The Glass House: Through these Photographer’s eyes.

There are a handful of iconic houses that have reached the public
imagination, and the Glass House is amongst the finest. In this
transparent pavilion, surrounded by nature, Philip Johnson designed an
Architectural gem of quiet depth and epic simplicity. It’s power
arises from the Earth and projects itself mathematically into the
auditorium of a landscape that suffuses the visitor with a sense of
grateful contemplation. It is a chapel in a cathedral of nature. One
is tempted into thinking that the Glass House is just a brown
rectangular box with see through walls, but to follow this line of
thinking is to miss the point completely. Its simplicity is its depth
and its raw sophistication is its mystery. The experience of being in
the Glass House is nothing short of sublime. One does not need to add
a “because” to this statement. Some things just are!

My first visit to the Glass House was in the fall of 2006. However, my
experiences of Philip Johnson buildings previous to this had been
somewhat contradictory. On the one hand I had loathed the AT&T
building for its post modernist faux grandeur, but on the other hand I
had witnessed an urgent sensitivity in the Architect’s hands at the
JFK memorial in Dallas. So I was in a mood of uncertainty when I was
hired to photograph the Glass House. Was the place worth all the
adventurous Architectural commentary? Could it possibly live up to all
its expectations? Given the fact that its been photographed by all the
greats including Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman, would I be able to
find something that I could call my own? I shouldn’t have worried.
The Glass House owns its iconic status like Clark Gable owns ‘Gone
with the wind’. Like Bruce Springsteen owns ‘Born to Run’ and yes like
David Bowie owns ‘Thru these Architect’s eyes’. The Architect’s
educated hands are everywhere. It breathes Architecture. There is not
a building in sight. It is all pure majestic Architectural power! The
Glass walls integrate the landsacpe into the Architecture and the
Architecture integrates into the landscape. The pavilion is very much
part of its location, just in the same way as one cannot imagine
Stonehenge being anywhere else except on its geomantic nodal point on
the Salisbury Plains of England, one cannot perceive a better more
artful location for Johnson’s own house, perched on a New England
outcrop overlooking a lake!
It is at this point, where I was looking over the undulating hills of
the Glass House property that I began to wonder about the debt owed to
Mies Van Der Rohe for this exquisite masterpiece. The Glass House is
not an original work of Architecture. Johnson had already seen Mies’s
plans for Farnsworth House and the two houses share much the same
geometry and philosophy of construction. And yet they are profoundly
different. One floats (The Farnsworth) the other clings to the Earth.
One is white, the other dark brown, one is next to a river, the other
overlooks a lake. One is a singular piece of Architecture, the other
is the first in a series of calculated structures that interweave over
a whole estate. One was birthed into existence by a romance, the other
by an Architect who always knew that his best client was himself.
Johnson is clearly the under study. When there’s a bright beacon of
real genius in the room, the best one can do is get out of the way and
be inspired. Johnson did just that and was deeply inspired by his
master, and the greatest compliment he could give him was the Glass
House. The Glass House is different enough to Farnsworth for it to be
labelled Philip Johnson 1949, but one would be tempted to put in
parentheses “inspired by an idea by Mies Van Der Rohe.”

I am up before the crack of dawn. It is 4.20 a.m and I am staying in
New Canaan at the Maples Inn. A taxi cab arrives, and into the pitch
darkness we go. In an orgy of ‘being prepared’  I have arranged for
the lights (designed by lighting pioneer Richard Kellly) of the Glass
House to be left on and sure enough as we pull into the driveway with
deer scattering before our headlights, I see that my request has been
honored.
I am consumed in silence. The taxi arcs around Donald Judd’s circular
sculpture and rears off into the night. I am alone. It is a perfect
solitude. Tranquility personified. There are the beginnings of
pre-dawn light, a slight mauve tint starts to fill the lower horizon.
My senses are heightened. My tripod is steady and my Canon is armed.

I realize that I have never seen the Glass House photographed from
behind the swimming pool. I have a natural and almost naive love for
reflections and I thought that laying flat on my belly with the camera
just an inch above the water would create something compelling. The
trick then was to support the camera during a long exposure. There are
technical terms racing through my left brain and artistic concerns
running through my right brain and happily they meet somewhere in the
middle of my armed Canon! Pre-Dawn light is now at a a happy
interstices with its pregnant daughter, Dawn light. On the lower
horizon mauve has moved to purple and further up the sky has turned
from its deep inky black to a nebulous quarter light. The shutter
releases. I am both in the moment of observation and in the moment of
complete participation in the passing light show. There is no
distinction between the vast Architecture of Nature and the little
Architecture of man. In such a place they are one and the same.
Breathing together in their own crucible. They are one.

