A Composition of Contradictions - The Glass House

If I wanted to describe Philip Johnson’s Glass House, I would start out describing the well-known image of how it is set free and transparent in front of a backdrop of large trees, but would find myself talking about its dependence and ties with its neighbors and barriers to this landscape. Or I would indicate the minimal furniture set in the liberated open interior, but would end up admitting their fixed position to enable the habitation of the house. Or I could describe the essential, almost universal, simplicity of the glass box, but would be led to talk of how it is tailored to the person of Philip Johnson as both its designer and resident. It is clear after this enumeration that this hailed monument of Modernist architecture has risen out of contrasts and counter-movements and is, perhaps, not this pristine object we all imagine it to be, but rather a composition of contradictions.

The entrance of the Glass House compound is set as a careful scene, with Johnson as the stage master, deciding what is to be revealed and what not. It grew as a personal autobiography where Johnson added his latest folly when a new aesthetic had seized him. You first encounter two of Johnson’s later contraptions: ‘Da Monsta’, a sculptural estranging force as gatekeeper, and a tiny library set in the middle of the slightly sloping meadow. However, the winding entry road bypasses the library and leads you through an evergreen thicket of trees to arrive at your first encounter with the Glass House: its gray asphalt parking lot, lined by a rocky wall obscuring most of the house. It is clear that the rocky wall – which was raised from former small walls that delimited the old fields – is compensating for the openness of the house to conceal the cars. One wonders why these cars, as an unwanted part of the composition, were not left somewhere beyond the evergreen trees at the street. But it seemed as if Philip Johnson was reluctant to create something so immaterial as a house of glass and had a need to compensate both its shortcomings in enclosure and lack of mass as reflected in the rocky wall and the brick guesthouse. The Brick House marks the other end of the parking lot and creates a massive counterform for the Glass House since their simultaneous construction in 1949, and provides yet another aspect that the rigorous aesthetic principles of the Glass House apparently prevented: a space for its heating. Its long façade faces the Glass House and is equal in length and composition with a door right in the middle, except that a blind brick wall here replaces the abundant glass. In stark contrast with this massive bunker, you suddenly find yourself facing the Glass House. Where you expected an intangible structure, hardly intruding in the landscape, you encounter the heavy black metal columns and cornice, firmly set on the ground with a brick base. These heavy elements underline the strongest contrasts with Johnson’s inspiration of the transparent glass Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. Even though you do not localize it at a first glance, you feel an undercurrent of something held back, this is not a free, light object of crystallized transparency that has gently landed here, but is inseparably part of a larger composition bound to earth. This is not just because of the literal technical and proportional association with its brick counterpart, but even more because of its setting on an unnatural horizontal plane in the landscape. Contrary to the implantation of his later works in the compound, where Johnson used the rolling fields to insert his architectural experiments – placing the library on a small hill or disguising the painting gallery as a grass tumulus – he flattened the slope to a completely horizontal lookout, delimited by a fine white border that, contrary to the house, does distance itself a few inches above the ground. This on the one hand creates a useful space around the house, but unfortunately also sets it apart from the landscape of the valley of the North Stamford Reservoir. Because of its dependence on the larger arrangement, the Glass House is not the free exposed observation post it could have been in this extraordinary setting. The clutter of other structures, walls, the white border, etc. prevent it to become the true crystallized free object it should have been.

When you pass the transparent door and enter the interior, the austere simplicity of the idea for the house – replacing all walls by the largest glass panes possible – makes it a unique vantage point on the valley right in front of you. However, Johnson’s obsession with the aesthetics of his architecture makes him give precedence to his exterior shell in which later habitation has to find its place. Since the glass does not replace the wall, but the landscape becomes – as Johnson put it – the wallpaper, the filtering function of the wall had to be on the one hand extroverted – the Brick House, the rocky wall, etc. – but also interiorized to the furniture that, rather than being free in the completely open space becomes a fixed answer to the surroundings. Despite the perfect symmetry accomplished in the exterior façades, the interior is not liberated of answering to the orientations of the landscape, to this painting instead of uniform wallpaper. This leads to a similar ambiguity as before, all the liberating achievements of the simple exterior shell have stronger restrictive repercussions imprisoning the occupants in a highly demanding bare box. As for the outside, Johnson also anchors his interior strongly to the soil trough the massive brick floor, hinting at the kinship with the Brick House, but also bringing in an unexpected kind of geometric decoration that he would fully embrace in his later work, especially in the interior of the NYU Bobst Library in Manhattan. The earth colors of the brick together with the black frame form a counterforce to the openness and are anchored at the circular bath cell, which is the only element reaching from the floor to the ceiling and bringing with its hearth a strange element of homeliness to this hard interior. It is in these elements that we can truly find Philip Johnson’s strong personal grip on the design, as both architect and future resident, who tailored the house to his personal needs, bringing extra ambiguity to the minimal ideals of its conception. And this is perhaps the only justification to call the glass pavilion a house, or as Frank Stella expressed it:

“Philip Lived here, and it’s livable, it’s just not livable for everybody.”

However, after some time this open structure of his weekend house became even too demanding for him and later he moved his bedroom to the brick guesthouse.

Today, after the demise of the only man who could live there, the house is left as an empty shell in the very ambiguous company of Johnson’s later follies. When you go there now the spell is broken and this dream and image of free and open architecture is held back by the strong imprint of Johnson’s ego with almighty formal control, but sadly he resolved all newly created architectural challenges of the new form, outside of the shell inflicting its surroundings and interior.

Thomas Willemse

April 2013