Architectural Icon
July 2007
It’s been more than 60 years since Philip Johnson had to traverse dense forest to reach the promontory where the Glass House now stands, in New Canaan, Connecticut. The architect immediately recognized the site’s enormous potential. Within an hour, he’d secured the 5-acre parcel, but it took three years and more than 75 conceptual drawings—vacillating from the monumentality of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to the airiness of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe— before he built his defining Modernist home.While the Glass House was conceived more as a work of art than as a residence, it did indeed serve as a home for its creator. When Johnson began spending weekends there in 1949, the glass-and-paintedsteel rectangle had already established his reputation as an architect of importance.
Over the decades, expanding the property to 47 acres, Johnson sculpted the landscape and filled it with structures that represent significant shifts in his architectural point of view. As one stands beside the Glass House and looks left to right, the Library/Study (1980), Ghost House (1984), Lincoln Kirstein Tower (1985) and Lake Pavilion (1962) express the Pritzker Prize–winning architect’s penchant for change. Using the land as a design laboratory, Johnson reshaped forests and hillsides, integrating them with the stone walls and structures. With no visual breaks to impede him, he relished his immersion in the falling snow or the light of the moon. Along the way, he added his art collection, a barometer of 20th-century art history. The whole Glass House estate, now a National Trust for Historic Preservation Site, opened to the public on June 23rd for the first time in more than 50 years.
The Glass House’s 1,728-square-foot interior is a spare, elegant arrangement of low walnut cabinets and Mies van der Rohe furniture. Mostly brought from Johnson’s New York apartment, these pieces are an acknowledgement of the inspiration Johnson found in his mentor’s glass-box design for the Farnsworth House in Illinois. Other prominent features are an 82-inch, papiermâché- over-plaster maquette of Elie Nadelman’s 1930 “Two Circus Women,” which was rendered in Carrara marble for the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, and a Baroque landscape painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin. “Burial of Phocion” (1648–49) related to the surrounding scenery and was selected for the Glass House by Johnson’s close friend Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. A cylindrical brick bathroom is the only floor-to-ceiling object in the 56-by-32-foot house. The same red brick is on the floor and each of the four quarter-inch glass facades is bisected by a door. “These structures are architectural treasures of a movement whose significance is not yet fully realized,” says Jack Pyburn, chair of the American Institute of Architects Historic Resources Committee. “The scope of their importance and value to architectural history will increase with time and reflection.”
On the same promontory from which the Glass House faces the setting sun, the adjacent Brick House, also completed in 1949, marks the opposite side of a connecting courtyard. The Brick House’s solid facing wall preserves privacy but is more significant as a counterpoint to the Glass House’s transparency. Used for guests and as the center for the estate’s utilities, its interior was renovated in 1953 to reflect Johnson’s break with pure Modernism. The bright, skylit hallway is hung with selections from Brice Marden’s 1986 “Etchings to Rexroth Portfolio.” The bedroom where Andy Warhol occasionally slept has billowy white vaults curving overhead, walls and round windows draped in Fortuny silk, and above the bed is “Clouds of Magellan,” a 1953 bronze-and-steel sculpture by Ibram Lassaw. It was here that Johnson napped and relaxed in the chocolate-brown reading room stocked with his books on history and philosophy.
As founding director of MoMA’s Architecture and Design department, Johnson had more than ample opportunity to explore au courant art, but meeting David Whitney in 1960 changed his aesthetic and personal life forever. Whitney, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, approached Johnson after hearing him lecture at nearby Brown University. Their conversation about the Glass House led to an invitation for Whitney, which began an intimate 45-year partnership steeped in love of art and architecture. “Philip always said, ‘David has an eye for art,” recalls Hilary Lewis, the site’s Philip Johnson scholar, who collaborated with the architect for a dozen years on book projects.Though Johnson had been collecting art since his visit to the Bauhaus in Germany where he bought his first piece from Paul Klee, and often took his cues from his old friend Barr, Whitney’s influence increased with the passing years, according to the late MoMA Chief Curator Kirk Varnedoe. Initially employed as a designer at MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture, Whitney was plugged into the ’60s art scene with a later stint at Leo Castelli’s gallery and as an assistant to Jasper Johns. Warhol became a daily telephone confidant, and Whitney joined Claes Oldenburg in a performance piece. Starting in the 1970s, Whitney curated highly regarded solo shows for Johns, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning, David Salle and Eric Fischl.
