EGN NEWS DESK
The architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House, an oblong glass-and-steel residence set on a grassy shelf above a wooded bluff in New Canaan, Conn., has epitomized a sure East Coast excellent of midcentury magnificence since its completion in 1949. Before turning into an architect at age 37, Johnson ran the structure division at MoMA, and the spare, luminous constructing, which he inhabited for over half a century, embodies the Modernist International Style that he helped outline in a landmark exhibition on the museum in 1932. The dwelling additionally established Johnson himself because the paragon of a selected sort of New York architect: erudite, absolutist in his refinement and formidable in his affect wielding, shaping careers, establishments and public opinion like few others in his discipline.
But for the reason that National Trust of Historic Preservation opened the Glass House to the general public as a museum in 2007, guests have found there’s extra to the place than its namesake centerpiece. By the time Johnson died in 2005, the 5 acres he’d purchased in 1946 had grown tenfold to embody 14 buildings, together with experimental follies, a subterranean portray gallery and three wood houses from earlier durations, together with a shingled 18th-century dwelling that Johnson and his accomplice, the curator David Whitney, would use as a refuge in sizzling climate. For the previous 15 years, nonetheless, a pivotal a part of the property has remained semi-concealed: Johnson’s guesthouse, often called the Brick House and located simply 80 ft from the positioning’s most important attraction, has been closed to the general public due to water harm. Now, after an in depth restoration and in time for the Glass House’s seventy fifth anniversary, the constructing has lastly been unveiled.
Johnson thought of the 1,728-square-foot Glass House and its 860-square-foot brick companion, which was constructed on the identical time, two components of a single dwelling — one alluringly crystalline, the opposite introverted and opaque. He wrapped the smaller constructing totally in iron-spotted pink brick and positioned it dealing with the primary home at a slight angle, with a gravel pathway crossing the courtyard between them. The buildings are additionally linked under floor: Along with a bed room, examine, storage room and loo, the Brick House incorporates the unpleasant mechanical tools that provides the Glass House with electrical energy and warmth, enabling the bigger constructing to take care of its aesthetic purity. Tellingly, Johnson positioned the Brick House’s solely home windows — three large mahogany-framed portholes — on the constructing’s again facet, dealing with away from his glass retreat. “I didn’t see why the friends ought to have a window searching towards my home,” he stated in an unpublished 1991 interview for the National Trust. “They can look their very own approach out to the hill.” But he and Whitney additionally typically slept within the constructing once they didn’t have guests.
The Brick House is stern, squat and stable, its entrance interrupted solely by a tall, centered black pinewood door. Even Johnson admitted it wasn’t a lot to have a look at, calling it “completely plain.” But if the outside is unassuming, Johnson created an surprising panorama of coloration, texture and fantastical element inside. At one finish of the intense entrance corridor, which runs parallel to the entrance of the home, a door provides method to the constructing’s showpiece: a dim, sand-hued bed room that’s directly monastic, womblike and glamorous. Johnson — who by no means shied away from, as he put it within the 1991 interview, “intentionally copying no matter I felt like” — modeled it after a domed parlor within the early Nineteenth-century London dwelling of the English architect John Soane. Soane described the layered design of that room as “a succession of fanciful results,’’ and Johnson deployed his personal sequence of intelligent tips. First, he constructed an off-white plaster pavilion contained in the 10-by-26-foot room. A row of vaults appear to be supported by 14 superslim columns however are, in truth, suspended from the ceiling and provides the room the sheltered high quality of a cloister.
To heighten the sense of intimacy — “This was a bed room; why not get cuddly?” Johnson stated — the partitions are hidden behind panels clad in cotton from the Venice-based textile home Fortuny with a pink, aquamarine and gold feather motif. (One of a number of donations made throughout the restoration by the producers Johnson labored with, the material was replicated by Fortuny to interchange the unique, which had darkened with age.) Johnson’s third fanciful concept, developed with the lighting designer Richard Kelly, was to tuck lights between the ceiling and the cover, producing an oblique glow that accentuates the one paintings within the room, a gridlike summary metallic sculpture by the Jewish Egyptian-born artist Ibram Lassaw that hangs above a low, spartan mattress. (Johnson hated headboards.) A luxurious champagne-colored carpet completes the enveloping impact.
With the voluptuous, theatrical bed room — a part of a 1953 redesign of the Brick House inside — Johnson broke with the purist tenets and inflexible strains of his mentor, the German-born Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose personal glass-encased construction, Farnsworth House, impressed the Glass House. (Located in Plano, Ill., and accomplished in 1951, Farnsworth House was designed earlier than however constructed after Johnson’s challenge.) Famously prolific and stylistically fickle, Johnson used the Brick House to check out concepts he might revisit in different commissions. The bed room’s Fortuny material reappeared in his inside for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, accomplished in 1958, and the cover’s arches had been the seed of his classicist infatuation, which culminated on the Beck House, an opulent personal dwelling in Dallas completed in 1964. Johnson’s liberal historic referencing on his personal property — he additionally included nods to the Baroque and Romantic durations — anticipated his embrace of postmodernism within the Seventies and ’80s in tasks such because the AT&T Building in Manhattan, the place he reprised the Brick House’s round home windows.
The remainder of the Brick House’s inside can’t compete with the bed room’s atmospheric energy. The adjoining examine has been restored to a Eighties iteration with gleeful blue-and-pastel pink cotton-upholstered wool Feltri chairs by Gaetano Pesce, a dense purple carpet and a piece of Johnson’s library that confirms his troubling fascination with Fascism — he overtly admired Hitler’s regime earlier than publicly distancing himself from Nazism in 1940. The skylit rest room subsequent door, with its Greek frieze, black marble partitions and ground and polished brass fixtures, borders on camp. And the doorway corridor is straightforward — a gallery-like area at the moment dwelling to Johnson and Whitney’s prized set of etchings by the painter Brice Marden. (Over the years, Johnson donated a few of the artworks he stored within the constructing, together with a Paul Klee drawing that he purchased from the painter in 1929 for $75, to MoMA; others had been bought after his and Whitney’s deaths, which occurred simply 5 months aside in 2005.)
In designing the Brick House bed room, “Johnson wished to point out how fashionable structure could possibly be heat, and never simply sensual however horny,” says the structure critic Paul Goldberger, 73, the chair of the Glass House’s advisory council. The room’s reopening will certainly encourage theorizing about what function the sensuality served. Some students have seen the constructing as a queer area, decoding the interiors’ seductive artifice because the work of a homosexual man who was closeted for a lot of his life. But whereas the restored Brick House would possibly symbolize Johnson’s compartmentalized identification, it additionally sheds gentle on a elementary paradox of his masterpiece. A separate personal area was mandatory not simply to behave out wants that society couldn’t settle for but in addition as a result of a pristine glass temple wasn’t all the time conducive to introspection or leisure. The Brick House each completes an iconic American dwelling and reminds guests of its creator’s humanity: Even a grasp of spectacle generally simply wished to cover.
