From the Archive: Philip Johnson’s Glass House Gets a Restoration

As a part of our 25th anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s March 2007 issue.  

As the old saying goes: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But what about people who design them? Philip Johnson made a name for himself with his iconic, bare-faced structure, and, in turn, was judged as being an architect of both pure genius and pure artifice. Now part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Johnson’s 47-acre estate will again be open to the public, and public scrutiny.

"We used to talk about the hedgehog and the fox," recalls the writer Hilary Lewis of her favorite subject, Philip Johnson. She’s referring to the poet Archilochus’s observation, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing," which is typically applied to opposing artistic temperaments—the former pursuing multiple objectives, the latter governed by an overarching vision. Johnson, who upon his death at 98 in 2005 was remembered, in Paul Goldberger’s New York Times obituary, as a "combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator, and cheerleader," readily acknowledged his uber-foxiness. But he also knew one big thing. And there’s no better place to experience it than at his New Canaan, Connecticut, residence, the Glass House.

That was Johnson’s name, not only for his 1949 modernist landmark, but the entire estate, which he gradually expanded from 5 to 47 acres and adorned with ten provocative constructions. And it will all be on public display beginning in April, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation, to which he donated the property in 1986, opens what will officially be called Philip Johnson’s Glass House.

The Glass House’s executive director, Christy MacLear, explains that by offering tours and seminars, the trust’s mission is "to make the estate a center point of preservation of modern architecture, and maintain the spirit of inspiration Johnson brought to the site by creating residential fellowships for young talent. Our goal is to make sure the house isn't stuck in time"—a sentiment that would have pleased the forward moving architect.

For many, the biggest revelation may be not the house but the estate’s lesser-known attractions, each of which represents "a response to a different type of architectural problem," Lewis says. Principal among these are the lake pavilion (1962), a small-scale folly-composed of four arched structures pinwheeling around a water-filled center—that enabled Johnson to experiment with precast concrete and the challenge of joining arches at corners; the painting gallery (1965), a grouping of cylinders—completely submerged in an earthen mound—in which Johnson suspended giant, art-covered movable panels; and the 1970 sculpture gallery, a five-level Mediterranean village in miniature that spirals downward past a series of asymmetrical galleries to create dynamic, constantly shifting perspectives—"a spectacular enactment," observed Johnson biographer Franz Schulze, "of his belief in architecture as procession."

Johnson’s other additions are no less lively: The library (1980), a spartan workplace notable for its conical skylight; the "postmodern medieval" entry gate(1977); the ghost house (1984), a barn-shaped homage to Frank Gehry in chain link; the tower (1985) dedicated to Johnson’s friend Lincoln Kirstein, a concrete-block stairway to nowhere, which he designed using dominoes; and what Johnson called da Monsta (1995), a pavilion representative of his late-career enthusiasm for biomorphic forms.

But it’s the Glass House, both manifest and mythically speaking, that’s the draw. In 1945, Johnson, whose practice and curatorial duties at the Museum of Modern Art based him in New York, decided to find a country place, and gravitated to New Canaan, a well-heeled community that was home to fellow architects Marcel Breuer and Eliot Noyes. Johnson came upon five overgrown acres on Ponus Ridge Road that sloped down to a promontory with superlative views.

Though he quickly selected the promontory as his site, neither the house’s form nor, surprisingly, its material were givens. Over two years, Johnson explored 27 separate schemes and a range of building types, some of which incorporated masonry walls and distinctly unmodern Syrian arches. The architect ultimately decided to set a glass pavilion on the overlook and a guest house, identical in form but composed of brick, at a remove behind it—thereby looking outward to the view and inward to an entry court. "When I came to an isolated box," he recalled, "it was quite a break."

Johnson had Mies van der Rohe to thank. In 1946, while preparing a MoMA retrospective of Mies’s work, Johnson reviewed sketches for what would become the Farnsworth House, a residence with entirely glass walls. Inspired, Johnson finalized his own design in 1947, and spent his first night on the property (sleeping in the guest house) on New Year’s Eve, 1949—beating his hero to the finish line by two years.