With Whitney’s passion and perspective for collecting, the Painting Gallery was constructed in 1965. It was built into the side of a hill so that only its roof and massive red sandstone entrance are visible. Three of Lynn Davis’ architecturally rich photographs from Burma, Syria and Yemen (1993–96) and Michael Heizer’s “Dragged Mass (Iso/Planar/Section)” (1983) hang in the wide entry hall. Whitney edited Davis’ book Monument, a further exploration of her iconic look at buildings and land forms. The three adjoining circular galleries have massive walls that are mounted like a giant poster rack; they are moved to view each painting. In correspondence with the National Trust in the 1980s, Johnson and Whitney envisioned a comprehensive timeline of Frank Stella’s painting and sculpture. This project anticipated a need to deaccession pieces by other artists.
Executive Director Christy MacLear notes that since that letter, several seminal works such as Warhol’s “S & H Green Stamps,” went to MoMA, but all Stellas from the early 1960s through 2005 were kept on-site, and though it’s unclear why plans changed, large-scale works by Salle, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg and Julian Schnabel remain. (While these pieces are in the collection, they are not on view.) Annual reinstallation of the gallery will allow access to those works and to Warhol’s 1972 silkscreen portrait “Philip Johnson,” another example of the close ties between artists and collectors.
While the earth-berm Painting Gallery excludes natural light, the glass-roofed Sculpture Gallery exults in it. Built in 1970 and based on a series of squares rotated at 45-degree angles, the five-tiered space has wide display niches. Imposing works by John Chamberlain, George Segal, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and Andrew Lord can each be viewed in splendid isolation. Stella has four pieces, including “Raft of the Medusa, Part I” (1990), which acts as the gallery’s anchor. Both galleries reflect Johnson’s belief that artworks are best viewed individually. The roster of artists represented in these spaces further testifies to Whitney’s often prescient cultivation of talent. Lord is not alone when he says, “I miss David most when I’ve completed new work, when I’d like to show him what I’ve done, find out if I went off course.”
Johnson and Whitney were often among the first to bring new art to a wider audience. One of MoMA’s major benefactors, Johnson gave the museum Jasper Johns’ “Flag” (1954) and Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe,” the year it was made, 1962. In 1986, Johnson arranged for the Glass House estate to become part of the National Trust, but retained use until his death in 2005. Whitney, who died later that same year, served as a trustee at Houston’s Menil Collection and made a bequest to that institution that includes seminal works on paper by Johns. (Those works are on exhibit there until October 28.) Whitney also directed that his collection be auctioned and proceeds given to the National Trust to maintain the Glass House. The mix of American contemporary and folk art was sold by Sotheby’s for $13,802,452.
“Da Monsta,” the last structure Johnson designed on the site, is also the best example of his belief that art and architecture are one. The name, a Brooklynesque twist on the word “monster,” comes from the architect’s contention that the structure was almost animate. He regularly patted it like a pet when he passed it during his daily walks. Completed in 1995, it’s as much sculpture as it is building. Johnson used the term “structural warp” to describe the organic shape, which was inspired by an element of Frank Stella’s design for a Dresden museum. It’s fitting that Stella’s mixed-media “Shards I” (1986) hangs in its gently sloping cavernlike interior.The Glass House and the surrounding composition of landscape, art and architecture will continue to inspire the lively aesthetic dialogue that was a centerpiece of life for Philip Johnson. The place he called “the diary of an eccentric architect” is now an open book.
Connecticut-based writer Barbara Wysocki specialized in contemporary art during her tenure as a docent at Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Glass House, located in New Canaan, Connecticut, is open from April to October. Tours are limited to 10 and include entry to five of the structures. Personalized Patron Tours are also available. For reservations, visit www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org or call 866.811.4111.
BOOKS
An American Visionary: The Collection of David Whitney (Sotheby’s, New York, November 16, 2006).
The Architecture of Philip Johnson. Foreword by Philip Johnson, essay by Hilary Lewis, text by Stephen Fox (Bullfinch Press, Boston, 2002).
The Harvard Five in New Canaan: Midcentury Modern Houses by Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes and Others by William D. Earls, (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
Philip Johnson: Life and Work by Franz Schulze (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994).