Philip Johnson Glass House, Connecticut
William L. Fox
I’ve always thought of the Philip Johnson Glass House, designed by one of the founding fathers of modernism, as a single transparent structure hovering on the edge of a perfect lawn in New Canaan, that swanky Connecticut town where Cary Grant attempted to build his own arcadia in the 1948 movie Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House. (The actual house constructed for the film is now the park office for Malibu State Park north of Los Angeles, but that’s another story.) That’s not an incorrect impression, as this classic and oft-reproduced photo shows, but as Dorothy Dunn (CA+E Advisor and Director of Visitor Experience for the property) points out, it’s a much more complex place than simply an iconic dwelling.
When David Walker, Ann Wolfe and I visited what is now a structure owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we found it sitting within a 47-acre property punctuated with 14 buildings, including an underground art collection mounted on a giant Rolodex made of carpeted walls, a concrete pavilion next to a pond once sprayed by a fountain that blew water more than a hundred feet into the air, and a studio inspired by Frank Gehry. An early Donald Judd piece--a round beveled circle of concrete--welcomes visitors walking toward the house, while an enormous horizontal, painted bronzed tree trunk by Julian Schnabel leads the eye toward a sculpture collection housed in a multilevel gallery inspired by the villages of Greacian islands.
The Johnson property is a complex of buildings and sculptures sited in a landscape that was pruned, shaped, reshaped, and groomed during five decades into a calculated series of set pieces as carefully wrought as any of the great English estates. Think Stourhead in England, its gardens and follies initially designed by Henry Hoare in 1741 and finally finished in 1780.
Neighborhood protocols prevent the Johnson property from hosting visitors after dark, much less scholars in residence. But if ever a landscape demanded consideration over time--through all the hours of the day and seasons, this is it. The melding of art, architecture and topography appears at first to be seamless, and it takes patience and time to understand how human cognition could integrate itself so thoroughly into landscape.
Next: The Canary Project
I’ve always thought of the Philip Johnson Glass House, designed by one of the founding fathers of modernism, as a single transparent structure hovering on the edge of a perfect lawn in New Canaan, that swanky Connecticut town where Cary Grant attempted to build his own arcadia in the 1948 movie Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House. (The actual house constructed for the film is now the park office for Malibu State Park north of Los Angeles, but that’s another story.) That’s not an incorrect impression, as this classic and oft-reproduced photo shows, but as Dorothy Dunn (CA+E Advisor and Director of Visitor Experience for the property) points out, it’s a much more complex place than simply an iconic dwelling.
When David Walker, Ann Wolfe and I visited what is now a structure owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we found it sitting within a 47-acre property punctuated with 14 buildings, including an underground art collection mounted on a giant Rolodex made of carpeted walls, a concrete pavilion next to a pond once sprayed by a fountain that blew water more than a hundred feet into the air, and a studio inspired by Frank Gehry. An early Donald Judd piece--a round beveled circle of concrete--welcomes visitors walking toward the house, while an enormous horizontal, painted bronzed tree trunk by Julian Schnabel leads the eye toward a sculpture collection housed in a multilevel gallery inspired by the villages of Greacian islands.
The Johnson property is a complex of buildings and sculptures sited in a landscape that was pruned, shaped, reshaped, and groomed during five decades into a calculated series of set pieces as carefully wrought as any of the great English estates. Think Stourhead in England, its gardens and follies initially designed by Henry Hoare in 1741 and finally finished in 1780.
Neighborhood protocols prevent the Johnson property from hosting visitors after dark, much less scholars in residence. But if ever a landscape demanded consideration over time--through all the hours of the day and seasons, this is it. The melding of art, architecture and topography appears at first to be seamless, and it takes patience and time to understand how human cognition could integrate itself so thoroughly into landscape.
Next: The Canary Project
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