Though Johnson has been accused of ripping off Mies’s masterpiece, there are significant differences between the projects. Farnsworth—bone white, elevated on piers, its steel columns sited outside the glazing-is grandly classical and structurally expressive. Johnson’s house—black-painted, its columns suppressed beneath glass walls, the whole nearly flush with the ground—is a discreet rectangular object. The buildings also differ within: Mies inserted a substantial core that delineates living spaces, whereas the Glass House’s 56-by-32-foot interior is broken only by a low kitchenette counter, a taller cabinet that separates sleeping and public areas, and a large brick cylinder containing the bathroom and fireplace.

In short, whereas Mies designed a home (however iconoclastic), Johnson’s box makes few domestic concessions—and therein, believes the architectural historian Vincent Scully, lies its importance. "The objective of modern art was to liberate the individual from the past and from all traditional constraints, and the Glass House is the ultimate expression of that in architecture," he says. "Johnson gets rid of the porch, the stairs—everything that suggests tradition—so there’s nothing iconographic between the individual and nature."

That last is key: As the house’s jaw-dropping views attest, the architect cared less about the structure than what was outside it. A gifted garden designer, Johnson spent decades ruthlessly tearing out trees (despite complaints from the neighbors) until he’d achieved a sublime interplay of clearings and woods that suggests an 18th-century English landscape filtered through a modern sensibility. Amidst all this, the house was, to Johnson, "a viewing platform or a bandstand in the park," Lewis says. The architect put it best: "The Glass House is a permanent camping trip protected from weather."

It is, of course, much more. By the 1940s, Johnson was strongly associated with the International Style, which he helped popularize as founding chairman of MoMA’s architecture department. Yet he’d also become a devotee of architectural history, and subsequently cited Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (among others) as having influenced his house’s design. As such, despite its apparent modernity, Johnson’s creation is predictive of his later style, the historical eclecticism for which he remains best known—indeed, according to Lewis, Johnson saw the house as "an ode to 1920s modernism." The latter contains a measure of mischief, but that was part of Johnson’s personality, too, and partly accounts for his attraction to Mannerism, the 16th-century antecedent to postmodernism. Johnson "was always a Mannerist," says Lewis. "Everything has a little twist," as is evident in the outsized brick cylinder rising from his urbane, elegant box. The effect is amusing but also mysterious, a mystery heightened by the seemingly windowless guest house that stands at a remove, a composition suggestive of a thing and its shadow, an apparent fact and a secret truth, a narrative that renders the house—for all of its transparency—strangely opaque.

If the Glass House shows the fox’s kaleidoscopic intelligence, it’s this tension between the hidden and the seen that reveals the hedgehog’s big idea. In many ways, Philip Johnson was one man within another—a Mannerist within a modernist, a homosexual operating in a closeted society, an elitist promoting an egalitarian style—and his contradictions are amply expressed at his estate, nowhere more so than in the architect’s 1953 renovation of the guest house. Here Johnson created a master suite into which he inserted decorative vaults, sliding panels covered in Fortuny silk, and sensual indirect lighting, producing an environment MacLear describes as "Tangier in Fairfield County"—all of which he concealed in a brick box.

Similarly, within Johnson’s pursuit of excellence lay a ravening lust for fame. Toward this end, the Glass House was his greatest weapon. In 1949. Johnson was six years out of architecture school and had yet to make a definitive splash. Though he worked hard at its design—though he cared—it seems inconceivable that the house was not meant to, as Schulze wrote, "persuade the American profession that he was a figure of consequence as an architect." Indeed, Johnson publicized it himself, in a 1950 article citing his influences, and it became a sensation—"a calling card," as Lewis puts it, where he engaged two generations of architects, artists, and students with his protean charm and intellect.