10/22/2025
Join Preserve Orange County on Thursday, October 23 at The Newport Beach Film Festival where we are co-presenting “The Harvard Five” as part of the Art, Architecture + Design film series.
See below for discount code.
Philip Johnson (1906-2005) is among the 20th century’s most iconic architects and a member of the so-called Harvard Five. One of his best-known buildings is Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral (now known as Christ Cathedral), which he designed for Reverend Robert Schuller of Garden Grove Community Church in 1980.
Before Johnson began his career as an architect, he was founding curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The department’s first exhibition, the landmark “Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition,” which Johnson co-curated with historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, introduced the US to European modernists Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius and defined the term “International Style.”
In the 1940s, Johnson and his Harvard colleagues – Marcel Breuer, Eliot Noyes, John Johansen, and Landis Gores – settled in the small Connecticut town of New Caanan and designed groundbreaking modernist houses for themselves and a number of progressive clients. Johnson’s seminal designs include his own home in New Caanan, known as the Glass House (1949), the Seagram Building (1956) with Mies van der Rohe, and the AT&T Building (550 Madison Avenue) with John Burgee (1982).
When Garden Grove Community Church outgrew its Richard Neutra-designed building, Schuller sought out Johnson to design a new structure to accommodate his growing congregation and popular weekly show, “The Hour of Power,” which at its height of popularity was broadcast on 180 stations.
Johnson’s building features over 12,000 panes of glass, which filters out 80 percent of sunlight, supported by a grid of trusses and seats over 2,200 people. It became an instant landmark due to its mirrored glass façade and size, reaching to 128 feet, amid its suburban landscape. When Garden Grove Community Church filed for bankruptcy in 2010, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange purchased the site and renamed the building Christ Cathedral.
**Use discount code PRESERVEOC25 for 25 percent off tickets for "The Harvard Five."
Directed by Devon Chivvis, The Harvard Five screens on Thursday, October 23 at 5:30 PM at Triangle Cinema Screen 5 in Costa Mesa.
