 |
Courtesy of Paul Warchol |
A see-through icon of architecture
Visitors can now tour architect Philip Johnson's famed Glass House in Connecticut.
from the September 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
House and site, matched
The Glass House is perfectly proportioned to the grassy ridge on which it sits. The glass panels, set in a frame of dark steel, reflect the surrounding landscape (Johnson claimed he had "expensive wallpaper"), alternately revealing and concealing the interior. In only 1,728 square feet, the architect has managed to convey a purity of modernist vision and yet, at the same time, bring it down to a manageable, domestic scale.
The interior, which hasn't changed since the 1950s, hews closely to the tenets of Modernism – minimalist furniture in black leather, steel, and chrome; and storage limited to a set of cabinets that also serves as a divider between the living area and the bedroom.
The only interior wall is a floor-to-ceiling cylinder that contains the bathroom. (The plumbing and mechanical elements are concealed inside the guesthouse, which is connected by an underground umbilical cord to the Glass House.)
Johnson had a childlike enjoyment of nesting boxes, says Fernandez. In the Glass House, the "boxes" are all rectangular – from a small keepsake box atop a coffee table to the area rug to the shape of the house itself, contained within the rectangular boundaries of the terrace with its low granite railing.
Standing inside, I'm drawn outdoors again by the siren call of the landscape. From the terrace, I look down on the pond that Johnson carved out of a wetland and the pavilion that he created to play with the concept of scale. The pavilion, which looks much taller than its mere 63-inch height, floats above the glassy surface of the pond like a Roman temple.
Johnson influenced the appearance of the surrounding woods by pruning and clearing trees, but the effect is natural, not fussy.
While Johnson loved the Glass House, he found he couldn't work in it, according to Fernandez. He was too distracted by the changing light and the moving trees. Instead, he created a freestanding small library that he called his "monk's cloister," where he could read and think.
Architectural style
Johnson embraced the International Style as a student and later as an associate of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1940s and '50s.
Eventually though, Johnson's eclecticism got the better of him, and he broke away from pure interpretations of that style, borrowing and tweaking elements of historic styles.
For example, the Chippendale pediment on top of the otherwise modern Sony Building (1984) was derided as looking like a piece of furniture. Its humor was lost on critics at the time, but the Sony Building is regarded today as an early example of Post-Modernism.
RSS feed
