The simplicity of Mies van der Rohe's classic furniture provides a certain sense of serenity, as though the human hand dared not impose too heavily on the landscape. An area rug placed atop the brick floor draws the setting together. The tabletop items remain in the places that Johnson divined for them.
:Philip Johnson's Glass House is more than the epitome of International Style and more than a temple of Modernism. The Glass House, as the architect's estate is known, is a modernist experience with a capital "E," one that reawakens an appreciation for the major architectural, art and design movements of the second half of the Twentieth Century.
During Johnson's lifetime (1906–2005), the only way to view the Glass House, its counterpart, the Brick House, and the other visionary structures on Johnson's 47-acre estate, was to be an invited guest.
The majority of connoisseurs had to be content with Johnson's commercial ventures. Fortunately, they stretch across the United States like diadems of glass and steel. Among his International Style and post-Modernist buildings are California's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum, the IDS Center in Minneapolis, New York City's AT&T building (now Sony Plaza), the Lipstick Building and Lincoln Center's New York State Theater.
For foodies with aesthetic leanings, there was also the option of dining in the Johnson-designed Four Seasons Restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building in New York City, a construction on which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Johnson collaborated. A glorious double header for sure, but still a far cry from New Canaan where Johnson was his own client and played with form without having to adhere to the restrictions of a commission.
To visit the Glass House in its heyday was not only to see architectural projects that changed the way America worked and lived, but also to mingle with the creative giants and trendsetters of the times. Mies van der Rohe, Alfred Barr, Lincoln Kirstein, A.M. Stern, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and David Grainger Whitney — Johnson's life- and creative partner — were as much a part of the landscape of the Glass House as the ancient stone walls and manicured forests that the 1949 structure looks out on.
Philip Johnson's 1949 Glass House gleams like a national treasure.
Upon Johnson's death, the property came under the stewardship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. On April 30, the past transitioned into the future as the Glass House opened to the public. Access is limited to groups of ten escorted by a docent — one group on the property at a time. It is a strategy that offers intimacy and the feeling of going one-on-one with Johnson's immense creativity and obvious love of art.
"We have tried to leverage the physical with the cultural and historical," Christy MacLear, director of the Philip Johnson Glass House, explained.
In addition to choreographing as personalized a Glass House experience as possible, MacLear's multipronged strategy initiates the New Canaan Modern Home Survey, part of an overall program called "Preserve the Modern" that could lead to landmark status for some of the homes. Glass House Fellowships for young designers will be launched in 2008-2009. It is all part of an effort to bring new understanding to Modernism because, MacLear said, paraphrasing Johnson, "You cannot know the future without first knowing the past."
