Philip Johnson (born 1906) was an American architectural critic and historian and a practicing architect. His buildings are characterized by formal elegance.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 8, 1906, Philip Johnson attended Harvard College, majoring in the classics. There, in 1927, he was introduced to the modern movement in architecture through the writings of Henry-Russell Hitchcock.

Johnson began his career as an architectural critic and historian in 1931, when he became director of the architectural department at the newly formed Museum of Modern Art in New York. That year he and Hitchcock mounted the first International Exhibition of Architecture, showing the work of such major modern figures as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. With Hitchcock he published The International Style (1931), which not only defined the esthetic qualities of the new style but also gave it a name.

During the 1930s and 1940s, in his role as museum...