I am now in a state of heightened awareness. Part of me wants to sit
and meditate and just take it all in. The other part has a job to do.
There are many juxtapositions to be explored, the light is changing
quickly now and soon sunrise will be upon me offering up entirely new
vistas and a different palette will come into play. Richard Kelly’s
exemplary lighting is really starting to glow. In fact all three of
his famous lighting concepts of ‘focal glow’, ‘ambient luminescence’
and ‘play of brilliants’ seem to be coalescing into one beatific show
of light. I am now placed farely and squarely in front of the Glass
House. I am a few steps in front of the Brick House with a direct
perpendicular view of my subject. The light has moved on as its nature
and the sky has faded to a pale blue, but the trees lined up behind
the Glass House are underlit by Kelly’s lighting and the colors of the
fall saturate the scene with greens, browns, reds and yellows. Better
not mess this up! The air is cool. The shutter releases again and the
mood is captured.

(this photo is now being used by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to promote their dusk tours of the Glass House complex. Go to  http://www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org

for more details)

As dawn moves onto early morning, I realize that today will be cloud
covered. There will be no shafts of sunlight from a glowing sunrise. I
love this kind of day. The colors are muted, and nature is painterly.
The whole scene is reminiscent of Johnson’s famous Poussin painting
housed inside the Glass House. I start to move on from the Glass House
itself and explore the other structures that dot the landscape. Each
one of them is perfectly placed in what is eerily similar to an 18th
century British Stately Home landscape with all its abundant follies.
Down by the lake is the Lincoln Kirstein Memorial, a sculpture that
invites personal adventure with its risk taking staircase and atop the
summit is a suitable engraving; “The stone which the builders rejected,

has become the keystone” . Its a great voyage up this sculpture. One feels

a notion of being on the razor’s edge, of being deeply aware of each

step of ascent. One’s steps are noticeably steady and balance is the

order of the day. The summit calls for a pause.

I can see from here the angular rectilinearity of the Glass House in
what seems like a stark composition against the bulbous overflowing
landscape. But the house is not incongruent to its surroundungs, it
actually possesses through its reflective quality an aura of
mellifluous transcendence. It appears there there are no boundaries
between the outside and the inside, between the man made and the
natural, between the architect and the landscape. One might think that
a slab of modernist glass contained between bronze pillars would be
anathema to the landscape, but in fact the very counter point is true.
This is not ‘Falling Water’, but it does fit beautifully into its
chosen location.

A descent of the Kirstein Sculpture is now undertaken or rather negotiated. Each step is measured, corrected, singular. The void of space surrounding me is anchored by my feet. I am suspended in a mental tennis match between tackling Johnson’s staircase and taking in the view. Another pause is in order. The staircase spirals around the sculpture, and new vistas open up as one descends. One step down brings the lake into view, another couple of steps and one is greeted by a New England Forest burning with color. The bottom at last! I feel like I have undergone some kind of test, an ordeal, and that survival has brought a sense of achievement. Yes, I have achieved the ascent and descent of the Kirstien sculpture without fracture. I have pondered the Glass House from an alternate viewpoint, read the inscription and returned to Earth a wiser person. I can’t say if Johnson had in mind the proliferation of wisdom when he designed this piece, but my own experience was cultivated and my awareness expanded through my interaction with it. I have noticed with fresh eyes a beautiful connection between Architecture and Nature, between literature and design, between risk and reward.

Photo by Robin Hill (c)

Now I am making my way the few steps toward the lakeside Pavilion. Here Johnson is up to new tricks. As I approach the lakeside I am reminded of the London Undergound loud speaker system which brusquely ejaculates ‘MIND THE GAP’ everytime you board or deboard a train. Instead of designing the Pavilion to gently nudge the shoreline, there’s this intentional but irritating gap that Johnson has deliberately placed in one’s way. Why? My first thought is ‘to mess with  your head’ or perhaps it is to make you pay attention! OK, so now I’m paying attention and the first impression is that ordinary scale has been obliterated by the conniving Architect’s hands. This is a perfect modern folly. It is barely functional, save to sit underneath and have an uncomfortable picnic. Through these photographer’s eyes there are excellent framing opportunities given by the multiple archways. But the visual pun is too obvious for my taste and the pavilion does nothing for me in an Architectural sense. I begin to feel that this is a ‘dud’. A Johnson experiment that doesn’t really work very well both in form and function. Perhaps, this is indicative of Johnson’s uneven career as an Architect. Brilliant one minute and average the next. In the space of a few steps I have gone from momentous elevation to ungarnished mediocrity, from design excellence to controlled vacuousness. Still, the adventure of being here leaves my intellect alone for a while and I am left in solitude in the middle of a 46 acre design campus. Heaven! There is a serenity here that is palpable and dare I say ‘meaningful’.

photo by Robin Hill (c)

