When it was finished, the house was the first International Style building in Houston, and it marked the beginning of a warm friendship between Philip Johnson and the de Menils.
The de Menils were art patrons, and through a sculptor named Mary Callery, they met Philip and hired him as their architect. He had been the curator of architecture at the Museum of Modem Art in New York in the thirties, and in 1940, at the age of 34, he had enrolled in the architecture school at Harvard. Also, he could pick and choose his jobs because he was rich, having inherited a large block of Alcoa stock from his father. Even the famous all-glass house in Connecticut that he designed for himself was not yet completed. He was six years out of architecture school and he had done very little work. By the same token, Philip Johnson then was not yet really Philip, either. John de Menil of the Schlumberger oil well services empire, and as Philip himself says, Houston then was not Houston, and for all he cared it could have been a job in Dubuque. He had come to town to design a house for Mr.
The point about Philip’s arrival in Houston is that back then nobody suspected that big things were afoot. Nobody ever quoted the Houston architects’ pronouncements on anything on the other hand, nobody ever asked Philip how often his buildings came in on time and on budget, which the Houston architects felt was very seldom. Philip had lunch with people like the editor of Progressive Architecture and the architecture critic of the New York Times, and then they would write up his new building and quote his pronouncements on the latest architectural style. They were chummy, but not in a comfortable, lunch-with-your-banker way.
Johnson, and somehow his being so widely known as Philip was part and parcel of the way the chic New York architects did business. Philip is Philip Johnson, the New York architect, and one of the many annoying things about him, from the point of view of the Houston architects, was that everybody seemed to call him Philip, even people who barely knew him. With a little hindsight, any Houston architect could recognize that that was when this business of out-of-town architects’ getting all the good jobs had begun. The first one of them to arrive was Philip, back in 1949.
Read more here about our archive digitization project. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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