at legendary American architect Philip Johnson was a religiously focused
believer in modernism is something of an enduring fiction. He always thought
in a modern fashion, but did not believe that modernism was the one and only
way to practice architecture, and he'd break with convention, and the thinking
of some contemporaries, to create a modern aesthetic that could accommodate
historical elements—domes, colonnades, and columns.
en again, Johnson was unusually brilliant, a visionary both of his time and
before it, with an encyclopedic understanding of a great many things, from art
to 18th- and 19th-century European gardens. He studied philosophy and classics at Harvard,
traveled throughout Europe during the late 1920s, and met the central figures of modernist
architecture: Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and another of its disciples, Mies van
der Rohe. As director of a new architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, Johnson co-authored e International Style, bringing Bauhaus practices to the American
masses. He later returned to Harvard to study architecture, and followed Marcel Breuer's lead
to New Canaan, Connecticut, where land was plentiful, there was train access into Manhattan,
and it was easier to register as an architect. Taken by the landscape, Johnson purchased five
acres of 18th century farmland flanked by stone walls and designed the manifestation of an
earlier interest—the Glass House.
A modernist in the countryside, especially one as erudite and urbane as Johnson, is not a complete
contradiction. In fact not at all. Johnson was a native Midwesterner; his grandfather maintained a
gentleman's farm and he loved the idea of being in nature. So he situated the Glass House in a way
that has more of a relationship to fellow Midwesterner Frank Lloyd Wright than the early period
of modernism of which he is part: sort of nestled into a hill, with a lovely view of a manmade pond.
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e Glass House and, placed
in contrast, the Brick House