Already having made a name for himself as a historian and critic at New York’s Museum of Modern Art starting in 1932, Philip Johnson enrolled to train as an architect at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1941. While in Cambridge, he designed a small house for himself in the manner of his teacher Marcel Breuer, but after graduation and a brief return to New York, he set his sights on a five acre property in New Canaan CT in 1946. The design process for the Glass House began in 1947, moving through a number of studies and iterations, some contradictory to the myth that a Miesian idiom was the inevitable end for Johnson, Mies’ most devout and vocal follower (Stern 1977). The final design, however, was undoubtedly a personal elaboration on the steel and glass manner of Mies; particularly responsive to the Farnsworth House in Plano IL, whose design had begun a year before. Beyond Mies, Johnson cited a diverse array of historical sources which informed the design, touching on the influence of Schinkel, Ledoux, Malevich, and The Athenian Acropolis in a 1950 article for the British Publication Architectural Review (Johnson). The Glass House culminated years of international progress towards reduced masses and refined technical details, an intensified expression of the modern principles which Johnson had observed in his 1932 publication The International Style. Johnson continued to design and build on the wooded grounds throughout his life, expanding the ensemble of his original Glass and Brick Houses to include satellite galleries and pavilions, reflective of changing contemporary and historical interests across the decades of his career. 

A sand filled base intended to display a work of sculpture, originally the third major element in relation to the Glass and Brick Houses, was replaced by a circular inground pool in 1955. 

A concrete Lake Pavilion, with sculpted arch forms later developed for Johnson’s Sheldon Museum and Beck House, was constructed in 1962.

A subterranean Painting Gallery was added to the grounds in 1965, followed by a brick and glass Sculpture Gallery in 1970.

A reinforced concrete study was constructed in 1980.

A sculptural ferrocement pavilion dubbed “Da Monsta” was constructed in 1995.

Johnson willed the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1986, and upon his death in 2005, the Trust began a sequence of restoration projects. Among these efforts were the 2008 repairs to the Glass House’s steel frame, replacement of its glass panes, and implementation of measures to prevent future sources of water infiltration and corrosion. In 2015 the skylight system of the sculpture gallery was repaired following years of water infiltration. In 2017 the plaster ceiling of the Glass House was replaced. A comprehensive restoration of the Brick House began in 2022 under the leadership of preservation architect Mark Stoner, when complete the Brick House will be open to the public for the first time since 2008.

Under the ownership of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Glass House grounds are operated as a public museum and gallery space.

With recent renovations and ongoing caretaking, the Glass House is in excellent condition and the Brick House is set to open in April of 2024. The pond pavilion is in a state of advanced disrepair, with its instability prohibiting occupancy. Although the sculpture gallery underwent recent repairs, the steps inside do not meet code requirements, barring occupancy.

The Glass House is integrally related to its environment, owing to its ample transparency and dynamic siting. Rising from the edge of a wooded plateau, the house sits in active contrast with the adjacent Brick House, offset in their alignment and connected by a diagonal gravel path across a manicured lawn. The structure measures 56′ x 32′, sitting atop a Flemish bond plinth stacked four courses high, with a herringbone brick floor laid over top. Six black painted H-beams spaced evenly along the building’s length carry the roof 10′ 6″ high. The corner beams are oriented with their webs open to the north and south, forming recessed channels on the shorter faces of the building. The outfacing flanges are flush with steel channel fascias concealing the timber joists and wooden decking of the roof. The ceiling is plaster on metal lath.

A brick drum, 10′ in diameter and laid in a header bond, is situated in the house’s northeast corner and pierces through the roof on the exterior. The greater volume of the tower contains a bathroom, faced with green ceramic tile on its walls and floor, and square leather patches on its ceiling. A curving excise in the drum’s southwest perimeter forms a fireplace, opposite the bathroom entry. The Glass House’s furniture was deliberately curated and carefully arranged within the open space, forming an inseparable part of the total design which changed little over Johnson’s life. The heart of the interior is a living space, outlined by a white wool rug and populated by two Mies designed Barcelona Chairs, an ottoman, daybed, and table. A sleeping space with a bed and desk is separated to the north by a row of walnut cabinets and an easel carrying a Nicolas Poussin painting. The cooking space is arranged along a simple bar in the southeast corner of the house, opposite a wooden dining table with four Brno Chairs in the southwest. Doors are arranged axially, with one on each side.

