John Johansen’s Electrifying Architecture

John Johansen (1916-2012) was a member of the loosely affiliated group of architects known as the Harvard Five. The group, which included Harvard instructor Marcel Breuer and Johansen's fellow alumni Philip Johnson, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes, is best known for building a collection of modernist homes around New Canaan, Connecticut—many of which, unfortunately, have been demolished. Johansen alone lived to see 10 of his 27 houses torn down; he's had more buildings destroyed than some architects will ever have built. Johansen's Labyrinth House (1966) in Westport, Connecticut was perhaps one of these most famous losses. When owner Phil Donahue razed it in 1988, the former talk show host likened its curved, concrete walls to an "avant-garde bomb shelter." In response to its destruction, Johansen, heartbroken, turned the other cheek: "The reward is in the doing," he said, "I won already for having created it. I offer finally a more forceful reference: Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Mummer's Theater in Oklahoma City Well, in Johansen’s absence, let us prepare to forgive again. The architect’s Mummer's Theater in Oklahoma City (1970), the project he called “the finest thing I’ve ...