Inside The Iconic Glass House situated on Roughly 50 acres of Greenery | Home Tour

You could be very distracted here, I mean it's kind of a wildlife sanctuary in a way just because of the 49 acres and he loved the changing seasons and the change in the weather even during the day or day to day. My name is Gwen Northreese and I've worked with the Glass House since 2008 either as an educator giving tours or talking about the house or working with the oral history project where we interview people with a connection to the site. Philip Johnson was born in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio. His life spanned the 20th century. He died in 2005 and he studied the classics and philosophy at Harvard as an undergraduate then after that went to work at MoMA as the first architecture curator. One of his landmark shows there was the 1932 International Style Exhibition which he did with Henry Russell Hitchcock, fellow curator and historian. They were basically introducing the Bauhaus architects and the European modernists to the American art scene and of course Frank Lloyd Wright was part of that because his work had influenced them. He didn't go back to school until he was in his 30s to learn how to become an architect. He was in school, in graduate school, during the war. After he got his degree he spent a year in the army and then came with a group of his colleagues to New Canaan. So Johnson, Elliot Noyes, Landis Gores, John Johanson and their teacher, Marcel Breuer, all from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard moved to New Canaan. They designed houses for themselves which kind of became calling cards and they got commissions to do other houses and what happened is at one time we had as many as 120 mid-century modern houses from that time period of 1947 to about 1978. He talked with Mies van der Rohe early on about designing a glass house and they spoke about it in 1945 and Mies designed the Farnsworth House on paper. He had it fully designed in 1947. Johnson saw those designs and decided that he would also do his glass house and he was working off of the Farnsworth House but what he came up with was something very different. The Farnsworth House is the beautiful object in the landscape. The framework of it is white. It's asymmetrical. It's lifted off the ground. It's very much a classic Bauhaus design and everything about this place is different. The steel framing is painted black and so it disappears. This place is all about the view of the landscape around you. It also sits on the ground solidly like a Greek temple. So there's a lot of classicism at work here. Many architectural critics find that there are many, many little clues here that point toward his later turn toward post-modernism where architects used historical styles incorporated into newer buildings. The glass house was Philip Johnson's residence. He designed it for himself. It had everything he needed and it was essentially a weekend house for him. He always had an apartment in New York. He and his partner, David Whitney, who was a curator. David came into his life in 1960 and they were a lifelong couple after that. As Johnson got older, he was here more and more. He continued to work on this landscape and build buildings and thought about it all the time, walked the property every day that he was here. Philip Johnson and David Whitney started thinking about making this a public place in the 1970s. During the 80s, they spoke with the National Trust and by 1987, they had donated the entire place with all of its acres to the National Trust. So the National Trust owned the property starting in 1987, but there was a lifetime tenancy agreement so as long as Johnson was alive it was his home. He lived to be 98 plus, so this was done when he was in his 70s or maybe it was 80, just 80. So he had almost 20 years to talk with the National Trust about how he did things here, what he'd like, how he envisioned tours. We didn't come in to do anything before his death. It was his home, but there was constant back and forth discussions about how everything would work and I think that it was important for him just to know that it would have a future, that the whole place would be saved, not just the glass house structure. Altogether there are 14 structures. Now that includes architectural follies and little structures and sculptures on the landscape. There's six buildings that are on our basic tour and that's the glass house and brick house. The brick house is the guest house portion of the glass house. The painting gallery and sculpture gallery, both of which were created to exhibit art. It's not a painting studio but an exhibition space. So our general tour comes to the glass house area and then up to the painting gallery and sculpture gallery and we walk along a path that runs roughly through the middle of the 49 acres. So you don't see every corner of the 49 acres here but you're pretty close. You have a view of everything. When you approach the glass house, and everything about the approach to the glass house was so important to Johnson. He felt that architecture was the organization of procession. When you approach it, it looks like a little jewel box, but as you walk inside, you realize how tall those doors are and you are inside a space with ceiling that is 10 feet 5 inches. It's 12 feet from the grass to the top of the roof. So once you walk into the space, it has a, you know, the feeling you have changes. So often when we're doing the tours, I try not to talk too much when people walk in because there's a feeling you get when you come into this space and walk around. One space in the glass house, of course the kitchen is open. It's a sleek counter. It has a piano hinge on two pieces of the counter so you can open it up to use the sink and the little stove or you can close them and have this sleek countertop. But the one space where you need some privacy is the bathroom. So the solution for that, that Johnson and Blanda Scores came up with was to have this cylinder, which on one side is the fireplace and on the other side, most of it is an enclosure for the bathroom. So there's a shower, a full shower, toilet, sink in there. And those fixtures have been changed out a few times by Johnson. So that was the last iteration of what he had in there for his bathroom. The goal of this place is partly just to make it available to visitors and architecture students and also to let it be used as a platform for inspiration. Because of Johnson's life as a curator and historian, aside from his architecture career, there's so much of value here for historians and curators. And so we have a pretty robust educational program that went full bore through COVID thanks to Zoom. But we also do things occasionally on site or with local organizations that have a greater capacity for an audience. And we've done some things here on the promontory of the Glass House, music and dance performances, occasionally talks and panels. This is a really great place to sort of make people aware of the whole modernist movement and every aspect of it, art and architecture. Preservation is important too. I mean, the National Trust and the Glass House here, I mean, we're part of the National Trust and we have tried to be part of that preservation movement in every way, both for these local mid-century modern houses and for larger issues that come up with preservation. I mean, the Glass House has become such an icon for modernism, although even though it has its little clues of post-modernism everywhere. So we try to be part of that educational effort. It's hard to sum up the Glass House. One of my colleagues once said, there's just no end to it. There's so much to find here for everyone, whether you love landscape or history of art or the history of architecture, there's just so much here. But it's also a serene place when you come here, you're separated a little bit from the usual busyness of the world. You might look around the Glass House, which always was kept this pristine, by the way, by Johnson. And it makes you think about how you live and you will take something away. You might want to, you might not go home and do exactly this, but it just changes the way you think about how you live. And that's partly what all of these modernist architects, especially in New Canaan, were trying to do. They were just rethinking what you need in a house or what a house could be, not necessarily what you thought it had to be. There's just so much here that can be a canvas for inspiration, not just for art, but for your life.