SMOKE AND MIRRORS
A visit to Philip Johnson’s Glass House
It’s a few days later than we’d normally send this out, but we have a good excuse for it. We spent our weekend up in New Canaan, Connecticut, land of Vineyard Vines, and home base for the Harvard Five. (We know which camp we’re in.) We took a little road trip, which, if you’re from The City, we’d highly recommend. If you’re going to make the trip, add Hotel Marcel, Grace Farms, and Gores Pavilion to your route.
ICYMI: We just published our Copenhagen Field Guide, updated with a new member perk from our friends at GoBoat.
WE WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU’RE HEADED
If you have upcoming travel plans and haven’t booked your stay yet, send us a note at CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM.
We just helped one of our members plan a trip across Japan, and hooked another up with some spots in Puglia recommended by some local architects and designers we asked. Very good recs to have, if you're the kind of person who likes having very good recs.
We’re standing in the living room of the Glass House, which isn’t so much a room as much as it is an area inside a 1,815 square-foot glass rectangle. We’re sitting on stools (not original to the house), so as not to disturb the Mies-designed furniture (some of it original, some of it might as well be, as production prototypes). We’re not allowed to touch anything. It all feels very perfect. And yet, for a single-room building with four glass walls, oddly human.
TO GO BEYOND THE (LACK OF) WALLS
We were somewhat embarrassed to find out, as architecturally curious as we consider ourselves to be, that the Glass House does not stand alone. Standing opposite the Glass House is the Brick House, which looks a little bit like you’d imagine a utility building at a public middle school.
The front door, said Johnson, started at the end of the driveway. The sound of steps making their way across the gravel was its doorbell. The manicured grass stretching between the Glass House and the Brick House — the only mowed part of the 49 acres he built on — was its carpet. He envisioned the property as a sort of nesting doll — the dining table being at the center, enveloped by the Glass House, then the lawn (and the Brick House along with it), then the greater property.
As Johnson and, and his partner, David Whitney’s lifestyle evolved, so too did the property. An 18th-century farmhouse became the sitting room to watch TV. A subterranean art gallery and Aegean-inspired sculpture gallery provided a temporary home for their growing art collection as pieces made their way to MoMA.
A BUILDING SHOULD NEVER BE FOLfDED
There are fourteen structures on the property, including the Glass House. Johnson spent most of his time in five of them, designed over more than thirty years.
The Glass House, completed in 1949, is the one everyone knows, in its signature, International Style. Very Miesian. (Too Miesian, Mies might say.)
The Brick House, completed the same year, sits opposite as its foil.
Then come the later buildings: the Painting Gallery, completed in 1965; the Sculpture Gallery, completed in 1970; and the Library, completed in 1980, a “recombination of geometric forms,” with Gehry furniture and Venturi/Scott Brown carpet.
We found it somewhat surprising to see such a varied style across his works. Unlike his peers in the International Style community, like his friend Mies van der Rohe, Johnson didn’t seem particularly interested in sticking to a style, or even a belief system.
Johnson was a curator first, and walking the property gives you the sense that his projects were less about finding the ideal way to live, and more about whatever interested him at the time. It feels rare to get to spend time in a place that has so many different eras of an artist — you might really only be able to do this with music.
(The twisted forms of Da Monsta, for what it’s worth, were literally nausea inducing.)
THE HOUSE IS FULL OF SMOKE
For such a prolific architect, the Glass House and its neighboring structures came with a surprising number of design problems. The chimney, built into the bathroom column, was too shallow, and sending smoke and soot onto the ceiling. Johnson covered the bathroom walls in leather tiles, a very beautiful and very bad idea for a room with a shower. The wall tiles didn’t last. The ones on the ceiling, improbably, did — helped by the fact that Johnson and Whitney often showered across the lawn in the Brick House.
Then there was the glass itself. The first time Johnson turned on the lights at night, he found himself staring back at his own reflection rather than the landscape outside. The house he’d built to dissolve the boundary between inside and out had been reduced, by a light switch, to a mirror. Richard Kelly later fixed the problem by lighting the exterior of the house and surrounding trees, making the windows pass-through again.
The subterranean art gallery had its own issue: moisture. A lot of it. The solution was not especially glamorous, but it worked: a drainage ditch, spanned by a small bridge.
At the base of the driveway sits a sculpture by Donald Judd which, during the concrete curing process, ended up scarred by mismatched pours. Judd insisted he fix it. Johnson wouldn’t allow it. We’re paraphrasing:
“The project was mismanaged. It’s going to stay.”