People Who Build Glass Houses Shouldn’t Forget Their Head Stones

Philip Johnson, an innovative and oft-changing architect, has graduated from glass boxes to a pine box at the age of 98. Among his works are the Chippendale-topped AT&T Building in New York City, the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., an ecclesiastical greenhouse that is wider and higher than Notre Dame in Paris; the RepublicBank in Houston, a 56-story tower of pink granite stepped back in a series of Dutch gable roofs; the Cleveland Playhouse, a complex with the feel of an 11th century town; the IDS Center office building in Minneapolis, that city’s tallest building plus his own glass cube home in New Canaan, Connecticut.