Cathedral of Hope's Nazi Architect. Philip Johnson's fascist past and the shape of architecture.
I am recently an academically published author on the Texas Centennial, Fair Park and how it is an empire exhibition. A lot of intellectual figures in the 1930s had fascist involvements.
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As always I have put into the Internet Archive as much as possible.
Cathedral of Hope’s Interfaith Peace Chapel is designed by a fascist architect.
An architect who formed the “Gray Shirts” American fascist group.
An architect who acccompanied the Nazi invasion of Poland at their invitation.
However, the Cathedral of Hope is very proud that their building is designed by Johnson. From the Cathedral of Hope’s page on the Interfaith Peace Chapel.
The Interfaith Peace Chapel is a modern masterpiece designed by award-winning and world-renowned architect Philip Johnson. It is a brilliant, inspirational design of “sculpture as architecture.” The chapel provides ideal space for intimate worship services, commitment ceremonies and memorial services.
https://www.cathedralofhope.com/interfaith-peace-chapel
I can imagine the wailings and protestations and denials that will be coming forth about this the usual segments of the Dallas LGBT. I am sure leaders at the Cathedral of Hope will issue a gushing of sentimentality and sad words.
This is the building which the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence hold their monthly meetings.
Form follows fascism.
African American Architect Mitch McEwen in his article, “Form Follows Fascism Redux,” in Archinect, writes the following:
The legacy of Philip Johnson reveals the ways that a certain architecture and planning status quo is built upon anti-Black racism and anti-democratic politics. MoMA owes the people of this country an apology for serving as an institutional enabler of fascism and white supremacist work throughout the last century. Let removing Johnson’s name be the beginning of a much deeper reckoning for that one institution and a small step for the field of architecture toward unequivocally embracing both democracy and Black existence. [Boldface added.]
And:
As late as his 90th birthday, Philip Johnson laced racial theories into his interviews on architecture (Source: Charlie Rose show Monday 07/08/1996). Johnson allied himself so thoroughly with racial segregation in the South, that he discussed preferences for designing segregated buildings as late as 1973 and often referred to himself as Southern, even though he was born and raised in Ohio. [Boldface added.]
https://archinect.com/features/article/150243873/form-follows-fascism-redux
He was one of a set of prominent architechs asking for the removal of Philip Johnson’s name from MoMA.
McEwen is the Director of Princeton’s Black Box Research Group.
https://soa.princeton.edu/content/v.-mitch-mcewen
https://aas.princeton.edu/people/v-mitch-mcewen
Philip Johnson’s Fascism and collusion with the Nazi’s has been reported by many sources.
From Vanity Fair:
Philip Johnson was a pedigreed, witty charmer from Cleveland who became a fixture of Manhattan’s art world and social circuit. But before Johnson’s rise to fame as one of America’s most influential architects, he delighted in another rise—that of Hitler and the Third Reich. In his forthcoming book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, Marc Wortman explores the architect’s fascination with Nazism.
After joyfully watching the Nazi’s crush Poland, he was enthusiastic for the Nazi’s.
Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed.
Over the next two years, Johnson moved back and forth between Europe and New York City. At home, he mounted shows and promoted modernist artists whose works he considered the best of the new. All the while, he kept an eye on the Nazis as they consolidated power. He had slept with his share of men in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin; now he turned a blind eye to Nazi restrictions on homosexual behavior, which brought imprisonment and even death sentences. [Boldface added.]
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/philip-johnson-nazi-architect-marc-wortman
From Intelligencer hia race suicide and eugenics beliefs:
Johnson, then, was at work on an essay devoted to what might be generously termed economic philosophy for the pro-fascist journal The Examiner. Titled “A Dying People,” the piece was a Malthusian analysis of American decline. Johnson argued that the United States, defined exclusively as a nation of white Christians, was committing “race suicide.” Americans were not having enough children to sustain the country, and the growing use of birth control (to which he was opposed) was merely a symptom of a broader degeneracy of national values. “The philosophy of individualism and materialism is eugenically bad,” he wrote. “It leads us only to the satisfying of the immediate physical desires of each individual, not to the satisfying of the imperatives of racial maintenance.” This from a man of almost pathological individualism, materialism, and hedonism, a man who was by the nature of his homosexuality bound to be childless.
