Before his death Philip Johnson was the first on this list, first in the hearts and minds of his fellow architects, the dean of American architecture. Johnson was sophisticated and well-connected to say the least, wicked-smart with a self-serving deflective wit equal to Bob Dole, an authentic legend. And he had that respect that comes with outliving one's victims.

The round of Philip Johnson obituaries brought unexpected threads into his known narrative, and new reasons for respect. For one thing, he made it to almost 100. Overcoming the crippling handicap of accidental millionaire-hood early in life, Johnson avoided the millionaire's rathole. After the money he went back to Harvard, carved out a commercial and artistic niche, sustained a long career, and died as the boss of his profession despite leaving behind an eerie lack of solid accomplishments. He sustained a single personal relationship for the last 40 years, even if he found it necessary to conceal it for thirty. He became a human logo - no small task. And he was good at icy bursts of truth in conversation. William Shirer fingered him as a probable Nazi spy in 1930's Berlin, and it's jarring to see the resemblance between the young Philip Johnson and other fiery Caucasians like Dennis Hopper and Eminem. Something defiant in the eyes.

But these obituaries come out with lists of buildings, and this list of Johnson's buildings must be confusing to people outside the profession. So this is the output of the dean of American architecture? This is very nice. Are there… are there more pages to this?

His architectural high-water mark is the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Have you seen it before somewhere? Are there two of these? Yes, you have, there is, it's a straightforward steal from Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, yes. (That he capitalizes on the work of junior partners and nameless office grunts doesn't count, because that's life in the big city, from Wright's birthday boxes to Gyo Obata.) Johnson was working for Mies at the time, and after this preemptive homage, Mies never spoke to him again. Mies didn't care that it was stolen, he cared that it was poorly detailed.

It doesn't matter, really. There's a pox on both those houses. They're both unlivable. Everybody knows it. Both completely ignore the climate. Stunningly hot and insect-ridden in the summer, biting cold in the winter, both of them, they're more symbols of aesthetic purity than houses. You might as well try to nestle for the night inside a Brancusi.

There's the Sony Building on Madison Avenue, the one with the Chippendale top. In 1984 this unspeakable and unnecessary shape was a titillating departure from the dull flat planes of Modernism, and, to be fair, it did loosen up the aesthetic rules for everybody else, but the building itself or its lobby hasn't become any more necessary or speakable since then.

And people talk about his collaborations, the changes in his forms, the serial repudiations of Modernism, Postmodernism and Deconstructivism, which doesn't really explain anything, or make sense of his work. Even Johnson's strongest defenders these days admit his built legacy is less than stellar.

Johnson's true genius was as a curator, a powerbroker, a salonista, a careerist, a 'tastemaker', the guy who got to frame the debate to his own advantage, behind the curtain. It's well known that Philip Johnson became the first curator of the architecture department at MOMA, that was one of his key credentials. Less well-known that he funded the department out of own pocket, including staff salaries, and bought that curatorship fair and square. It's well-known that Philip Johnson promoted The International Style in that famous 1932 MOMA show and the classic book; less understood that Johnson and Hitchcock pirated the look of European modernism and gave everybody permission to employ it as a style of the surface, as "design appliqué". And every obit accurately describes Philip Johnson as the first winner of the Pritzker Prize, but hardly anybody knows or remembers that Johnson may have helped set it up and taken the first one for his trouble. True or not, the annual shaft of Pritzger sunlight tends to shine on architects of Johnson's stripe.

Johnson's influence arose partly out of his social energy, partly from his black glasses, and partly from his firm opinion on the single most important and imbedded controversy in architecture, a deep controversy which burns like a banked fire and flares up occasionally, a live debate that's more basic than stylistic sniping about Chippendale tops, an undying family controversy that's rarely articulated in public but cuts to the heart of the matter. It's really only about one thing.

Should the architect design for the benefit of the client?

Or should the architect be allowed to design whatever the hell he wants?

Some architects who hold artistic license don't enjoy being challenged on the issue. Some demand that the clients learn to live with the result. Johnson's entire career was dedicated to the idea that architects build what they please, at the client's expense, leaving those ideas about design integrity outside of serious discussion. That's really what made Johnson special. His wit, his considerable energy and intellectual firepower, promoted the idea that architects are expressive artists accountable to nobody. "The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings," he said. "That's all."

That's the underlying consistency of the glass house, the lipstick building, the Chippendale Top, and Pennzoil Plaza. Whatever I say, goes.

Imagine American architecture as a gang of children in a dirt lot. Somebody drags a stick across the ground and everybody lines up on two sides. Cowboys, over here; Indians, there.

The Cowboys are the stylists, the artistes, the players. This is their dirt lot. There's I.M. Pei, he's still running around. There's that damned Tschumi. There's all the New York Five, who Johnson trained personally: Meier, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Graves, and Eisenman. Meier's a cowboy and a self-proclaimed sculptor of light. Graves is a cowboy. Peter Eisenman, awe-inspiring in his contempt and abuse of his clients, is a real tough cowboy who plays rough and laughs about making his users nauseated. There's a lot of west-cost architects on that side, and a lot of cowboys difficult to recognize under their asinine eyeglasses. But the cowboys were well-organized and motivated by Philip Johnson for decades, with a big badge that said MOMA, and now that he's gone home there's this moment when the imbalance of power makes everybody feel uneasy. One of the cowboys yells out to the other side, "Hey you Functionalist!"

If you count Indians as the functionalists, the ones who try to get the building right from the client's perspective, I think James Stewart Polshek is the top dog, the troublemaker, the guy who dashes up to the line and shouts out things like, "'I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance!" which makes all the cowboys nervy and wal-eyed. Koolhaas belongs on the Indians' side too, and Bruder, and McDonough. They handicap themselves by making the game tougher for themselves. While scanning the faces you realize the moment in the dirt lot is not right, the argument isn't going to develop, and they're always going to squabble, and it doesn't really matter.

One thing does matter, though. There's an old medicine man on the Indians' side, Lawrence Halprin, the legendary landscape architect. He's in his 90's as well. Unlike Philip Johnson, Halprin believes in his responsibility to the users.

In the same years that Halprin and his staffer Angela Danadjieva designed the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland Oregon, Philip Johnson and John Burgee designed the Water Garden in Fort Worth. Both fountains are about the same sized examples of the very early 1970's municipal public garden kind of Zeitgeist. They're both noisy with massive multiple poured-concrete bowls and a canyon-like effect, with concrete steps that encourage close-up exploration and interaction with the water.

But their origins are different. The steps of the Keller fountain in Portland were based on human measurement and filmed dancers, and modeled to exaggerate the water's power and danger to keep people out of trouble. You could still fall in, but in its configuration the playable loud fountain retains a delicious sense of danger without being dangerous at all. It's a work of craft. Compare this to the Fort Worth fountain, a work of art, designed purely on the basis of style, inherently duller in its bowl configuration, the site where part of Logan's Run was filmed. In the summer of 2004 this was also where four members of a Chicago family, including an eight-year-old girl, died after being tempted by a path of square stones into a collecting pool where the suction was strong enough to empty a swimming pool in two minutes. Both designs wordlessly articulate where you can walk, where you should stand, what you can do. Consider the photos. Those steps in the Water Garden take you down directly where you should not go.

Whether or not it's bad taste to bring up an architect's responsibilities on the event of his death - that's your choice. Philip Johnson was intelligent and knowledgeable, he was not a phony, and I don't believe he wished serious ill on anybody. But in these elegies let nobody say that Philip Johnson did no harm.