Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York City, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; IDS Tower in downtown Minneapolis; the Sculpture Garden of New York City's Museum of Modern Art; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks.

There he arranged for visits by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier and negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe, after he fled Nazi Germany.

[6] In 1941, after the U.S. entered the war, Johnson abruptly renounced his earlier views, quit journalism, organizing anti-Fascist league at Harvard Design School.

[8] Today his skyscrapers are prominent features in the skylines of New York, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Madrid, and other cities.

[10] He attended the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, then studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University where he focused on learning Greek, philology, history and philosophy, particularly the work of the Pre-Socratic philosophers.

In politics, he proved to be a trifler, the dilettante he earlier feared himself to be, a model of futility who sought to find a messiah or to pursue messianic ends but whose most lasting following turned out to be the agents of the FBI—who themselves finally grew bored with him.

Years later he would describe the event to his biographer, Franz Schulze: "You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd".

[16]: 144, 146 [20][17] In 1941, at the age of 35, Johnson abandoned politics and journalism and enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who had recently fled from Nazi Germany.

[21] It was used by Johnson to host social events and was eventually submitted as his graduate thesis; he sold the house after the war, and it was purchased by Harvard in 2010[22] and restored by 2016.

[24] He was investigated by the FBI for his involvement with the German government, Coughlin and Lawrence Dennis, an American fascist economist, and was cleared for continued military service.

The interior is an open space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

"Like all of Johnson's early work, it was inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors and closeness to the earth marked it as a personal statement; calm and ordered rather than sleek and brittle.

He added a small pavilion with columns by the lake in 1963, an art gallery set into a hillside in 1965, a postmodern sculpture gallery with a glass roof in 1970; a castle-like library with a rounded tower in 1980; and a concrete block tower dedicated to his friend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet; a chain-link "ghost house" dedicated to Frank Gehry.

Throughout the 1960s, Johnson continued to create in the vocabulary of the modernist style, designing geometrical theatres, a monastery, art galleries and gardens.

The two towers of Pennzoil Place have sloping roofs covering the top seven floors and are trapezoidal in form, planned to create two large triangual areas on the site, which are occupied with glass-covered lobbies designed like greenhouses.

It features a non-denominational chapel in a spiral form, a meditation garden and cascading fountains, tucked between buildings in the center of the city.

The Glass panels are not bolted, but glued to the structure, with a silicon based glue, to give it greater ability to resist Southern California earthquakes.

Built between 1978 and 1982, it is a skyscraper with an eight-story high arched entry and a split pediment at the top which resembles an enormous piece of 18th-century Chippendale furniture.

Other late works include the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the Habitable Sculpture (a 26-story apartment tower in lower Manhattan), The Children's Museum in Guadalajara, Mexico, and The Chrysler Center.

It is a condominium building in lower Manhattan whose form was inspired by Johnson's most famous early work, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

[18] Johnson's activities included organizing political rallies for populist Huey Long; funding figures such as the right-wing agitator Joe McWilliams and his "Christian Mobilizers";[54] and writing for three periodicals, including Charles Coughlin's Social Justice, whose "almost every issue contained articles about the 'Jewish conspiracy' or about destructive economic forces led by figures with Jewish names".

[17][56] On the same tour, three weeks after Poland fell to the Nazis, Johnson, with Shirer, "was with German troops at the front as the guest of the Propaganda Ministry".

"[11][58] In his Social Justice report on his trip to Poland, Johnson declared that the German victory amounted to an unmitigated triumph for the Polish people and that nothing in the war's outcome need concern Americans.

[17] Referring to political developments in France, Johnson wrote in Social Justice that "Lack of leadership and direction in the state has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation's time of weakness—the Jews".

His name arose again in the so-called "Great Sedition Trial" of 1944 through his former contacts in the 1930s with its main target, the former diplomat and economist Lawrence Dennis, who in the 1930s supported fascist economics as an alternative to capitalism.

[60] Johnson was formally asked to appear at trial as a witness, and—by his own account—was speaking to prosecutor O. John Rogge,[16] but after Judge Edward C. Eicher died of a heart attack, a mistrial was declared and the case was dropped.

Architecture professor Anat Geva observed in a paper that "all critics agree that his design of the Port Chester Synagogue can be considered as his attempt to ask for forgiveness.

'"[13] In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the wave of place name changes that followed, the Johnson Study Group—a group of 40 architects, designers, and educators—approached the Museum of Modern Art asking that honors given to Johnson be removed from public view, citing his "commitment to white supremacy", spread of Nazi publications, involvement with American fascist politics, and "effective segregation" of the architectural collection at the museum.

"When it comes to racist urban planning policies in the 20th century and a deeply Eurocentric antiblack archive of American architecture," V. Mitch McEwen said, "MoMA under white supremacist Philip Johnson did largely create the problem.

Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Roheʼs controversial 860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, and Chicagoʼs Newberry Library.