Mark Lamster in conversation with William Rawn at the BPL

In conversation with William Rawn, award-winning critic Mark Lamster will lift the veil on Phillip Johnson’s contradictions to tell the story of this charming yet deeply flawed man. Johnson, a man of deep paradoxes: a Nazi sympathizer who built synagogues and supported Israel, a genius without originality, an opportunist and a romantic, a populist and a snob.  When Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable—and influential—figures on the American cultural landscape. Johnson was the first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA’s founding architectural curator, he introduced America to modernism, and promoted generations of architects, designers, and artists. Johnson, the consummate power broker, virtually invented the “starchitect,” the celebrity architect. His own work, most prominently his own Glass House and the Chippendale-capped AT&T Building in New York, was polarizing and can be found in almost every major American city.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, a professor in the architecture school at the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Loeb Fellow of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

William L. Rawn, FAIA, LEED AP, Principal is the founding Principal of William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc. in Boston. The firm has won 12 American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Awards, including the 2016 transformation of the Johnson Wing of the Boston Public Library. In 2018, Architect Magazine ranked William Rawn Associates as the #3 Firm in the country based on design, sustainability, and financial metrics.