Bad Boy Builder : The architect of ‘Glass House’ and the best visual joke in the Manhattan skyline hasn’t confined his hubris to his work. : PHILIP JOHNSON: Life and Work, <i> By Franz Schulze (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 420 pp.)</i>

Philip Johnson is the wicked old man of American architecture. At the age of 88, he has not lost the capacity to shock. Although he will never again do anything so outrageous as crowning the AT&T; Building in Manhattan with a huge broken pediment resembling a Chippendale highboy, it will not be for want of trying. Assisted as always by younger architects, he is still at the drawing board a few days of the week, fragile but elegant, candid but perverse, rich, amazingly cultivated, gay of course, even slightly vicieux, disarming his critics with the cool smiling malice that put him on the cover of Time and made him a top talk-show draw on TV.

Franz Schulze, the rather sober-sided author of this long-awaited study of Johnson’s life and work, is not a critic who is easily charmed or disarmed by an architect whose sins, aesthetic and otherwise, may outnumber his virtues. Despite recent competition on the tube from I. M. Pei, Johnson is probably the best-known living architect. That, as Schulze makes clear, is not the same as being the best architect. Johnson has done some very good buildings, most notably his own famous Glass House in Connecticut and the spectacular Crystal Cathedral at Garden Grove, in nethermost Orange County. But he has perpetrated many more bad buildings, enumerated by Schulze in one of the worst drubbings ever administered to a supposedly serious architect by a writer to whom he opened his heart and from whom he may have expected more kindly treatment.

Yet Johnson asked for it. He has not been serious in the way that masters such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe (Johnson’s foremost influence) were wholly serious about their art. This went largely unnoticed so long as Johnson adhered to the strict structural discipline of Miesian “skin-and-bones” architecture, an allegiance so close, Schulze and others have remarked, that it sometimes bordered on “plagiarism.” As soon as Johnson broke with Mies around 1960, however, after they worked together on the Seagram Building in New York, he struck out wildly on his own (although he occasionally returned to his Miesian manner in his best later buildings such as the Crystal Cathedral).

Then Johnson’s frivolity and essential weakness were exposed in a series of flippant, careless, trivial but unfortunately often very big buildings, especially in parvenu places like Texas. There were campy buildings in pseudo-historical drag, like the ersatz Gothic of Pittsburgh Plate Glass or the stepped-up Dutch gables of the Republic Bank Building in Houston; one-liner joke buildings like the gift-wrapped Neiman Marcus store in San Francisco; decadent “ballet school” buildings, sporting crass facades at Lincoln Center in New York or in Lincoln, Neb.; and finally, after an array of Post-Modern pastiches, such as the bogus mansard roofs of the Crescent in Dallas, an autumnal infatuation with throw-out-the-rules Deconstructivism in which--striving as ever to keep ahead of the game with younger architects--he feverishly embraces the bombastic masculine nihilism of Frank Gehry.

In that sense, Johnson is our finest Fake Architect, a bantamweight Nietzsche with a will to power, who is truly best only at creating and recreating his inimitable self. For this Johnson has had abundant financial means all of his life. Had he chosen another career--and for a time in the 1930s, like an American Oswald Mosley, he embarked on a loathsome pro-Nazi excursion in politics--he still would have been a phenomenal multifaceted personality, afflicted when young with manic-depression, who might be hated or execrated but not ignored. Besides, after the fascist interlude, his grace, generosity and genuine talent earned him forgiveness--nay, admiration and affection--from Jewish friends, colleagues and clients.

Complicating all this was his unashamed homosexuality. Well, almost unashamed. Over the years his inamoratos have included no less than four pretty “Mrs. Johnsons,” long-term catamites, as well as innumerable one-night stands, sometimes picked up on “chicken-hawk” forays for boys and risky hunts for “rough trade” (Schulze reports that Johnson has always been pleasurably excited by risks and physical danger). Then there were flings with Merce Cunningham and other stars. Yet Johnson was middle-aged, long after Cunningham left him over a presumed slight, before he took gay lovers to “uptown” dinner parties where he cajoled social equals as important as Blanchette (Mrs. John D., 3rd) Rockefeller, for whom--to her conventional husband’s annoyance--he did the exquisite Rockefeller Guest House just north of the Museum of Modern Art.

To decipher the codes of Johnson’s arcane personal life, and to relate them to his architecture, has been Schulze’s most daunting task. On the whole he has done a fair and conscientious job. Almost all the relevant facts seem to be here, even if their nuances--worthy of a Proust--have sometimes escaped the dogged research of an able architectural historian, not a psychologist, who in 1985 brought out an excellent biography of Mies.

The present book is not quite in that class, just as Johnson is not in the class of Mies either as an architect or an individual. Nonetheless the Johnson book cuts deeply enough. It is not an “authorized” biography. Certainly the text was not submitted to Johnson for his imprimatur, much less the glossings and emendations at which this most literate of architects is adept. Yet Schulze could not have written as he has with confessions by Johnson that make Oscar Wilde’s seem reticent.

