Editor’s Note: In June, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, by Pierluigi Serraino, will be published by Monacelli Press. The book is based on psychological tests conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958–59 to try to determine what promotes creativity in architects. RECORD presents excerpts of three case studies of the leading architects of the day—Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra—along with the author’s summary of the goals, methodology, and findings of this unusual, almost-forgotten investigation. Go back to the main article.
Of the 40 architects in the creativity experiment in 1958–59, Johnson was the most challenging to interview. Often he stood silent for three to four minutes without answering the questions that his interviewer, psychologist George S. Welsh, had posed, therefore compromising the potential of this evaluation. At other times, Johnson’s behavior, ranging from the erratic to the peculiar during the interview, baffled Welsh, who wrote a descriptive two-page summary: “Occasionally he jumped up from his chair and looked at things on the wall or stared out the window . . . The subject seems like a controlled psychotic . . . He showed many classic features of the manic: self-centered, irritable, jumpy, flighty in ideas, arrogant, and using humor to defend himself against serious consideration of anxiety-producing topics.”
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