The Glass House
Philip Johnson's transparent 1949 house and the structures he added around it on a Connecticut hillside.
Philip Johnson completed the Glass House in 1949 as his own weekend home, a single room of 56 by 32 feet enclosed in plate glass between steel piers, with a brick cylinder holding the bathroom and hearth. It was built alongside the Brick House, a windowless guest building that carries the services. Johnson acknowledged the debt to Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, then under design, and the two buildings sit as a pair on a shelf of lawn above a wooded valley.
Over the next five decades Johnson and his partner David Whitney added to the 49-acre site: the Pavilion in the Pond, the underground Painting Gallery with its rotating racks, the Sculpture Gallery under a glazed roof, the Library/Study, the Ghost House, the Lincoln Kirstein Tower and Da Monsta. Johnson left the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it opened to visitors in 2007. Contemporary art commissions are shown across the grounds each season.
Highlights
- The 1949 Glass House and its windowless Brick House pair
- Painting Gallery built underground with pivoting racks
- Sculpture Gallery of stepped terraces under a glass roof
- Da Monsta, Johnson's last completed building, of 1995
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