Interior uplight cans provide immediate illumination within the house, supplemented by roof mounted floodlights targeting the surrounding yard, accent lights illuminating distant trees, and trench concealed floodlights targeted inward to reflect off the ceiling. 

The Brick House measures the same length but half the width of the Glass House. Its Flemish bond brick walls are featureless apart from black metal coping along the roofline, a black wooden door and granite step centered on the western facade, and three porthole windows along the east. Beyond an entry corridor with flanking storage and bath spaces, a bedroom occupies the eastern length of the building. Remodeled in 1953, the bedroom’s plaster vaulted canopy and cotton draperies of pink and gold are among the earliest products of Johnson’s nascent romantic period. A 1953 brazen metal sculpture by Ibram Lassaw hangs above the bed.   

The Glass House is steel framed with a wooden roof structure and single pane glass. The Brick House is of load bearing brick construction  

Name of surrounding area: New Canaan, Ct.

Type of area: Open fields, stone walls, and scattered clusters of trees. from the road along the ridge, the land gently slopes downward westerly toward a bluff, where it then descends steeply to a small pond and wooded area on the western ridge of the property.

Visual relation: Site provides full sunrise/sunset exposure

Other relations:

Brick House (1949) (1952 floor plan remodeled) one story 1000 square feet building of wood frame construction, measuring 18 feet by 52 feet built of Flemish Bond Brick with façade broken by single black painted door at west and three circular windows at the east, flat roof with sheet metal cornice: architect, Philip Johnson; builder, John C. Smith, New Canaan, Ct.

Pool (1955/6) circular concrete pool with rectangular platform and an element in the geometric composition of the site: architect and builder, E.W. Howell Co., Philip Johnson, owner and architect.

Lake Pavilion (1962) 32 feet square pre-cast concrete structure with open colonnades situated on man-made pond. Painting Gallery (1965) 60 feet by 72 feet earth berm construction in the shape of an asymmetrical four-leaf-clover, inspired by classical tomb: architect, Philip Johnson, builder, E.W. Howell Co.

Sculpture Gallery (1970) glass roofed gallery with complex, five star-like pattern of intersecting rectangles and triangles, pitched roofs made of semi-mirrored glass panes set in metal channels, five levels, inspired by Greek villages: architects, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, builder, Louis E. Lee Co., New Canaan, Ct.

Entrance Gates (1977) concrete and aluminum construction: architect, Philip Johnson, builder Louis E. Lee Co., New Canaan, Ct. Library/Study (1980) 15 feet by 20 feet reinforced concrete box in plan and 10 feet high with intersecting cylinder 12 feet in diameter, along roofline cone changes to 8 feet in height truncated cone tapering to 3 feet in diameter oculus: architects, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, builder, Louis E. Lee Co., New Canaan, Ct.

Ghost House (1984) open structure of chain-link fencing that refers to separate work of Frank Gehry and Venturi Scott Brown.Lincoln Kirstein Tower (1985) inspired by the choreography of George Balanchine and a tribute to friend and former classmate, Lincoln Kirstein: architect, Philip Johnson.

da Monsta (1995) 30 feet by 40 feet highly irregular shaped plan, corners forming acute angles and walls with curving dimensions, inspired by the architecture of Frank Stella: architect, Philip Johnson.

