Art: Toward a New Slang

On the evidence of his work, John M. Johansen is a restless eccentric among U.S. architects. He seems willing to try anything once. Pecking among the styles, he has, in the past, gone through the routine Miesian curtain-wall phase, made his bow to Italian Baroque in his design for the U.S. embassy in Dublin and constructed a house in Connecticut framed like a ramifying tepee with 150 telephone poles (they were bolted together under the direction of a Norwegian shipwright). He also has designed buildings, like the Mechanic Theater in Baltimore, of an almost Egyptian heaviness. Currently his office is lodged on the top floor of a loft building overlooking Manhattan's East River. The loft is owned by a retailer of garden furniture who stores his surplus on the roof. There, Johansen entertains in a boneyard of leafy wrought-iron love seats, rusty trellises, cast-lead nymphs and salvaged Art Nouveau birdbaths. In those startling surroundings he looks for all the world like a Viking who has strayed onto the set of an unfinished Cocteau movie.

At 54, Johansen is still relentlessly curious and something of a loner, but his dissent has firmed. With a growing minority of other highly gifted American architects, Johansen is engaged in what amounts to the first rethinking of the architectural commandments handed down years ago by the late Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His new approach has crystallized in one challenging building: the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City.

Brash and Incisive. At first sight, it does not look like a theater at all. Johansen designed it in terms of distinct units—blocks of raw concrete with brightly painted steel cladding, connected by tubes and catwalks. Nothing could be more remote from the idiom of the theater as temple—massive portico and formidable foyer suggesting, in the manner of Lincoln Center, that the audience is going to be vouchsafed a peek at the altar of some crushing god named High Culture. The Mummers Theater, by contrast, with its simple materials and modest scale, does not try to stimulate the audience's sense of selfimportance; it is entirely directed toward the events onstage. It is literally a playhouse—open, light, improvisatory, gamelike. The design amounts to a proposition that boxing all the functions of a building into one articulated mass is not the only way to order, and that the legacy of the Beaux-Arts tradition, which Johansen scornfully calls "the tasteful arrangement of compositional elements," is dead because it cannot provoke fresh responses. "Most modern building," he adds, "is just an extension of the Beaux-Arts tradition." The idiom of Gropius or I.M. Pei is eloquence; that of corporate architects like Edward Durell Stone is rhetoric; what Johansen now seeks is "a kind of slang ... I want my things to look brash and incisive and immediate. They should respond to what people actually need, the way slang and jargon respond to quick needs in communication."