The Glass House

Philip Johnson’s own house is a box of glass and steel in a park. Inside there are almost no walls, only a round brick cylinder with a bathroom and a fireplace. The house became one of modernism’s most famous homes and a symbol of American post-war modernism.

As head of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philip Johnson had helped introduce the International Style to the United States. He then trained as an architect and built his own house in New Canaan in 1949. He had seen Mies van der Rohe’s drawings for Farnsworth House and openly acknowledged the influence. Johnson lived in the house for almost sixty years.

The house is a rectangle with glass walls and a frame of black-painted steel. It stands directly on a brick base. Inside there are no doors between rooms, only furniture and a brick cylinder containing a bathroom and a fireplace. Opposite lies the Brick House, an almost closed building for guests and services, as a counterpart to the glass house. Over the years Johnson built more pavilions on the property, among them an underground painting gallery and a sculpture gallery.

Johnson and his partner David Whitney left the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it has been a museum since 2007. The Glass House has become one of the best-known icons of modernism. Johnson later moved on to postmodernism, with the AT&T Building in New York among other works.

• Post-war modernism
• Philip Johnson