Three Vernacular Buildings on site:

Grainger (1735 farmhouse renovated ca. 1999) used as a retreat, graffiti window;

Calluna Farms (ca. 1890, remodeled 1980, renovated 2000) residence of David Whitney;

Popestead (completed as a barn in late 19th century then remodeled as a house in 1920’s and again by Johnson in 1996).Art Collection of Philip Johnson includes works by: John Chamberlain, Lynn Davis, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Ibram Lassaw, Andrew Lord, Brice Marden, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Stella, Julian Schnabel, George Segal, Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

The imagery of the Glass House suggests technological mastery of the natural world, but Johnson’s home is in greater cooperation with the environment, and at greater mercy of the elements, than its controlled and industrialized appearance implies. Reflecting on the house soon after its completion, Johnson suggested that, “The greatest architect… could shelter a space using no materials at all. Architecture without buildings . . . would be paradise” (Architectural Forum. Nov, 1949). Interest in the continuity of interior and exterior environments is a common thread across various traditions of global modernism, but the particular duality of control and harmony to which Johnson speaks is suggestive of the International Style’s hybrid focus on mechanical mastery and the crusade for “sun, space, and greenery”. 

Reyner Banham called the Glass House, “One of the masterpieces of smooth apparent simplicity and concealment,” with reference to the radiant heating systems embedded in the floor slab, roof, and walkways; but there is no comparable mechanical system for cooling in the uninsulated home (Banham 228). Instead, Johnson deliberately situated the structure beneath heavy foliage as a natural sunbreak, and ostensibly, the cliff-top siting produces a microclimate whose updraft from the pond provides a substantial crossdraft (Banham 231-232).    

Johnson’s radical design was not without detractors in the relatively conservative New Canaan community. A cultural conflict developed as the colonial bedroom community grew into a Mecca for East Coast modernism, with the proliferation of designs by the recently arrived Harvard Five: Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Elliot Noyes, John Johansen, and Landis Gores. An ensuing change in attitudes is evident in the commission of local modern firms to design nearby cultural, civic, and commercial buildings, notably the SMS Partnership’s 1959 St. Mark's Episcopal Church and 1961 Temple Sinai, as well as Victor Christ Janner’s 1957 Walter Stewart's Market and 1961 New Canaan High School. 

Regardless of stylistic differences, the wave of modern houses nonetheless consisted of country homes for the New York and New England elite, not all too different from the community into which they integrated. The Glass House stands out from local contemporaries in the extent to which Johnson pursued aesthetic and technical extremes, pushing beyond the tolerance expected of any client less committed to achieving Johnson’s absolute conception. His home is the purest realization of a personal design ethic which Vincent Scully labeled, “The most ruthlessly aristocratic, high studied taste of anyone practicing in America today” (Stern 1969, 42). Even in the transformative, unpredictable, and optimistic year of 1949 a receptive critic submitted that, “It is unlikely that glass houses will instantly multiply, yet the curiosity and wonder that have been aroused are enormous (Architectural Forum. Nov, 1949). 

A growing awareness of Johnson’s harmful and insensitive social views has caused a major reassessment of his place in history. His fascist ties and racist comments remind us, just as well, to reflect on the systems and professional biases which allowed him to flourish in high society. His public persona, that of a politically apathetic and quarrelsome aesthete, hinted at the intolerance beneath, but only since his death in 2005 has the full picture reached public light. Further complicating Johnson’s legacy is his stature as one of the most historically impactful design icons of American LGBT history. Arguably the most famous openly gay architect of the 20th century, the impact of his sexuality can be neither neglected, nor used to overlook his regressive politics. 

Johnson sacrificed certain practical, and conventionally humane, conditions at the Glass House to serve the total pursuit of his personal creative ends. The house, as a result, embodies a thread of contradictory rhetoric which surfaced throughout his career, contrasting moralistic concern with aesthetic absolutism. In the course of one 1973 interview he proclaimed, “to me architecture is all about form,” then agreed with a contrary assertion that, “concern for pure architecture creates a sterile lifeless environment,” (Cook 39-41). It’s undoubtedly difficult to excavate Johnson’s historical convictions from the facetious and provocative language with which he spoke, but addressing the primacy afforded to formal-aesthetic ends at the Glass House, he showed some consistency, routinely defending the subordination of his own comfort and convenience to his artistic pursuits. 

