Another Reason to Save My Money

Photos courtesy of the Glass House

I’ve been on the board of the AIGA/NY (American Institute of Graphic Arts) for the past two years. My tenure ended this June, and as a sort of thank you, the board members were treated to a tour of the Glass House, the famous Philip Johnson structure in New Canaan. The tour is sold out through 2008, so it was an especially nice treat.

New Canaan is a short 90 minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It’s an affluent, sleepy town with equal measures of large McMansions and quaint farmhouses. Philip Johnson (a practicing architect and MoMa’s first architecture curator) began buying property in New Canaan in the 1940s, and built the Glass House in 1949. It was the first glass house to be built in the United States, with Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House being the second. It is, as the name suggests, a house made of glass. I felt initially a little underwhelmed by the house itself, mostly because by now, we’re so used to the open plan, and also to the notion of glass being used as structural elements of a house. But keep in mind, this was pretty radical in the 1940s. And besides, the house and its furnishings are as relevant and stylish now as it was back then. Everything in the house is beautifully composed and thoughtfully selected: from the furniture (mostly from Johnson’s friend Mies van der Rohe) to the pastoral painting by the classical painter Poussin, the house is pretty much the same as it was when Johnson first built it in 1949. 

Painting Gallery

What’s mostly impressive however, is the collection of other buildings he built around the Glass House on the property (now up to 47 acres). Across the Glass House, not 100 feet away, is the Brick House so named because the facade is completely made of brick. The front of this structure has no windows, so it feels a little claustrophobic from the outside, but we were told (closed to visitors for now) that the skylights on the roof and the three windows in the back, do fill the house with natural light. It’s a stark contrast to the completely transparent Glass House. Johnson also built a painting gallery just a stones throw from the Glass House to house the paintings he and his partner, David Whitney collected. The entrance to the gallery is pretty stunning—it’s carved out of the side of a hill. The coolest feature of this space is not the art (filled at the moment with Frank Stella’s work), but the rotating spindle system that Johnson created so he could fit a lot of big pieces in such a small space. Imagine three humongous rolodexes flipped on its side, with 7 cards on each rolodex, with a painting hung on the front and back of each card. He would “flip” each rack to the desired painting and then contemplate.

Sculpture Gallery

Past the painting gallery is another structure to house the sculpture which looks like an unobtrusive whitewashed barn from the outside. Inside, it reminds me of a miniature Greek seaside town on a hill, the ones with the winding staircases. Completely open, with art that makes you feel a little like you’re Alice in Wonderland (ie bigger than reality), this was the building that made me want to move in. I read on the visitor postcards (which I’m using to jog my memory to write this post) that Johnson liked this building so much that he almost moved in.

Library Study

There are 9 more structure on the property. The last one I’ll mention is the Library Study. It’s a tiny structure that’s about a one minute walk from the Glass House. Someone on the tour mentioned that Johnson was really taken with the idea of separating different functions of the house into different buildings. Some of us thought that sounded inconvenient, but when I thought more about it, there’s a certain poetry to it. I can imagine that the walk through the crisp air from the Glass House to the Library would help me refocus my intention to the activity in the room I’m about to walk into—it would give my actions a sense of purpose that I might not have if the library were across the hall from the living room.

Johnson used to work at the Glass House and it makes me wonder how much the beauty of that place (which he created) fed into the work he made while surrounded by all that beauty.

It makes me long for a house of my own.