This emphasis on external styling dates back to his early years as a curator and critic, as in the 1931 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and book that first made his reputation, The International Style. Here Johnson and his co-author, Henry Russell Hitchcock, decoupled the unadorned, cubistic prisms of the early modernist designers Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, J.P.P. Oud and others from the socialist politics that accompanied them, making the new look suitable for wealthy American patrons and corporate executives. By the late 1940s, classical was out, modern was in, and Johnson, after receiving his architecture degree from Harvard in 1948, became one of the most visible and prolific exponents of the new style. His Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, of 1949 was, and remains, an icon of the new architecture he helped to popularize.