The Houses Of Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson's Glass House: Beyond Mies and the Modern Movement

Philip Johnson (b. 1906) began his career in the 1930s as a critic and curator. In 1932, during his time at The Museum of Modern Art, he oversaw an exhibition he titled The International Style, which featured the work of the avant-garde architects, designers and theorists of Europe led by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and his mentor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was Johnson and this exhibition that helped to define and articulate for the American public the main characteristics of the new Modern Movement know as the International Style.

After turning himself to the practice of architecture in the mid-1940s, Philip Johnson became, among other things, a leader in the postwar institutionalization of modern design in American domestic life. His "Glass House" of 1949, one of the most famous houses of the 20th century, is in many ways a tribute to Mies and to the high modernism and elegant minimalism of the International Style, characterized by flexible internal space and minimal applied decoration. Yet, despite the epoch, the cultural influences and the governing architectural principles of the time, the Glass House registers in many ways as the antithesis of the Modern Movement: it is a cozy nook vs. a "machine for living."

The Modern Movement originated in Europe and marked a total aversion to "the florid excess of Art Nouveau and the Ð''precious' interiors of "Wiener Werkstatte." Mass production was established as the means of manufacturing consumer goods, and the Modern Movement was inspired by the concepts of rationalization and standardization. New materials and building techniques led to lighter, more spacious and functional interior environments that stripped away unnecessary ornament and gave a material and structural basis to the abstract idea of pure geometry.

In the new International Style "modernist" language, Le Corbusier defined the purpose of a house as "a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life." For Le Corbusier, if it does not fulfill those functional requirements, it is not possible that factors of harmony and beauty should enter in. This new stripped-down approach to building interiors used an equally stripped-down language, rid of the florid speech that often described domestic structures. Modernism was boiled down to five key words: Ð''space', Ð''form', Ð''design', Ð''structure', and Ð''order'.

Interestingly, in the U.S., the International Style was being accepted at the same time that pre- and post-war suburbanization was taking hold of the country. The boom in domestic architecture attracted the most serious attention from modern architects and the "domesticization of the International Style" ensued.

European professors like Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who came to America to head schools of architecture, used their own houses to introduce their modernist ideas, and Johnson followed suit with his "thesis" house on Ash Street in Cambridge, MA. This Mies-influenced space was criticized as being almost totally unlivable for an average U.S. family because of the complete formality of the basic design in which "few people would be at ease in so disciplined a background for every day living." His first "International Style"-house may have been too much "machine" and not enough "living" for America. But his next house, his own Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, became the paramount example of Johnson's translation of International Style modernism. Perhaps the acceptance of this house, based on the same glass-pavilion as Ash Street, was more palatable because it offered a surprisingly warm interpretation of materials, simplicity, transparency and nature that reach beyond the cold modernist language of Ð''space', Ð''form', Ð''design', Ð''structure', and Ð''order'.

In his own introduction of the Glass House in the English Architectural Review, Johnson attributes his inspiration to the great European modernists, among them: Le Corbusier, whose Farm Village Plan of 1933 helped him devise the approach to the house, and Theo Van Doesburg, a De Stijl painter, designer and theorist, whose idea of asymmetric sliding rectangles are seen in the plans for the Glass House. He importantly pays tribute to Mies and his model of Farnsworth House, truly the first "glass house" ideal and the one that inspired Johnson to build Glass House. However, he is also quick to point out that while the debt to Mies is clear in the Glass House, there are still "obvious differences in composition and relation to the ground." And this is where Johnson's break from the fundamental principles of modernism occurs and his work as influenced by historicism begins.

His nod to historicism is quite overt. In the same introductory article, Johnson pays homage to architects Karl Friedrick Schinkel and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who both redefined the conception of architecture at the beginning of the 19th century. He says that the siting of the Glass House is "in a pure Neo-Classic Romantic-more specifically, Schinkelesque" manner. "Whereas the architects of the 1920's denounced history vehemently as an influence on design, Johnson restated its importance, saying, "Form follows form, not function." In this way, Johnson is unique in the group of Modernist Architects: he feels that architects whose tenets are based on a moral foundation of formal, technical and social ideas have led to the "sterility" of the modern movement.

What can be interpreted from his diversion from pure Modernist thinking is that Johnson's approach to domestic design, unlike Le Corbusier, offers a warmer and more enveloping place, a house best described by Adolf Loos in his article Ð''the Principles of Cladding' of 1898, where he claims that "'The architect's general task is to provide a warm and livable space'; he goes on to say that Ð''effects are produced by both the material and the form of the space.'"

Beyond his stated influences, Johnson also seems to take cues from the ideas and beliefs of John Ruskin and William Morris. Ruskin, a leading writer on art and design in 19th century Britain who influenced taste in interior design, was an early modern thinker. He took issue with the Victorian