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Johnson purchased a small lot when he started work on the Glass House in 1945, but the parcel grew to 49 acres and became a laboratory for artistic expression. While it's a museum now, not a home, almost all the furniture is exactly as it was when Johnson lived there. The house is small, just 1,815 square feet of open-plan design (a common home layout now, but a rarity in the 1940s), containing dining room, kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, and study. And perhaps its greatest magic trick is how expansive it all feels, thanks to the surrounding landscape on all four sides, which is just as much a part of the home as the interior. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, the Glass House by Philip Johnson, with its perfect proportions and its simplicity, is considered one of the first most brilliant works of modern architecture.
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Educators will be available across the site to provide information and answer questions. Visitors on self-guided tour days will have access to The Glass House, Painting Gallery, Sculpture Gallery, Studio, Pavilion in the Pond, Monument to Lincoln Kirstein and both upper and lower landscapes. This option will include the newly restored interior of the Brick House beginning on May 2, 2024. Picnicking, professional photography, tripods, and easels are not permitted. Johnson emphasized what he called “procession.” Different vistas, follies, buildings, and artworks, such as the large concrete sculpture by Donald Judd towards the end of the driveway, are slowly revealed while walking through the property. What started with the Glass House has become an entire park with several noteworthy buildings that are all part of Johnson’s vision for his New Canaan estate.
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Philip Johnson Glass House Exhibition
The Glass House, built between 1949 and 1995 by architect Philip Johnson, is a historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation located in New Canaan, CT. The pastoral 49-acre landscape comprises the midcentury modern Glass House (1949) as well as fourteen structures- follies, outdoor sculptures and more, and features a permanent collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture. The campus serves as a catalyst for the preservation and interpretation of modern architecture, lart, and andscape, and a canvas for inspiration and experimentation. The tour season runs from April through November and advance reservations are required. The pastoral 49-acre landscape comprises fourteen structures, including the Glass House (1949), and features a permanent collection of renowned 20th century painting and sculpture, along with temporary exhibitions. The campus serves as a catalyst for the preservation and interpretation of modern architecture, landscape, and art; and a canvas for inspiration and experimentation.
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For much of his adult life he wielded great influence on the field of architecture and maintained his interest in the work of others until the end of his life. Originally a curator, he never lost that desire to present new and evolving ideas in architecture, design and art. Today, the Glass House carries on that mindset by presenting innovative programming in the arts within the framework of 21st-century culture, which is far more diverse and inclusive than in Johnson’s time. The best option is the three-hour "self-guided" tour available on Sundays only, which costs $75 and gives you free reign to wander through all the buildings and across the grounds at your own pace. Over the decades, Johnson added acreage to the property and continued to design and construct small-scale, almost jewel-box buildings and structures on the land.
Athenian statesman convicted of treason for his relations with a foreign dictator. She considers Johnson’s passion for Poussin to stem from this choice of Phocion as the subject of the painting. Johnson was wealthy his entire life--born into a rich family, his first fortune as a young man came from the Alcoa stock his father had given him before heading off to Harvard--and over the decades he amassed a staggering art collection. And so in New Canaan Johnson built a pair of galleries to store and display some of this work. On these days (Monday, Friday, and Saturday) you can also add an extra hour (at double the cost) to your visit and tack on a tour of Johnson's painting and sculpture galleries as well. Yet since 2008 visitors to the New Canaan compound where Johnson lived with his longtime partner, the collector and curator David Whitney, before donating it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, have arrived to find the Brick House shut up tight.
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In 1986, he bequeathed it all to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Two years after Johnson died in 2005 (inside Glass House, by the way), the sprawling site was opened to the public and it has been hosting tours ever since. In New York city alone, Johnson's legacy includes the Seagram Building at 375 Park Avenue, the AT&T Building at 550 Madison Avenue, the Lipstick Building at 885 Third Avenue, and the New York State Theater (home to the New York City Ballet) at Lincoln Center. He was also responsible for the Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as the first director of the architecture department in 1930, and to which he donated some 2,200 works from his personal art collection over the course of his lifetime.
Home of Philip Johnson, one of the 20th century's most influential architects.
Since his early days visiting the Bauhaus, Johnson had been an admirer of Breuer’s with whom Johnson also studied while at Harvard. Breuer had joined a number of his former Bauhaus colleagues under Walter Gropius’s leadership at Harvard following their departures from Germany in the late 1930s. I found a great oak tree and I hung a whole design on the oak tree and the knoll because of this place.
