John M. Johansen | Modernist architect, 96

John M. Johansen, 96, a celebrated modernist architect and the last surviving member of the Harvard Five, a group that made New Canaan, Conn., a hotbed of architectural experimentation in the 1950s and '60s, died Friday of heart failure in Brewster, Mass.

In the postwar years, Mr. Johansen and four other young modernist architects - Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores and Eliot Noyes, all with connections to Harvard's architecture school - dotted southwestern Connecticut with houses conveying the optimism of the time. Hugely influential in the field, the buildings were seen in museum exhibitions and on the covers of Life and Look magazines.

Some of the five, including Johnson, liked to strip houses down to their bare essentials. Mr. Johansen took a more varied approach. His Warner House (1957) in New Canaan, also known as the Villa Ponte, had a symmetrical layout derived from the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Vaulted gold-leaf ceilings, terrazzo floors and ebonized-wood cabinets helped show that Modernism, which had its roots in industrial efficiency, could also be luxurious.

His Telephone Pole House (1968) in Greenwich, Conn., was made from 104 poles, which braced the structure into the side of a steep ravine. His Plastic Tent House (1975) in Stanfordville, N.Y. - which he built as his own home - consisted of a steel frame covered in translucent plastic. Mr. Johansen lived there after leaving New Canaan in the '70s and opening a practice in New York. He later moved to Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod.

Mr. Johansen also designed a number of large public buildings, among them, in the 1960s, the Goddard Library at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.; the Clowes Memorial Hall at Butler University in Indianapolis (with Evans Woollen); the Museum of Art, Science and Industry, now the Discovery Museum and Planetarium, in Bridgeport, Conn.; and the Orlando Public Library in Florida.

His Morris A. Mechanic Theater in Baltimore (1967) and the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City (1970) - now the Stage Center - consist of concrete "pods" connected by walkways and tubes. With raw concrete exteriors, they were easy targets for criticism.

Mr. Johansen continued writing and lecturing well into his 90s. In 2002, he published Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture, a book filled with futuristic projects based on advances in biology and physics. He described it as "an exhortation to the younger generations."

John MacLane Johansen was born at his home in New York on June 29, 1916, and raised in Manhattan, where his parents were successful portrait painters.

In recent years, Mr. Johansen refused to return to New Canaan, where he blamed real estate speculators for tearing down houses he had designed. But in an interview in 2005, he waxed philosophical.

"The reward," he said, "is in the doing. Having built the houses, I've already won."

- N.Y. Times News Service