Johnson reminds me of a common type of self-hating Gays in Dallas.
The New Yorker has an article, I have used up my free readings.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/philip-johnson-the-man-who-made-architecture-amoral
The Architect’s Newspaper has the article, “In Prequel, Rachel Maddow chronicles Philip Johnson’s fascist activity for the general public.”
Touring Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939 with SS officers, attending a 1939 Hitler rally in Nuremberg, actively spying for the Nazis, designing a stage for the fascist radio personality Father Coughlin, and translating texts about Nazi political economy into English over a 20-year period were just a few of Philip Johnson’s so-called “mistakes.” Blanchette Rockefeller herself had good reason to wash Johnson’s hands: Throughout World War II, the Rockefellers laundered money for the Nazis via their Chase National Bank office in Vichy, France, facilitating trade agreements for the fascists with complete impunity, as described by Michael Parenti in Blackshirts and Reds.
Hyperallergic has this article, “Philip Johnson’s Pro-Nazi Sympathies Detailed in FBI File,” April 22, 2014.
https://hyperallergic.com/121993/philip-johnsons-pro-nazi-sympathies-detailed-in-fbi-file/
Architecture and racism and the WHITE building.
I suppose there will be the usual attempt to seperate the artist from their art, or in this case more specifically the architect from his architecture.
However modern architecture arose within the 20th century imperialist system of world wide supremacy.
As Mark Crinson states in his book, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,” points out, the historians of architecture have largely ignored the relation of modernist architecture to imperialism and have made assumptions that it was inherently not nationalistic or imperialistic, but instead assumed that it was anti-imperialistic. Crinson in his book points out that these assumptions are not true. Instead Crinson suggests that modernist architecture is a part of imperialism. Crinson makes these statements in his introduction:
Imperialism figures hazily if at all in most surveys of modern architecture, even those specifically devoted to British modernism.
Architecture as an arm of imperialism is seen, and seen episodically at best, as an embarrassment to modernism and part of what it … contests.
But modernism arose at the peak of European colonial empires, even if its own histories barely acknowledge this and even if empire seems like one of those things it consigns to history.
One [assumption] is that the values of modernist architecture are understood to transcend issues of national power and sovereignty over other peoples; modernist architecture … was … silent, so it can remain for its historians in relation to imperialism.
One [assumption] is that modernism’s advocates were anti-imperialist … Yet, if this opposition to imperialism was there it was subconscious at best: there are few anti-imperialist statements by modernist architects, and where we do find them they tend to be voiced by only a few non-wester clients. Perhaps it might be better to speculate that modernism was not a disavowal of imperialism, it was actively employed as a way of improving the function of the colonial city …
But it [modernist architecture; was also a form for the veiling and naturalizing the violence …[1]
[1] Crinson, Mark, “Modern Architecture and the End of Empire,” Ashgate Publishing Co., Hants, England, 2003, pp. 1-3
As explained by Patricia A. Morton in her book, “Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris,” this exposition used modernist architecture to establish a racial hierarchy with France, the Metropole, represented by modernist architecture, as being the advanced and the subject peoples of the French empire represented by their architecture which was to represent their less evolved state. As Morton states:
“The Exposition classified and organized colonial objects and peoples it displayed according to principles of hierarchy and evolution, with Europe at the pinnacle and ‘less evolved’ civilizations ranked below it. The architecture of the pavilions was the medium for bearing the ‘good news’ of colonialization and, at the same time, was the physical manifestation of this invented colonial ‘reality.’”
Nor is the whiteness of the building innocent.
Le Corbusier, stated that color was, “suited to simple races, peasants and savages.” [Page 41, in Chromophobia, by David Batchelor, Reaktion Books Ltd., London. ]
In the book Chromophobia, Batchelor discusses how color is purged:
More specifically” this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body — usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. {Pages 22-23, Chromophobia.] [Boldface added.]
