John Burgee

John Burgee: The Partner Who Built Postmodernism

In 1975, two 36-storey towers went up at 711 Louisiana Street in downtown Houston, sliced at forty-five degrees so that their tops fell away from each other like a pair of chisels laid point to point. Pennzoil Place cost about $50 million, rose 495 feet, and made a developer named Gerald D. Hines into the most powerful commercial patron in America. Ada Louise Huxtable called it a "towering achievement." The name on the drawings was Johnson/Burgee — and the second half of that name belonged to a Chicago-born architect who ran the firm, won the clients, and delivered the buildings, while the first half took the applause.

The Chicago Man in a New York Practice

John Burgee was born in Chicago on 28 August 1933 and graduated from the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture in 1956. That schooling matters: Notre Dame in the 1950s trained architects to build, not to theorise, and Burgee arrived in New York with the working temperament of the Midwestern commercial office rather than the Ivy League seminar room. In 1967 he began working with Philip Johnson, twenty-seven years his senior and already the most famous architect in America. In 1968 the two formally established Johnson/Burgee Architects in Manhattan, with Burgee as chief executive.

The arrangement was unusual and, in the end, unsustainable. Johnson was the public face — the wit, the taste-maker, the man who had co-curated the show that gave the International Style its name. Burgee was the one who kept a large firm solvent through three decades of skyscraper commissions. In practice the two roles bled into each other, which is precisely why the question of who designed what has never been settled.

Houston, and the Making of a Boom-Time Practice

Pennzoil Place is the clearest case. Hines and Pennzoil asked for a building that was dignified but not box-shaped and that admitted plentiful natural light. Johnson/Burgee, working in association with S. I. Morris Associates, answered with twin trapezoids: splayed inner walls, counterposed tops, glass-roofed plazas wedged into the gap between them, the whole thing sheathed in bronze-tinted solar glass. It was built between 1972 and 1976, gaining two extra floors mid-construction in 1974 as demand outran the recession. It won the American Institute of Architects Honor Award in 1977 and the R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award in 1978, and it pushed Johnson toward the first Pritzker Prize in 1979.

It also changed what a speculative office tower could look like. After Pennzoil, the flat-topped glass box was no longer the only respectable answer, and developers across the country began asking for silhouettes. Burgee's practice supplied them for the next fifteen years.

The Building That Legitimised Postmodernism

The AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue, completed in 1984, is the one everyone knows. Clad in rose Stony Creek granite at a moment when granite on a skyscraper read as heresy, it was crowned with a broken pediment — the Chippendale top, as it was instantly and permanently nicknamed. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it a landmark on 1 August 2018, protecting the granite and the crown. Frederick Bland, the commission's vice chair, put the case plainly: "This is the building that established postmodernism as a legitimate architectural movement."

That designation followed a bruising fight over a proposed Snøhetta renovation and the demolition of the lobby, which tells you something about the building's standing. A tower that provokes a preservation war thirty-four years after completion is not merely a period piece.

The Portfolio of the Boom Years

The list from those years is a map of American corporate ambition. The Roosevelt Island master plan came in 1969. Then Pennzoil Place in 1975; the IDS Center in Minneapolis; Williams Tower in Houston in 1983; the Madison Avenue tower, later renamed the Sony Building, in 1984; PPG Place in Pittsburgh the same year, a Gothic glass cathedral for a glass company; The Crescent in Dallas in 1986; the leaning Gate of Europe towers in Madrid in 1989; One Detroit Center in 1991. In 1986 the firm moved into 885 Third Avenue — its own elliptical, tiered Lipstick Building, one of the few Johnson/Burgee towers whose nickname is affectionate rather than arch.

The Unmaking of a Firm

The end was fast and self-inflicted. Raj Ahuja had become a third partner in 1984. In 1986 Burgee negotiated Johnson down to a reduced consulting role. In 1988 he asked Ahuja to leave. By the early 1990s Johnson himself was gone from the firm, at Burgee's behest. The arbitration arising from Ahuja's departure drove the practice into bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy ended Burgee's design career outright. He was in his late fifties. He never built again.

It is a rare thing in architecture: a career terminated not by falling out of fashion, nor by scandal over the work, but by a partnership dispute the principal himself initiated.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The word sits awkwardly here, and the honest version of the case has to acknowledge why. Burgee's name appears on perhaps a dozen buildings that reshaped the American skyline, but for nearly all of them the design credit has been assigned in public to Philip Johnson. Johnson took the Pritzker; Burgee took the payroll. The claim on Burgee's behalf is therefore not that he was a great form-giver whose authorship was stolen — the evidence does not support that, and inflating it would be dishonest.

The claim is narrower and more specific: Burgee was unusually good at the thing that actually gets ambitious buildings built. He read the commercial brief — Hines's brief, Pennzoil's brief — and understood that a developer would pay for a distinctive silhouette because leasable prestige is worth money. He ran a large office that could execute towers in Houston, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Madrid and Detroit simultaneously without the quality collapsing. And he chose to yoke that machine to Johnson's restless formal appetite at exactly the moment when American corporate clients were ready to abandon the glass box. That is a form of judgement, and it is scarce. Peers recognised it in kind: he was president and chairman of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, sat on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and the Parsons School of Design, and held a Notre Dame trusteeship from 1988, an honorary doctorate in engineering from the university in 1983, the 1978 AIA award for Pennzoil Place, a 1984 Chicago Architecture Award, and Notre Dame's Orlando T. Maione Award in 2004.

The counter-case is real and should be stated. Burgee has no signature body of work independent of Johnson. When the partnership dissolved, no distinctive Burgee architecture emerged to prove what he had contributed — there was simply silence. His genius, if the word applies, was the applied and collaborative kind that leaves no fingerprint the public can see.

Legacy

Burgee retired to California, and the buildings do the arguing for him. The Chippendale top on Madison Avenue is a protected landmark. Pennzoil Place is still the most admired object on the Houston skyline. Half the world's cities acquired ornamental skyscraper crowns in the decade after these towers went up. Whatever share of that belongs to the second name on the letterhead, it is not nothing — and the man who could have spent his retirement litigating the point has instead said almost nothing at all.

Achievements

• Notable work: 550 Madison Avenue
• Movement: postmodern architecture
• Trained at University of Notre Dame