SOUTH BAY DIGS | Digital Edition Online

December 15, 2017

DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.

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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. T 12.15.2017 | DIGS.NET 111 e Glass House and, placed in contrast, the Brick House

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