Tours will include the interior of the newly restored Brick House beginning on May 2, 2024. The series’ spiraling, polychrome works form a bold new chapter in Stella’s decades-long career exploring artistic reinvention and technical innovation, and are unlike any work he has created before. Scarlatti Kirkpatrick (2006-present) is a series of recent works by the renowned American abstract artist Frank Stella. Exhibitions and other programs will allow the public to experience the site in new ways so that the Glass House continues to exist as a site of cultural production, a place of innovation and discovery,” Urbach says. Join Toshiko Mori (principal, Toshiko Mori Architect) and Nicholas Fox Weber (executive director, Albers Foundation) for a conversation about the legacy and impact of Anni and Josef Albers, as well as Mori’s engagement with New Canaan modernism. Cost is $20 per person, call ahead as the house is only visible by reserving a tour.
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One wing of the house contained a den, living room, dining room, and kitchen, while the other wing contained a master bedroom and bath, and two children’s bedrooms. The Wiley Development Corporation offered to build the prototype anywhere in Fairfield County for $45,000, but the Wiley Speculative House was never reproduced. Following his time in the military, Johnson elected to come to New York rather than return to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began looking at property as early as late 1945, purchasing his initial five acres of property in New Canaan in 1946. He would spend the next few years developing the design of the Glass House, completing the two main structures in 1949. Exactly at this time Johnson would become familiar with Mies’s design for the Farnsworth House, a weekend home outside of Chicago for Dr. Edith Farnsworth.
The Glass House stylistically is a mixture of Mies van der Rohe, Malevich, the Parthenon, the English garden, the whole Romantic Movement, the asymmetry of the 19th century. In other words, all these things are mixed up in it but basically it is the last of the modern, in the sense of the historic way we treat modern architecture today, the simple cube. Since its completion in 1949, the building and decor have not strayed from their original design.
There has always been a suspicion that so complex a figure as Johnson demands yet a different kind of analytical approach to this work. She admits the risk of seating the architecture on the couch as a substitute for its author, but for her, the house is a repository packed with architectural signs of envy, a sense of inadequacy, deferral, and the burial of memory. Out of this exploration, she has constructed a fascinating and often penetrating narrative that allows us to see Johnson’s Glass House as a deeply layered expression of his own psyche. Still, the house is a deliberate transformation, rather than imitation, of Mies’s aesthetic.
The glass walls and other intriguing features of the dwelling inspired psychoanalyst Adele Tutter to go beyond the usual architectural analysis to a psychological one. Johnson would trudge across the field to his Studio in all seasons--he kept the grass uncut, because he liked the way the grassy hills rippled in the wind--and though the space is air-conditioned, a fireplace provides the only warmth in the winter. Like all of his buildings here, starting with Glass House, it feels as sculptural as much as a work of architecture.
Day is the first artist the Glass House has invited to reinterpret the building, originally intended as a visitor center and now used as a project space for contemporary art. Johnson’s style took a final turn with the New York City AT&T Building (1984; it was later sold and renamed). Designed with a top resembling a Chippendale cabinet, the building was considered by critics to be a landmark in the history of postmodern architecture. Johnson turned explicitly to the 18th century for his design of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston (1983–85); it was based on unexecuted plans published by the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
Tucked out of sight in then rural Fairfield County, Johnson and his partner, curator David Whitney, purchased a five-acre parcel of land in 1945. By 1949, Johnson had built the Glass House on a promontory with views of the surrounding forest. Measuring 56 feet long, 32 feet wide, and 10.5 feet high, the open floor plan has no enclosed spaces except for a large brick cylinder to the right of the entrance, which extends slightly through the flat roof.
Guest curator Jordan Stein organized this unfolding sculpture exhibition, held in the same spot where Giacometti’s Night once stood, over the course of three years. On display for three to six months at a time, the individual works presented in Night (1947 – 2015) each “disappear” after their run, making room for new works and new absences. Tours of the entire property are available and begin from the visitor’s center in downtown New Canaan. Those interested in Johnson’s influences should check out the similarly-designed Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, that is also constructed of mostly steel and glass.
The Glass House has and will continue to engage in frank dialogue and open exchange about all aspects of its history, including Philip Johnson’s own history, and to work diligently to expand inclusivity in all aspects of our programming and operations. The Glass House, built between 1949 and 1995 by architect Philip Johnson, is a National Trust Historic Site located in New Canaan, Connecticut. Tours of the site are available in April through December and advance reservations are recommended. The Glass House features an open floor plan, with areas referred to as “rooms” despite the lack of walls, including a kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, hearth area, bathroom, and an entrance area. The furniture in the Glass House was sourced from Johnson’s New York apartment, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1930, and includes the now-iconic daybed designed specifically for Johnson by Mies. According to Henry Urbach, director of the Glass House (now operated as a historic house museum by the National Trust for Historic Preservation), that rich sense of contradiction, even paradox, is part of the structure’s continuing appeal.
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