Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Philip Johnson was not, frankly, one of the world’s greatest architects. But he did have a notable talent for spotting a trend. After the trauma of the second world war, he felt that the future of architecture was clear. So clear that you could see right through it. His Glass House (1949), an architectural aquarium in New Canaan, Connecticut, became the first important manifestation of this move towards total transparency.The house was good but it was, like much of Johnson’s work, a top-end rip-off. He managed to steal the ideas and aesthetics of his then idol, German émigré Mies van der Rohe, whose own glass house — the Farnsworth House in Illinois — wouldn’t be finished until 1951, six years after work began.Mies had struggled with his client, but Johnson bypassed such issues by building his version as a summer house for himself. With its charcoal-painted steel structure and floor-to-ceiling glass walls, it had a slightly sinister, burnt-out-barn feel. Johnson himself gave credence to this idea, emphasising it as a building reduced to its elements, architecture at its most naked.But what might appear austere in the extreme from the outside is something else from within.Johnson referred to the view of the lush, green lawns as “expensive wallpaper”. The modelling of the landscape was inspired by a Poussin painting hanging on his wall. Poussin’s works were dotted with the kinds of temples and ruins that would inspire the English to punctuate the grounds of their country houses with follies, weaving stories around these classical or Gothic highlights. In its way, this house is also a folly, a minimalist sculpture, as much a statement as a piece of architecture. The bathroom, contained in a brick cylinder, itself appears as a folly within a folly. Quite clever.Johnson and his partner, the curator and collector David Whitney (who, like Johnson, kicked off his career as a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art), spent their summers here. They were a hugely influential couple with a heavy and targeted entertaining schedule; the Glass House was critical in persuading the American moneyed classes to adopt this kind of Modernism. Along with Mies’s works, the house laid the foundations not just for a new kind of residence but for mid-century Midtown Manhattan, the Mad Men-era blocks of steel and glass that transformed commercial architecture and still predominate today.But an early infatuation with fascism has tainted Johnson’s reputation. He travelled to Nazi Germany, writing enthusiastically about its iconography and ritual, and was even suspected by the FBI of being a Nazi spy. His legacy is contested and fraught, for both MoMA, whose architecture department he founded, and, arguably, for Modernism itself in the US. If Mies stormed off in a huff when he first saw the house, rightly perceiving it as a pilfering of his ideas, Johnson at least had the good grace to fill it with Mies’s furniture designs, notably four Barcelona chairs. He lived there until his death in 2005.The site is studded with Johnson’s later structures, including “Da Monsta”, a Frank Gehry-inspired deconstructionist effort. They showcase his chameleon-like ability to shift with the times, rarely producing the best, but often the earliest. Very much in the vein of those grand English manor houses, the Glass House was Johnson’s stately home, a vitrine containing some fragments of the past and a great dollop of the future.theglasshouse.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