The Interfaith Peace Chapel is the color of homophobia. Given that the Gay flag is a rainbow and that the rainbow is the symbol of the Gay movement, sometimes with additions, the selection of a bland modernistic white building raises questions. Perhaps this is the color you choose when you emphatically want people to know that you aren’t a Gay church, but a church with a lot of Gay members
More specific to Philip Johnson are his gruesome sources of architectural inspiration. From article, “America’s Nazi Architect,” by Carolyn Stewart, Oct. 10, 2022, in American Purpose:
Nor did the tour guide relay how the fireplace—a tall nook integrated into a brick column that also hosts the bathroom—was used by Johnson for more than cozy ambiance. As Ian Volner, another Johnson biographer, notes,
“Following his notorious pre-war flirtation (closer to a full-blown romance) with Nazism, [Johnson] was careful to cover his tracks, burning the bulk of his incriminating letters and articles in the brick-clad fireplace of his landmark Glass House.”
Also omitted by our guide was one of Johnson’s particularly gruesome sources of inspiration. The brick column of the Glass House was inspired by, in Johnson’s words, “a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.” The inspirational ruins in question are those that Johnson had witnessed on a Nazi-sponsored junket to Poland. [Boldface added.]
The article details how Philip Johnson’s fascist past is erased by the tour guide.
The article makes it very clear how Johnson’s enthusiams for fascism was entangled in his architecture.
It’s difficult to know whether Johnson’s love of modern architecture led to his interest in fascism, or vice versa. Regardless, by the time he reached twenty-seven in 1933, his political and architectural ambitions fed off each other in extreme ways. The year prior he had curated MoMA’s first architectural exhibition, a popular display credited with introducing the American public to modernist architecture. He now sought to use his architectural passion as a gateway into Germany’s fascist politics. In an article titled “Architecture in the Third Reich” that he wrote for Hound & Horn magazine after the Potsdam rally, Johnson argues that the Nazi Party should adopt modernism to “satisfy the new craving for monumentality” and demonstrate that “the new Germany is not bent on destroying all the modern arts”—this “new Germany,” that is, which had just months earlier sent forty thousand political opponents to concentration camps and passed a law prohibiting the creation of new political parties.
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/americas-nazi-architect/
The cover of “The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935),” by John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, 1st Edition, 1974, Times Change Press.
Notice the end date, the first Gay rights movement was exterminated by the Nazis.
“The Pink Triangle: From Nazi Label to Symbol of Gay Pride,” by Matt Mullen, June 3, 2024, History.com.
https://www.history.com/news/pink-triangle-nazi-concentration-camps
The Nazi extermination of Gays.
The Nazis rounded up and exterminated Gays. The first Gay liberation movement was destroyed by them.
One of the symbols of the Gay movement, is the Pink Triangle, which Gays in the Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany
This is an article from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The Extermination of Homosexuals
Homosexuals were one of the specially selected groups in the concentration camps. Far less numerous than other prisoners, they experienced a hell of a particular kind. The first transport of homosexuals noted by the Nazis arrived at Fuhlsbuttel concentration camp in the fall of 1933. This was a new prisoner category. They were marked with the letter “A,” which was later replaced by the pink triangle (Rose Winkeln). As opposed to the Jews and the Roma, the Nazis intended not to exterminate homosexuals, but to “reeducate” them. The death rate among homosexuals was high, especially when compared to other groups imprisoned for purposes of reeducation. Fifty-five percent of homosexual prisoners died in the camps, as opposed to 40% of political prisoners and 34.7% of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 gays died in the camps, although this figure might have been much higher since homosexuals, as opposed to Jews and Roma, could easily conceal their otherness. Homosexuals were treated as the lowest of the groups within the prisoner population. As a rule, they obtained the worst labor assignments, and were often rejected by their fellow prisoners and treated as deviants. The camp capos who oversaw the labor details also refused to help them. They had limited contact with the outside world; it rarely happened that families maintained contact with prisoners wearing the pink triangle, and their friends outside had no desire to maintain contact with those who were in the camps. Impulses of solidarity occurred sporadically among the homosexuals themselves. As Raimund Schnabel writes in his study of Dachau, “Those whose behavior could be called perverted were seldom found among the homosexuals; nevertheless, there were some sycophants and fraudsters. The prisoners wearing the pink triangle never lived long. The SS murdered them quickly and systematically.” [Boldface added.]
