TitleProject Number 2: The Web
Architect
John M. Johansen
(1916 - 2012)
Date1989
MediumSteel and plastic
DimensionsOverall: 39 3/4 × 47 3/4 × 18 1/4 in.
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of John Johansen, 2002
Object number2002.3
Label TextThroughout his long career, architect John M. Johansen has continually sought to expand the boundaries of what is possible, both conceptually and practically, in his designs. Johansen studied architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard University and following World War II established a practice in New Canaan, CT along with four other colleagues Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and Landis Gores, all of whom had studied at Harvard and thus became known as the "Harvard Five." Johansen's early designs display an adherence to modernist principles but by the late 1950s he began exploring biomorphic forms and unconventional building techniques such as sprayed concrete. By the late 1960s, his designs for the Morris Mechanical Theatre, Baltimore, and the Goddard Library, Clark University, were recognized as icons of Brutalist architecture.In the 1980s Johansen's designs took an even greater theoretical turn as he developed the idea of nanoarchitecture, in which he envisioned buildings not as static mechanisms, but living organisms that would constantly change in response to the outside world. Not necessarily intended to be realized, these projects were a re-conception of architectural space that incorporated a range of new technologies and materials. "The Web" was designed as a conference center to be suspended between the two towers of the World Trade Center, New York. It has a self-regulating system of tension cables that would shift in response to wind or live loads. The forms would be created out of lightweight fiberglass-reinforced resin, eliminating a conventional frame.
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