“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” famously said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In Philip Johnson’s New York Times obituary, Paul Goldberger described him as architecture’s “godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator, and cheerleader.”That is true. It is also true that although Johnson rejected Nazism after the end of the Second World War, in his younger years he attended Nazi rallies in Germany, admired Mein Kampf, and had connections to the Nazi party. Can Johnson be celebrated for the first activities and condemned for the second? Apparently not. A public Instagram letter from the largely anonymous Johnson Study Group. demands that with the purpose of “dismantling of white supremacy” MoMA and the GSD remove Johnson’s name from titles and spaces, which include the title of the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, the department that Johnson founded, as well as the house (now owned by Harvard) that Johnson built in Cambridge. In other words, Mr. Johnson is to be cancelled.
Philip Johnson in 1933
The problem with deleting imperfect individuals from public memory is that so few of us are perfect. Could we not better acknowledge that millions of individuals make mistakes, learn, and move on to better things?