The foremost aesthetic ideal commanding the design is a pursuit of lightness and transparency, taken to extents scarcely precedented outside of expressionist “glasarchitektur” fantasies, or the work of Mies himself. Johnson approached his own model of high transparency with a subdued classical simplicity, employing axial symmetric elevations and a modest stylobate. 

Dissolving into the landscape, the surrounding environment becomes an extension of the interior. Johnson referred to the lawn as his “carpet” and the trees as his “continually changing wallpaper,” expressing a spirit of natural unity and spatial continuity in kinship with the formative organic tradition of American modernism; although Johnson was often at odds with Frank Lloyd Wright, who was not cited among manifold historical influences in his 1950 Glass House article for the Architectural Review. Allegiances aside, the Glass House is a landmark in the development of the International Style, marrying the transplanted and amplified aesthetics of Mies van der Rohe with American naturalistic tradition.

Johnson’s experience with public relations as a critic, historian, and educator helped him to pioneer a new breed of celebrity architect, propelled by a fervent, often controversial, public persona and a network of high profile connections within the American aristocracy. The unending vagary of his allegiances, within and without architectural discourse, made him a perpetual enfant terrible, and the focus of national attention, even in the twilight of his career. 

Through all his turns of fortune, the Glass House compound was the nucleus of Johnson’s life, a fortress for inward retreat, a laboratory for design, and a forum for public address. Whether seeking or sought out by Johnson, architects, artists, educators, and celebrities made the Glass House a site of pilgrimage; one of few rising to the status of Wright’s Taliesin or Soleri’s Arcosanti, but with a greater shroud of exclusivity and mystery than such communal operations. The compound’s iconic status and key role in the history of 20th century architecture has been enshrined through the care of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, whose programming on-site engages with far more than the singular life and legacy of Johnson. 

As an architect and public figure, Philip Johnson left an immense impact on public and institutional understandings of modernism, its past, and its future. The Glass House alone is an icon of American architecture, its model of exceeding clarity and conviction having shaped how the US public understood and visualized unfolding developments in the modern world. The broader Glass House complex is invaluable as a unique dialogical collection of architectural developments spanning the century. Johnson’s deeply problematic political history has complicated the work of appropriately framing the Glass House as an institution, but the challenge reinforces the imperative of preservation, not to immortalize and venerate powerful individuals, but ensure future generations understand the complexities of their world and the place of their power within it.

2024

“A Glass House in Connecticut.” House & Garden, Oct. 1949, pp. 168–173. 

Banham, Reyner. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. University of Chicago Press, 1969. 

Cook, John W., et al. Conversations with Architects. 1975. 

“Glass House Permits Its Owner to Live in a Room in Nature.” Architectural Forum, Nov. 1949, pp. 74–79. 

Johnson, Philip. “House at New Canaan, Connecticut.” Architectural Review, Sept. 1950, pp. 9–15. 

Stern, Robert A.M.. New Directions in American Architecture. George Braziller Inc, 1969. 

Stern, Robert A.M. “The Evolution of Philip Johnson’s Glass House.” Oppositions, Fall 1977, pp. 57–68. 

Haeberly, Mabel, New York Times, December 12, 1948, p. 121.

Glass House, Architectural Forum, November, 1949.

“Philip Johnson in New Canaan, The Glass House”, The New Canaan Historical Society Annual, (Vol. X., No. 2., 1986).

“Philip Johnson’s Modern Heritage”, Historic Preservation, September/October 1986., p.34.

National Historic Landmark Nomination Request, June 28, 1996.

“Philip Johnson Is Dead at 98. Architecture’s Restless Intellect”, Goldberger, Paul., New York Times, January 26, 2005.

”Treading Gently on Hallowed Ground”, Bernstein, Fred A., New York Times, August 13, 2006.

The Harvard Five in New Canaan., Earls, AIA., William D., New York., W.W. Norton., 2006.

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