Glass House - House and Property

House and Property

The house is mostly hidden from the street. It is behind a stone wall at the edge of a crest in Johnson’s estate overlooking a pond. Visitors walk over grass and gravel strips as they approach the building. The building is 56 feet (17 m) long, 32 feet (9.8 m) wide and 10½ feet high. The kitchen, dining and sleeping areas were all in one glass-enclosed room, which Johnson initially lived in, together with the brick guest house (later the glass-walled building was only used for entertaining). The exterior sides of the Glass House are charcoal-painted steel and glass. The brick floor is 10 inches above the ground. The interior is open with the space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

The house builds on ideas of German architects from the 1920s ("Glasarchitektur"). In a house of glass, the views of the landscape are its “wallpaper” ("I have very expensive wallpaper," Johnson once said.) Johnson was also inspired by the design of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Glass House contains several pieces of furniture designed by Mies.

The landscape surrounding the buildings was designed by Johnson and Whitney, with manicured areas of gravel or grass, trees grouped in what Johnson called outdoor "vestibules", and with care taken in the shape of the slopes and curves of the ground. In part, the landscape was a reflection of a landscape painting, The Funeral of Phocion by Nicolas Poussin (circa 1648) placed in a seating area of Glass House. The view through the glass walls to the landscaped grounds was strikingly similar, as Johnson designed it to resemble Poussin's picture. The estate overlooks the valley of the small Rippowam River to the west (seen from the back of Glass House, past a grassy rise). To the north and south are sloping scenery that particularly mimic the painting.

Johnson's rambling estate, originally 47-acre (190,000 m2), also includes 13 Modernist structures Johnson built, including the "Brick House" (1949–1950), which serves as a guest house, the pavilion (1962), Painting Gallery (1965), sculpture gallery (1970), the study (1980), the ghost house (1982), the Kirstein Tower (1985) (named for Johnson's friend Lincoln Kirstein) and the gate house ("Da Monsta", 1995).

The collection of structures vary between rectangular and circular. The rectangularity of the Glass House itself is complemented with a circular brick fireplace. The Brick House, also rectangular, faces the Glass House, but a nearby concrete, circular sculpture by Donald Judd (untitled, 1971) and small circular pools on either side of it serve to soften the rectangular effect, although structures and objects throughout the estate are arranged to show patterns or repetitions of curves and angles.

Several buildings on the property served specific functions: The Glass House was used eventually only for entertaining, and Johnson slept in the Brick House (which was initially used for guest rooms, Johnson's study and a picture gallery), the study was used for work and the galleries for storing and displaying the art collection. Other buildings Johnson called his "follies" because their size, shape or both made them unusable, such as the low-ceilinged Lake Pavilion or the Ghost House, a structure built with chain-link fencing on the foundation of an old barn and with lilies planted inside. Three other existing vernacular houses on the estate (Popestead, Grainger, and Calluna Farms) were remodeled by Johnson.

The red and black "Da Monsta" gatehouse, built without right angles, is one of the few structures visible from the road. Near it is a 20-foot (6.1 m)-high entrance gate, fashioned out of a sailboat boom. In the 1997 documentary, Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect, Johnson discusses the buildings he built on the property (his "diary") with a focus on Da Monsta, at that time the latest structure.

The Painting Gallery building is built underground with an entrance modeled on Agamemnon's Tomb. Paintings are displayed on a system of three revolving racks of carpeted panels. Johnson and Whitney acquired a large collection over 40 years, but much was sold to support the trust after Johnson's death. The gallery still includes a portrait of Johnson by Andy Warhol as well as works by Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Julian Schnabel and Robert Rauschenberg. Whitney, a friend of Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg, took the lead in shaping the art collection.