Early in his career, Philip Johnson (1906–2005) clearly aspired to be American modernism’s voice-over, the off-camera observer who sets the scene and analyzes the unfolding drama from a position of cool detachment (fig. 14). As co-curator, with the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, of the groundbreaking “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1932, and as the coauthor of the influential publication (entitled The International Style: …