I don't remember why, but in 2007 I was passing through southern Connecticut with my then-girlfriend/now wife Lisa, and I had heard that architect Philip Johnson's famous Glass House had just been opened for public tours. I wasn't particularly an architecture aficionado, but I thought it might be a fun side trip, only to find that there tickets were sold out for the next six months! Fast forward to this summer, and Lisa's birthday surprise for me is a visit to the Glass House. Much more availability during a global pandemic, I guess.
Built in 1949, the Glass House is just what it sounds like - a house with four glass walls. The entire 1,800 sq ft. (167 m2) interior is visible to the world, except for a brick cylinder that conceals the bathroom. "The idea of a glass house," Johnson said, "where somebody just might be looking - naturally you don't want them to be looking. But what about it? That little edge of danger . . . " I always imagined it to be a transparent house that any passerby could look into. In actuality, it's situated in the middle of 50 acres of rural land.
The Glass House was not well-received by other prominent architects; Frank Lloyd Wright said that he didn't know whether "to take my hat off or leave it on," and Johnson's idol and inspiration, Mies van der Rohe, ended his first visit to the house in a drunken rage. Nonetheless, the house solidified Johnson's reputation and popularized the notion of modern architecture in the U.S. Johnson used it as a weekend home and hosted events there, including performances by Merce Cunningham and the Velvet Underground. Later it became his permanent residence with his partner, David Whitney, until his death in 2005.
I had heard a bit about Philip Johnson's fascist leanings in the 1930s, and was aware that lately there is a lot of effort devoted to stripping his name off buildings and otherwise cancelling him. Later in life, he dismissed it as a youthful "phase," and it's often downplayed or bracketed as a side note. But reading up on him after this visit, I found that he was really, really into Nazism! He worked as journalist a far-right newspaper, Social Justice, where he wrote admiring reviews of Mein Kampf, visited Hitler Youth camps, attended the Nuremberg Rallies where he thrilled to "all those blond boys in black leather," and then visited the front as Germany invaded Poland. After the U.S. entered the war, of course, he stopped with all that talk, and after the war pointedly avoided mentioning his seven-year "phase."
Years later, he claimed the inspiration for the Glass House to be "a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick." Several historians have pointed out that this ruined house would have been one of the Polish homes destroyed by the German Nazi invasion, to which Johnson was an eyewitness. If that's true, well, holy shit! That beautiful structure suddenly takes on a very dark cast. Johnson's political leanings were not a secret, but somehow he managed to avoid contemporaneous consequences for them, and according to biographer Ian Volner, he used this very fireplace to destroy his incriminating letters and articles.
Johnson used the acreage for full-scale architectural experiments. In addition to the Glass House itself, there are 14 other structures on the site. This one is The Study, Johnson's library and work space.
This 30' (9.1 m) tall tower is a monument to Johnson's best friend, Lincoln Kirstein, a poet and co-founder of the New York City Ballet.
No comments:
Post a Comment