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Diptych, dyad, dialectic: The relationship between the primary pair of buildings Philip Johnson designed for his property in New Canaan, Conn., has taxed the metaphorical imaginations of critics and architectural historians for the reason that buildings have been accomplished, simply months aside, in 1949.
On one aspect, the Glass House, clear and completely self-possessed, a piece of modernist daring framed in metal and impressed, as Johnson was solely too completely happy to confess, by the designs of his hero, the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. On the opposite, the Brick House, typically known as the Guest House, hiding behind its inscrutable exterior the bed room Johnson known as his “intercourse room,” in addition to the mechanical gear serving its extra glamorous relative 105 toes away.
Point, counterpoint. You might write a guide concerning the Freudian relationship between the 2 buildings, linked by a tunnel carrying water and energy — a connection Johnson known as the “umbilical wire.” And actually someone has: Adele Tutter, affiliate medical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, whose 2016 research “Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House” observes that the architect, totally uncovered “in his clear home, however remained ever-connected to a supply of heat and sustenance, hidden behind a forbidding and impenetrable facade, in a home of earthen brick.”
Yet since 2008 guests to the New Canaan compound the place Johnson lived together with his longtime associate, the collector and curator David Whitney, earlier than donating it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, have arrived to search out the Brick House shut up tight.
Its deliberate restoration, to handle longstanding leaks and water injury, languished at the same time as different buildings by Johnson on the rolling 49-acre campus, together with the 1970 Sculpture Gallery, obtained their very own updates. In its center age as in its youth, the Brick House stood mutely by, its toes brushed by a highlight on the Glass House that by no means totally turned its means.
Until now, that’s: To mark the seventy fifth anniversary of those unique buildings, the Brick House, its restoration lastly full, will open for public excursions starting May 2. The $1.8 million effort has faithfully preserved the construction because it appeared in 1953, when the ever-impatient Johnson totally redesigned its 960-square-foot inside. It was a makeover that hinted at Johnson’s flip, through the decade that adopted, away from Miesian rigor and towards decoration and freewheeling historic citation. In the bed room, the place in a single day visitors would later embrace Andy Warhol, he added wall panels of Fortuny cotton in addition to slender columns and a vaulted ceiling impressed partially by the breakfast room of the architect John Soane’s home in London.
According to Mark Lamster, the structure critic for The Dallas Morning News and creator of a 2018 biography of Johnson, “The Man within the Glass House,” “You might make an argument that that is actually one of many first works of postmodernism.”
Compared to the supreme rationalism of the Glass House, Lamster stated, “The Brick House is an apostasy on the inside, with the columns that don’t really maintain up something, and naturally the unimaginable glamour of it, with these golden Fortuny partitions and the dimmer lighting. There was no such factor as a bed room with dimmer lighting earlier than then!”
On a wet morning final month, a small crew from Hobbs, Inc., the contractor, was ending element work in its bed room in preparation for returning Ibram Lassaw’s welded bronze and metal sculpture “Clouds of Magellan” to its acquainted place above the mattress. The bed room’s spherical, porthole-like home windows, on a aspect of the constructing not seen from the Glass House, had been rehung and lined with a protecting UV movie. Down the corridor, Johnson’s small private library, with its purple carpeting, was almost prepared for the books to be reshelved. Work within the tiny however luxurious rest room, a cocoon of black and white marble, was completed.
Unlike the Glass House, which occupies a first-rate website on the fringe of a bluff, Johnson situated the Brick House “on the backside of a hill, which, you recognize, any architect or civil engineer will let you know isn’t the most effective thought,” stated Mark Stoner, who oversaw the restoration because the National Trust’s senior director of preservation structure, constructing on earlier work by the New York agency Li · Saltzman Architects. “Between the water arising from the bottom and down from the roof, the constructing was in such poor situation, and sufficient mildew progress had set in, that it was not a wholesome place to be.”
The reopening returns a sure architectural equilibrium to Johnson’s property. The unique paired buildings, stated Kirsten Reoch, who was named govt director of the Glass House campus final summer season, “are two elements of a complete. Neither was conceived with out the opposite. So the concept we’ve been displaying and decoding half the story, it form of blows your thoughts.”
The seventy fifth anniversary comes at a second, rising from the Covid-19 pandemic and protests following the homicide of George Floyd, when many cultural establishments are re-examining their very own histories with new candor. The Glass House is not any completely different. Bringing guests again to the Brick House, with its resolute insistence on privateness, is a chance to discover the connection of its structure to Johnson’s homosexuality, which by skilled necessity he saved largely hidden within the Nineteen Forties and Fifties.
