Philip Johnson Biography, Buildings, Glass House, AT&T Building, Architecture, & Facts

Table Of Content

• Villa Kogelhof, The Netherlands, by Paul de Rutter Architects
• Shigeru Ban Architects Unveils "Paper Log House" on Display at Philip Johnson's Glass House
• Can You Build a House Out of Paper? Shigeru Ban Says Yes.
• Vernacular Buildings
• Pavilion in the pond
• National Trust for Historic Preservation
• Christopher Hawthorne previews the restoration of Philip Johnson's Brick House ahead of May reopening

At the architect Philip Johnson’s former estate in New Canaan, Conn., there has long been a Glass House and a Brick House. Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, is an architectural wonder. – Enhance your experience at The Glass House with our Digital Guide, a part of Bloomberg Connects. Parking is available in a municipal metered lot on Park Street, approximately 5 minutes walk from the Visitor Center. Parking passes which allow for all-day parking in metered lots can be purchased for $4.00 at checkout. Please select “parking pass” at ticket checkout to have parking pass included in your order.

Villa Kogelhof, The Netherlands, by Paul de Rutter Architects

The focal point of the Glass House is the living room, with a rug defining the space and seating around a low table anchoring it. The placement of furniture is precise and contrasts with the ever-changing landscape outside. The bedroom, separated from the living room by built-in storage cabinets with walnut veneer, is the most private room in the house and contains a small desk. The guest house, connected to the Glass House with a stone path that lays over the expansive lawn immediately surrounding it, is a heavy brick structure, contrasting the extreme lightness and transparency expressed in the Glass House. The “room” with the greatest privacy is the bedroom, which also contains a small desk. It is separated from the living room by a series of built-in storage cabinets with walnut veneer.

Shigeru Ban Architects Unveils "Paper Log House" on Display at Philip Johnson's Glass House

The New York Times called the house the world’s most famous transparent box. The Glass House being a simple cube might be exactly what makes it so special. 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. Our most comprehensive tour, the In-depth Tour includes the Glass House, Painting Gallery, Sculpture Gallery, Da Monsta, Studio as well as the lower landscape with the Pavilion in the Pond and the Monument to Lincoln Kirstein.

Can You Build a House Out of Paper? Shigeru Ban Says Yes.

The New York Times architecture critic wrote that the Glass House did more to make Modernism appealing to the US social elites than any other 20th-century structure. I found a great oak tree and I hung a whole design on the oak tree and the knoll because of this place. (…) It’s just a sort of a landscape in which I focused it on this knoll and this oak tree. Philip Johnson’s Glass House, built atop a dramatic hill on a rolling 47-acre estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, is a piece of architecture famous the world over not for what it includes, but for what it leaves out.

Vernacular Buildings

In particular, Johnson would develop a relationship with Mies that would lead to not only Mies designing an interior for Johnson’s 1930 home in New York but also a collaboration between both men on Manhattan’s Seagram Building in the 1950s. The interior of the house, whose only floor-to-ceiling structure is a brick cylinder containing a bathroom—is available for cocktail receptions, sit-down meals, and overnight stays. The beds have been replaced since Johnson lived there (he died in 2005), but everything else has remained the way he left it. I recently visited the house on a tour that Bentley organized to show off its new Bentayga, the fastest, most powerful, and most expensive SUV on the market. Our group of journalists had the grounds to ourselves and we had lunch in the underground Painting Gallery, which Johnson built to display the art collection he and his partner David Whitney collected.

5 Buildings Designed by Celebrated Architect Philip Johnson - The Collector

5 Buildings Designed by Celebrated Architect Philip Johnson.

Posted: Fri, 28 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

In 1942 he built a house for himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts based on the ideas of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and upon graduation in 1943 served in the US Army during WWII ( ). The first guest will be one of the last sculptures created by Ken Price, the California ceramist who died in February and who is the subject of a retrospective that opened this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The floor is also made of red brick laid out in a herringbone pattern and is raised ten inches off of ground level. The only other divisions in the house besides the bathroom are discreetly done with low cabinets and bookshelves, making the house a single open room. This provides ventilation from all four sides flowing through the house as well as ample lighting. Designed by the renowned architect Shigeru Ban, recipient of the Pritzker Prize, the installation process involved guiding 39 architecture students in fabricating and assembling the Paper Log House.

National Trust for Historic Preservation

Unlike the Farnsworth House, however, Philip Johnson's home is symmetrical and sits solidly on the ground. The interior space is divided by low walnut cabinets and a brick cylinder that contains the bathroom. Johnson’s style took a final turn with the New York City AT&T Building (1984; it was later sold and renamed).

Christopher Hawthorne previews the restoration of Philip Johnson's Brick House ahead of May reopening

Alongside steel, wrought iron, and concrete, the material came to define an architectural movement and quickly captured architects’ imagination. Glass structures—with their lightness, transparency, translucency, and reflectivity—intimately reveal their interiors and provide a commune with nature that was previously unachievable. As Johnson said himself, the land was the guiding principle for the location and design of the Glass House.

Brick House

Since its completion in 1949, the building and decor have not strayed from their original design. Most of the furniture came from Johnson’s New York apartment, designed in 1930 by Mies van der Rohe. A seventeenth-century painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin stands in the living room. The image, Burial of Phocion, depicts a classical landscape and was selected specifically for the house by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art.

Crystal Cathedral Ministries, formerly led by Reverend Schuller, filed for bankruptcy in 2010, claiming $50 million in debt. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange acquired the property the following year and rechristened the building "Christ Cathedral." Johnson Fain is overseeing the interior alterations, an effort to adapt the church for a Catholic congregation. The campus is to be remastered by Rios Clementi Hale Studios and also includes the International Center for Possibility Thinking and the Garden Grove Community Church building. The latter was designed by Richard Neutra and opened in 1961 as the first formal home to Schuller's congregation. An early proponent of modern architecture who later went in various design directions, from postmodernism to later explorations of non-Euclidean geometry, Johnson was not easy to pigeonhole stylistically. What is undeniable is that Johnson would go on to build substantial projects worldwide and also became one of the central powerbrokers of architecture in America for much of the 20th Century.

There are also hints of Mies’ aesthetic in the subtle asymmetry of the interior. During the 1920s, when Mies van der Rohe’s designs first helped define modernist architecture, the architect came up with the concept of asymmetry. Twenty years later, Johnson implemented this idea into his Glass House by using the round bathroom building. However, in Mies’ designs, the asymmetry could be found in both the interior and exterior, but Johnson only used it inside the building. Johnson thought that the symmetrical outside made the whole house look calm and organized. When one stepped inside, however, he or she would encounter a wild world of asymmetrical planes and volumes.

Because the house was designed as a prototype, it needed to be private as well as versatile. Johnson achieved this privacy by designing an L-shaped plan sheltering a terrace with a separate garage enclosing the third side of the terrace. 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.