In fairness to Johnson, he never expected to see his avowals in print. By mutual consent, publication was to have been withheld until after Johnson’s death; but as several years passed, and the octogenarian gave no sign of shuffling off this mortal coil, gleefully anticipating his 90th birthday, the dismayed author requested--and was graciously granted--permission to publish now.

Consequently we have a unique chronicle of Johnson’s pivotal role in high architectural culture of the 20th Century. He himself is only six years younger than the century; and he has been not only a designer of buildings, but almost equally significant as a critic, historian, theorist, instructor at Yale and Cornell, patron of all the fine arts, and even a propagandist, for he has been a formidable polemicist in the major architectural controversies of our time.

Not least, he was founding director (and ever since, the presiding genius behind the scenes) of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he teamed with the equally snooty homosexual aesthete Henry-Russell Hitchcock to change the history of architecture with the epochal “International Style” exhibition of 1932.

How he reached this precocious apogee at the age of 26, when he had visited many of the advanced Modern buildings in Europe, but as yet had received no formal architectural training, would have been an altogether different story if Philip as a girlish boy, a stammerer, had not realized his gender preference early. After painful confusion and a nervous breakdown, he came to terms passionately with his sexual identity, after boarding school at Harvard, where he studied philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead (who took a shine to him), and later in Weimar, Germany where, like so many other gay artists and intellectuals, he found more fun and freedom than anywhere else in Europe.

This deeply American struggle, so Jamesian, took place in an archetypal Protestant family in Sherwood Anderson’s Ohio, where Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born into the Cleveland patriciate in 1906. The protagonists are familiar: the dull, slightly ridiculous lawyer father who did not understand his son at all, but gave him a block of IBM stock on his 21st birthday that soon made him a millionaire; and the aesthetically ambitious, strangely thwarted mother who perhaps understood the son too well. There were also the lost older brother, who died in childhood; the slightly distant older sister; and the adoring younger sister Theodate, a fascinating libidinous creature, gifted musically, who deserves a biography of her own.

Schulze has the background pretty much correct. Although Philip was often considered “aristocratic” by plebeian New Yorkers, the Johnsons were a cut below the real ruling class of Mark Hanna’s Cleveland. Their status was summed up for me by an heiress to the White truck company fortune: “his father worked for my father.” That may be, but lawyer Johnson gave Philip the wherewithal to cut a dashing figure among the cultural elite of Europe and America. He was a quick study, who usually appeared in the right place at the right time, a bit before everyone else, for instance at Mies’ magnificent Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1930, accompanied by the architect who had not had the money to see the building earlier. Often Johnson would arrive in glorious motor-cars, among them a Cord and an Auburn, right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Slender, intense, drop-dead handsome, with a cleft chin to set off his chiseled features, he was a model of young WASP privilege. Then, inexplicably, he threw it all over--except his private fortune--and became a camp follower of Huey Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, Father Coughlin and other home-grown Populist demagogues, returning to Germany before the outbreak of World War II as a correspondent for Coughlin’s Social Justice. On the eve of the blitzkrieg William L. Shirer spotted him as “an American fascist” and suspected him of “spying” on the other foreign journalists “for the Nazis.” Philip has never refuted the charge, and only late in life did he make a tepid apology for his activities.

Was he a Nazi agent, or simply a sympathizer like Charles Lindbergh? By his own admission, he was bowled over by the uniforms, the leather belts, the storm troopers, above all the gigantic Hitlerian rallies staged by Albert Speer. Schulze, in a major discovery, has found that Johnson felt something like “a sexual thrill” when he watched the Nazis burn and destroy a Polish village.

Such things were not forgiven when he returned home. The FBI had a file on him, from which Schulze has culled chilling extracts. After a mysterious call to the German Embassy in Washington, before Pearl Harbor, he decided to study architecture at Harvard. The design school was now headed by Walter Gropius, the anti-fascist former head of the Bauhaus, whom Johnson never liked. The most brilliant professor was the ex-Bauhaus master Marcel Breuer, whom he did like. His thesis was a full-scale Miesian courtyard house--the first of its kind in the country--that Johnson built for himself in Cambridge.

After the war, in which he was somehow permitted to serve as an Army private, he became the most fashionable architect in New York. It was an event to lunch at his table in the Four Seasons, probably his finest interior. Once I was late, and he drummed on the table and said: “You vile boy, I should order you a steak tartare.” I was then in my 40s, and one of the first critics to attack his Post-Modern facades. Years later I could tell him how much I admired the Crystal Cathedral, where I heard the Rev. Robert Schuller deliver a televised sermon. “But does he know of your sinfulness?” I asked Philip. “Oh,” said Philip, waving his wrist, “he says we’re all sinners.”