As he grew older, he dropped among the pretense. Leading an on-camera tour for the 1997 documentary “Diary of an Eccentric Architect,” Johnson smiles as he enters the luxurious bed room. “It’s meant to be an attractive place,” he says. “Against this contemporary world, it’s speculated to be a room that invitations you to romance.”
He provides, “This was an ideal breakthrough for me, to thumb my nostril at my mentor, Mies van der Rohe, and to say that issues ought to be hotter and toastier and sexier than they’re in fashionable, square-beamed structure.”
Among the occasions deliberate by the Glass House this spring is a dialogue on May 5, that includes the architectural historians Alice Friedman and Timothy Rohan, on “the cultural significance and queer social historical past of the just lately restored Brick House.” According to Reoch, the Glass House is searching for to amend its itemizing on the National Register of Historic Places to incorporate L.G.B.T.Q. historical past as an space of significance.
Then there may be the query of Johnson’s politics. Scholars in recent times have devoted rising consideration to Johnson’s embrace of Fascism, which started within the Thirties after he left a curatorial submit on the Museum of Modern Art and finally noticed him accompany Nazi troops as they invaded Poland in 1939. The flimsy pretext for the journey was Johnson’s function as a correspondent for publications together with the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin’s infamously antisemitic journal, Social Justice.
Lamster’s guide contains alternatives from a letter Johnson wrote in 1939 to his good friend Viola Bodenschatz, whose husband’s brother, a German basic, was chief of employees to Hermann Göring. “The German inexperienced uniforms made the place look homosexual and completely happy,” Johnson wrote to Bodenschatz. “There weren’t many Jews to be seen. We noticed Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”
It isn’t that this historical past was unknown through the top of Johnson’s affect. In 1988, the critic Michael Sorkin known as out Johnson’s wartime actions immediately in an essay for Spy. But the architectural institution, pretty shortly, totally welcomed Johnson again into the fold. In the ultimate a long time of the architect’s life — he died in 2005, at 98 — it was typical to listen to of his “flirtation with Fascism,” as if it have been little greater than a youthful indiscretion.
“He spent greater than a decade deeply invested in Fascist politics,” Lamster stated. “I consider that historical past is important to understanding who he was.”
There stays some disagreement about whether or not these politics are mirrored within the design of the Glass House itself. While Johnson’s Fascist interval, based on the structure critic Paul Goldberger, chairman of the Glass House Advisory Council, “was longer and deeper than beforehand had been acknowledged, it’s additionally a interval that I believe had fairly emphatically come to an finish by the point he constructed the Glass House.”
Other students level to an essay Johnson himself wrote for the Architectural Review, in 1950, during which he famous that the brick cylinder that holds the Glass House’s fire and toilet, the design’s main vertical factor, was “not derived from Mies, however relatively from a burned-out wood village I noticed as soon as the place nothing was left however the foundations and chimneys of brick.” This is broadly understood to be a reference to one of many Polish cities he’d seen in ruins in 1939.
Reoch, the Glass House govt director, stated she deliberate to rent a devoted historian for Glass House packages, partially to probe Johnson’s politics extra totally.
There are certainly home museums the place a sustained deal with ideology and sexuality may qualify as a distraction — extraneous to the core mission of the location. This is hardly the case on the Glass House. By his personal admission, Johnson was extra expert as an influence dealer and packager of his personal legend than as a designer. He used structure constantly to propel bigger ambitions, not least political ones.
Reoch and the remainder of the Glass House management, as they work to discover Johnson’s political allegiances, benefit from collaborating with the National Trust, which has in depth expertise in framing fraught conversations about architectural and cultural historical past, together with at quite a few websites of enslavement.
“Part of the issue that we now have all the time encountered in public historical past and museums is that we are inclined to historically interpret issues from a really monolithic lens, both deifying an individual or demonizing an individual, with no steadiness, no center floor,” stated Omar Eaton-Martínez, senior vice chairman for Historic Sites on the National Trust. He steered the Glass House and Brick House, taken collectively, type an excellent backdrop for exploring the grey areas of Johnson’s life and profession.
It’s definitely true that the extra you look at the 2 buildings, the extra you understand that — removed from working as excellent opposites — their relationship is fluid, with the sensibility of every construction creeping into and shaping its sibling. The Glass House has a basis of brick, to go together with its chimney, and appears to develop from that materials; the Brick House, from the reflective sheen of its iron-flecked bricks to its luxe inside, is an effective deal much less utilitarian, and extra liable to its personal form of self-importance, than it appears to be like at first.
The Glass House is a present horse, the Brick House a workhorse. Of course! Except when the reverse is true.
The Glass House seventy fifth Anniversary
The Glass House opens for its seventy fifth anniversary season April 15-Dec. 15. Visits to the restored Brick House start May 2; 199 Elm Street, New Canaan, Conn.; theglasshouse.org, (203) 594-9884.
