The Glass House

Johnson's own house (also nicknamed the "Glass House") was hidden from the public eye on a forty-seven-acre site in New Canaan, Connecticut. Glass House and ten other structures (a guest house, a lakeside pavilion, a pinacotheca, a glyptotheca, a visitor pavilion, ...) that Johnson realized on his property over half a century are among the seminal works of world architecture. Since April 2007, it has finally been accessible to interested parties. In designing his own house, Johnson was evidently influenced by Mies's plans for the weekend house of Dr. Farnsworth. Unlike his, the house in New Canaan does not float on thin steel columns but has a dark brick floor firmly tied to the ground. Instead of perimeter walls, large glass panels are used. However, Johnson managed to free himself from the need for interior walls in his design. The only solid element in the interior is a brick cylinder piercing the roof of the glass box, which contains the necessary facilities.

"Beautiful or ugly, small or large, this was the purest period I have experienced in architecture during my life. Everything else was burdened by three problems: the client, function, and finances. Here it was not the case."

"Painters have all the advantages over us... partly because they can detach themselves from their failures— it seems that we can never grow academically fast enough—and the material costs them almost nothing. They have no union committees telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all annoyingly reconciled to last-minute cuts in our plans. Why not eliminate landscaping, foundations, colonnades? Houses will be just as useful and much cheaper. True, the architect leads a hard life—from the artist's perspective.
... Comfort is not the purpose of beauty... the intention is not necessarily to make a building beautiful... sooner or later we will adapt our buildings so that they can be usable... where form comes from I do not know, but it has nothing to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture."

"The arch and the box are two periodically recurring themes in the history of architecture. Few boxes in history have reached such sophistication as the steel skeleton of Johnson's glass house. Inside the transparent box, objects and furnishings (such as a freestanding snack bar) take on the importance of chess pieces— checkmate provides a perfect environment! The Éminence grise behind the design is Mies. It is, as many critics playfully suggest, a kind of eclectic mixture of Choisy's plans for the acropolis (analytical drawings from the late 19th century by the French historian Auguste Choisy), Schinkel's Casino (the former billiard house in the castle park in Potsdam by K.F. Schinkel, built in the Italian pavilion style on the banks of the Havel River), Mies's own sketches for Farnsworth House and IIT, Ledoux's rationalism, and possibly Malevich's 'circular' painting from 1913."

"The completely open house of glass and steel is the main element of an architectural composition that also includes an outdoor sculpture and a blind brick wall of the guest house. The spatial division inside the glass house is achieved by a brick cylinder containing the bathroom and low walnut cabinets—one of which contains kitchen equipment. The floor and cylinder of red bricks are waxed to show their cool lavender tones. The steel is painted black; the stairs and railings are made of white granite."

"Philip Johnson, one of the early advocates of modernism in the United States and at the same time the first architect to draw attention to its shortcomings in the 1950s, created with his Glass House one of the most beautiful and simultaneously least functional houses; it was never viewed as a 'home' for dwelling but as a stage presenting a lifestyle. Surprisingly in the spirit of l'esprit nouveau of the modern movement, it was, however, a building expressing serious concern for classical designs, its elevated placement in space, its balanced proportions, main overall symmetry, and balanced combination of elements with careful refinement in the details...."

"In 1946, under the strong influence of Mies, he also designed a small boxy house in Sagaponack on Long Island, but his first significant building, perhaps the most famous, was not meant for another client; like the Cambridge house, it served him: this was the glass house in New Canaan completed in 1949 with a brick guest house as its counterpart.
The bright Glass House, a rectangle measuring 56 x 32 feet, is generally considered one of the most magnificent residential buildings of the 20th century. Like all of Johnson’s early work, the house was also inspired by Mies, but its pure symmetry, dark colors, and proximity to the ground signify its own message: preferably calm and orderly rather than neat and fragile. ...
In 1985, the site was dedicated to the State Historical Preservation Foundation, which plans to manage the house as a museum."