drawing Attention
A renowned American architect weighs in on his life and a century of design
Terence Riley
The Philip Johnson Tapes, edited transcripts of ten conversations conducted in 1985, provides portraits of both interviewer (Robert A. M. Stern) and interviewee (Johnson) as no less than besotted with architecture, the history thereof, and, not inappropriately, their respective roles in shaping its discourse. As someone who, beginning in the 1980s, spent many hours in conversation with both Stern and Johnson, I found that the voices captured in these transcripts sounded amazingly familiar. While the presence of a tape recorder can often result in a deadening sense of historical self-awareness, Stern and Johnson display an intense familiarity—and comfort—with the mechanics of history. As they both so clearly understood, one of history’s most important tools in its own creation is talk—not chatter or gossip,
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