The camps were a horror.
Homosexuals were assigned to particularly hard labor in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and other camps. They labored in the Sachsenhausen cement plant and in the underground factories near Buchenwald that manufactured V-2 rockets. Rudolf Hoess, who held the post of commandant of the Sachsenhausen camp before being transferred to Auschwitz, was convinced that sexual orientation could be changed through hard labor. The results of this reeducation were lamentable: the majority of the prisoners under his control died. The Sachsenhausen camp, regarded until 1942 as “the Auschwitz for homosexuals,” held large numbers of homosexuals. They labored mostly at quarrying clay and making bricks in the camp. Regardless of the weather, they had to push carts full of clay towards the machines that produced the bricks. This work was particularly difficult because the pits were almost empty; most of the clay had already been dug out of them. The half-dead prisoners pushed their carts uphill, urged on all the time by the SS men and the capos guarding them. The carts ran on tracks, but they frequently derailed and tumbled back downhill, crushing defenseless prisoners who did not even attempt to get out of the way. The sounds of breaking bones and the lashings of the blows directed at the prisoners who remained alive could be heard. [Boldface added.]
The Play Bent and the Philip Glass composition in memorial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_(play)
https://philipglass.com/compositions/bent/
A repressed architecture for Respectability Gays.
It is doubtful that the members of the Cathedral of Hope will care much. They can impress the straight Christians and status conscious Dallas with their building designed by a famous, really, really famous architect. The mass extermination of Gays is nothing compared to prestige in Dallas for some.
This building by Johnson is the least Gay thing you could imagine as a place for Gay spirituality. It is without color and sterile, though somehow very appropriate for them.
It is very fittingly the architecture of a church whose minister prays for a church that is the deadly enemy of the LGBT, for the loss of a building where W.A. Criswell had sermons saying AIDS was punishment for sodomy.
For all the horribleness of 1st Baptist Dallas this post has links to the other posts about them. I had to do installments on their psychopathic faith.
How I came across this.
I am published regarding the Texas Centennial at Fair Park for a book, “Geography of Time, Place, Movement and Networks, Vol. 3,” editor Stanley D. Brunn, Springer, 2024.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58033-8
Our chapter is, “History of Negro from Jungles to Now to Be Shown”: The Texas 1936 Centennial and the Time Journeys of Fair Park, Dallas,” about how the whole Fair Park Centennial assemblage of buildings are an empire exhibition and triumphalist white supremacy.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-58033-8_8
I see as of today, 7/31/2024, it has been accessed 34 times.
We make reference to Le Corbusier in the chapter regarding chromophobia.
I am going to do a book on Fair Park and the Texas Centennials. Books are coming out about Le Corbusier’s collusion with fascism and I am hoping to get more info about his collaboration with fascism. I stumbled across references to Philip Johnson while doing research.
I still haven’t had time to write a letter of reprimand to the Cathedral of Hope for this.
When you find homophobia on the Internet make sure you archive it so it doesn’t vanish.
I've always admired the Architecture of the Third Reich. I couldn't help the symmetry, clean lines and grandeur of the structures with the long red banners and black spider graphics. It is so impressive, in your face graphic, majestic and visually unlike anything seen before.
Unfortunately, it was attached to mad men out of control, reaching the lowest depths of modern day cruelty towards innocents based on race, religion, sexual preference, educations, opinions and FREEDOMS. So, evil supported and created that style of architecture for specific reasons to make people feel small, insignificant and the State dominant and grande. It's based on EVIL, and represents those concepts and goals. It can't be a "little bit good or great, coming from such EVIL".
So, in my book.. you can't have your cake and eat it also. Pick good or evil, black or white.. grey doesn't work. Phillip Johnson designed many other buildings in Ft. Worth Amon Carter Museum, he also designed The Cresent Court in Dallas and many other buildings.
They haven't built the largest Gay church in the world and should reconsider the design with this new information. It does matter, what people believe in and their actions along their professional career and social philosophy. and building monumental buildings designed by those that support or supported EVIL is creating something based on principles of EVIL, which should never be overlooked or supported.