That meaning will have to wait for further exploration until this experience has subsumed itself into my fibres, because I am now off on a different tangent, intent on navigating myself to the next location, which is the Ghost House. In this rarefied atmosphere I am half expecting an encounter with a spectral Johnson. Now if I could only photograph that! But back to more earthly matters and the living Architect that this structure celebrates, Frank Owen Gehry. Johnson and Gehry were friends and Johnson famously championed Gehry’s Architecture. I once saw the both of them on the Charlie Rose show entering the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Johnson enters the lobby and tears are clearly streaming down his cheeks. It is a non affected moment. He is clearly moved by the Architecture. The void of space has entered his pores and the awesome power of Gehry’s paradigm shifting Architecture has rattled him. But that is another story, and this story brings me back to a small shed made of ordinary chain link fencing designed in homage to Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica. It is open to the elements and now covered with vines and beckons exploration. There are no ghosts here, but there is evidence of great intellect and learned design. Of pure geomtery and deconstructivist ideas. Of open minds and deliberate poise. The ghost house breathes more than any other structure at the Glass House complex. It changes with the seasons and interacts with nature. It is in its own way an organic piece of Architecture. It does not surrender itself to the usual laws of shelter, it is existent in its own paradigm. A reflection of the man it purports to pay homage to.

Photo by Robin Hill (c)

Johnson’s simple design reminds me of Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi (or Mother’s) house. But it is really Gehry’s baby. Who else could inspire such Architecture made out of chain link fence? The Ghost House is at once both a bit of a prank and an Architectural conundrum. It serves no real purpose, save to acknowledge the capacity of Architects to play with form. And why not? Why not serve only the tenet of delight? It is with this last Vitruvian thought that I exit the Ghost House and head uphill to the library.

Poised mid slope and currently painted a surprisingly boring shade of brown (not always the case) the library is a simple and beautifully lit space, with a Gehry Chair at Johnson’s Desk overlooking the Gehry inspired Ghost House.  Above the desk is a skylight and there are rows and rows of tomes on Architecture lining the walls. I start to scan the selection and find that Johnson’s range of reading in Architecture is a real panorama of its many and varied practitioners. There’s ‘Urban Space’ by Rob Krier (an early exponent of new urbanism) as well as Koolhaus’s OMA. Utterly opposing viewpoints in the space of the same box in row 4 column 5. It is at this point that I realize that Johnson’s mind was a true wide angle. Not the average 28mm with a viewpoint of 80 degrees, not even the traditional 180 degree fisheye, but a full on 360 degree panoramic that takes in everything and out of that fecund soup, he manifests new viewpoints and extends the realms of Architectural thought and practice into new areas. Now if only his political thought of the 1930’s could stand up to such a wide view, then perhaps he would be more fondly remembered! Still, I am on the hunt for Architecture, not politics and my eyes return to the bookshelves: Zaha Hadid, Melnikov, Loos, Michael Graves, the inevitable Le Corbusier and so many others too many to count. And there of all the books that are stacked in vertical manner, sits ‘Moby Dick’ conspicuosly perched on the horizontal like a lintel stone atop the massive sarsens at Stonehenge. I find this curiously invigorating. It is the only novel in the place. How novel, I thought! I am now sitting at Johnson’s desk, alone and pondering the beatific silence and how well appointed this place is for pure thought. There are no distractions. It is a temple to knowledge. A vibrant atmosphere of intellectual curiosity fills the space. It actually FEELS intelligent.

There are three shallow steps that greet the entrance way to the library rather similar to the two steps that lead up to the Glass House itself.  I find the spacing of the steps particularly inviting. They slow me down as I cross the threshold from one world into another. They act like a small bridge, an easily overlooked detail that can pass many by. But I am fortunate that my chosen vocation keeps me looking and searching for God in the details.

My library visit has come to an end, but my journey continues. I am like a spacecraft that visits many planets and uses the gravitational pull from one planet to pull me around to the next and on this journey the next  planet is unlike any other yet visited. It is the Pluto in the solar system of the Glass House complex. An outlier, living in the space between sculpture and architecture. It is ‘DA MONSTA!” A red, angular, unshapely cocoon of a “building”.  The last to be finished in 1995, it represents Johnson’s climactic period of Architectural exploration. Its free form geometry on the outside is dynamic and visceral, formative and sound. Step inside though and the atmosphere changes dramatically. I feel like I have been suddenly thrust onto a ship that is lurking to one side violently in a storm. Normal perception of space has been thrown out the window. There is a sense of chaos herein. I am very uncomfortable in this place. It is not soothing or peaceful, but torrid and perplexing, its space shifts hither and thither….arghhhhhhhhhh! I have to get out! And I do in short order. I recognize in this episode that for Architecture to move forward it has to experiment. And this is a perfect place for experiment to be undertaken. But oftentimes as any scientist will tell you, experiments fail (how else to get at the truth) before they succeed. ‘Da Monsta’ delivers as a sculpture, but as a work of Architecture it needs to be appreciated after consuming certain mushrooms. And there are none on the menu today. In my mind ‘Da Monsta’ is just like Pluto. Beyond categorization. And perhaps that was Johnson’s point.

to be continued in part two…

Text and photos copyright of Robin Hill (C)

Not to be used without permission.

Posted on April 26th, 2010 in Blog