Both architects had a lifelong connection to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and must have had quite a number of encounters. Yet think of it:

1.) Jerzy fought with the Polish army against the Nazis and barely survived the battle; then he barely survived six years of prisoner of war camp.

2.) Philip was a fucking NAZI! A real live Nazi who tried to start an American fascist party and loved him some Hitler! He celebrated the destruction of Warsaw! He attended Nuremberg rallies and it’s clear from his descriptions of his response to them that they made him come! Come, reader. Like have an orgasm.

****************

UD actually kind of finds it hard to imagine a universe in which these two men exist together; she totally can’t create a clear picture in her head of Cambridge only fifteen or twenty years after the war and ANYTHING civilized being exchanged between these two. Did Jerzy know about Philip’s profound commitment to and delight in the violent destruction of everything Jerzy not only held dear but for which he practically gave his life? “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed,” [Johnson wrote in a letter during the war]. “It was a stirring spectacle.”

*************

I mean, Jerzy already disliked Johnson because of Johnson’s commitment to postmodernism, to be sure; but can he also have known he was talking to a degenerate, seemingly unregenerate, Hitlerian?? If so, how can he have agreed to be in the same room with him? I’m thinking he must not have known.

************

But, well, fascinating fascism and all that. Most people who know about architecture have long known that Johnson was a brownshirted jackbooted antisemite… which is like SOOOO fascinating… SOOOO offbeat and edgy and out there… Oh, Philip, stop it!! (Giggle.)

[L]et us not forget his playbook (or his witticisms), so that we can recognize future versions when they arise: the nihilism and casual dismissal of the human that inspired his dark grids and glass-clad castles. I see traces of those qualities in certain architects who claim to be humanists, but whose work instead celebrates their own grandeur. Philip Johnson wasn’t just a racist and fascist: He was a cultured, rich cad who made us forget our own failings as a country and as a profession.

And it is fascinating to old UD, the way we extend a weird sort of – what’s the phrase everyone’s using these days? – preemptive pardon to people like Gore Vidal (UD loves Vidal and even made a pilgrimage to his DC gravesite, but there’s no denying his Johnsonian ugliness in old age) and Kingsley Amis. And maybe we should extend a pardon. But Philip Johnson was no garden variety bigot; he was a brilliant and principled Hitlerian. He laughed it all away years later and people let him. Look how long it’s taken for the civilized world to start erasing monuments to the fucker.

Now that he’s exposed millions of Americans to a fatal pathogen, embarrassed his home institution (Stanford), and called on the people of Michigan to rise up against their governor because she’s trying to arrest the spread of covid, Scott Atlas’s work for Mr Trump is done. He has resigned, trailing clouds of gory.

Bitter-Ender Trumpian Scott Atlas is on leave at the moment from Stanford’s Hoover Institutution, but his connection to the place still means that the university gets besmirched with each of his increasingly debauched statements about covid. His latest command to the citizens of Michigan that they “RISE UP” against their governor for her commitment to their health is so disgusting that Stanford has been moved to make a public statement against him.

****************

UD thanks a reader for correcting the first name of Atlas; with my literary sensibility I seem to have decided it was James Atlas. It is Scott.

[The] leadership that we have … seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population…

LOLOLOL. And the university is San Diego State! Feast your eyes! For years, it has consistently been one of the shittiest, drugs-guns-frats-and-jocks-choked scandals in America.

One of the more notorious drug raids in this country took place at SDSU’s well-armed Theta Chi fraternity. One of UD‘s colleagues left her university to last barely six years as SDSU’s president, his unflagging personal greed an insult to students, faculty, alumni, and of course the state legislature.

It’s such a bad school. UD‘s so not surprised it hired people to add segregation to its stupidities and misdeeds.

… a place where her family has roots starting in 1911. Like Myrtle Beach, OC has allowed itself (for stupid short-sighted commercial reasons) to be taken over by anarchic and/or criminal elements; and now that it’s a guns/booze/street fights/muscle car wasteland, there’s not much it can do about it. It’s hard to walk back the destruction of civic life.

The mayor, for instance, outlawed a major car rally for this year, after it spent last year trashing the city and “terrorizing” residents. But the rally guys said fuck you we’re coming anyway. They’re in OC right now, and will stay for a few more days.

In the language of a desperate, last-minute law the city got through the General Assembly, these are the actions that can trigger a $1,000 fine and/or sixty days in jail.

• Excessive or abrupt acceleration or deceleration.
• Skidding, squealing, burning or smoking tires.
• Swerving or swaying a vehicle.
• Producing an unreasonably loud engine noise.
• Grinding gears.
• Wheels losing contact with the ground.
• Transporting a passenger on the hood or roof.

Weren’t you smart to buy a condo in Ocean City?

How dully predictable that the endpoint of Jessica Krug’s violent nihilism is murder. Here she is exciting herself and her audience by applauding the gang killing of a fifteen year old kid who wanted to be a policeman.

Wonder if the clip was part of her George Washington University tenure application.

Owner selling because she “doesn’t need so much space.”

… lacks are two Presa Canarios.

… who, with her husband, did a Martin Shkreli and massively jacked up the price of a desperately needed commodity – in this case, hand sanitizer. Ellen was in charge of chatting up rich people in order to get them to give enormous sums to the university, but apparently OU doesn’t want to be associated with her any longer.

Wow. They certainly took their time taking them down. It’s hard to read about his activities in the Congo without throwing up.

That’s what it looks like Amy Cooper harbors, now that a second instance of her calling the powers of the law down on a man who has angered her has surfaced.

[Martin] Priest said Amy developed a “fascination” with him when they worked together at Lehman Brothers and filed [an expensive] lawsuit against him in 2015 with “fabricated” claims. “I never had a romantic relationship with her, period. She purposely engineered false allegations against me. And she made up allegations targeting my family’s physical safety,” Priest told The [Daily] News. … The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2018 after all parties failed to appear at back-to-back hearings, online court records show.

Right, so she’d done her thing, made her point, scared the shit out of the guy, and now her work was done. No need to expose her lies to scrutiny in court.

Precedents? I’ll give you one real, and one fictional. Whenever another Amy — Amy Bishop — got mad, she went hard against the person who made her mad and then boohooed to the cops that a frail innocent well-bred person like her could never do anything violent. Even more crazily, there’s Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest — another highly educated, impressively employed urbanite who didn’t take it well when a man angered her.

More violent than Cooper? Sure. But who knows what a cop might have done if Cooper had stayed at the scene and continued to make her hysterical claims against Christian Cooper?

Only Vinod Khosla and his beach (scroll down) can hold a candle to the story of this house in LA.

America!

Only he forgot a couple of things.

1. He gambled away $1.8 billion of Harvard’s money.
2. He made five million dollars working for a hedge fund while still Harvard’s president.