Glass House
Interesting facts
- Johnson said the idea came from a burned-out wooden village he once saw, where nothing remained but brick foundations and chimneys.
- The landscape was shaped to echo a 17th-century painting, The Funeral of Phocion from the school of Poussin, which hangs inside the house.
- The underground Painting Gallery displays large canvases on three revolving racks of panels, including an eight-foot Warhol portrait that repeats Johnson's face nine times.
- The Ghost House is a frame of chain-link fencing built on the foundations of an old barn, with lilies planted inside, inspired by Frank Gehry.
- Da Monsta was built without a single right angle; Johnson first called its model Dresden Zwei and presented it to his friend Frank Stella.
- Near Da Monsta stands an entrance gate about six metres tall, fashioned from the boom of a sailboat.
- The house caused such a stir that a police officer was once posted nearby to keep trespassers out.
- For decades Yale architecture students treated sneaking onto the estate as a rite of passage, lasting until David Whitney found them and sent them away.
- Johnson called several buildings his follies because their size or shape made them unusable, such as the low-ceilinged Pavilion on the Pond.
- The estate began as an 11-acre plot; after Johnson's death the National Trust bought neighbouring land and enlarged it to about 200 acres.
Why it is worth it
Philip Johnson's Glass House is a single room with no walls in the usual sense: a rectangle of charcoal-painted steel and plate glass, about 17 metres long and 10 wide, standing on a grassy crest above a pond in New Canaan, Connecticut. Kitchen, dining and sleeping areas share one open space, divided only by low walnut cabinets, and the only element that rises from floor to ceiling is a brick cylinder holding the bathroom and fireplace. Johnson liked to say the landscape outside was his very expensive wallpaper. Built in 1948–49 as his weekend retreat, it became his signature work and was once counted among the most famous houses in the United States.
The house grew directly out of Johnson's admiration for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As a curator at the Museum of Modern Art he had exhibited the model of Mies's Farnsworth House in 1947, and his own glass box, finished two years before the Farnsworth House, was universally seen as derived from it; Mies is said to have walked out in irritation when he saw it. It also draws on the German "glass architecture" ideas of the 1920s. Facing it across the lawn is the Brick House, the guest house designed alongside it, so that transparency and enclosure answer each other.
Johnson lived on the estate for 58 years, 45 of them with his partner David Whitney, a curator who shaped both the landscape and the art collection. Over the decades Johnson added some 14 structures that trace his whole career: a pavilion on the pond (1962), an underground Painting Gallery (1965) with an entrance modelled on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, a Sculpture Gallery (1970), a study, the chain-link Ghost House, the Kirstein Tower and the red-and-black "Da Monsta" (1995). The grounds were composed with care around views over the valley of the Rippowam River. Johnson died in the house in 2005, aged 98, and left the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation; it is a National Historic Landmark and opened to the public in 2007.
Getting there
The Glass House stands on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut, close to the boundary with Stamford; North Stamford is about 1 km away. The nearest airport is Westchester County Airport (HPN), about 17 km away. New Canaan has a station on the Metro-North rail line.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Glass House is a historic house museum on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut. It was built in 1948–49 by the architect Philip Johnson, who designed the home as his weekend retreat. The New York Times has called the home his "signature work".
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