page_title: Glass House
section_title: House and property
hierarchical_section_title: Glass House / House and property
caption_attribution_description: English: Guest House (exterior), Philip Johnson Estate (Glass House), New Canaan, CT (USA).
context_page_description: The Glass House, or Johnson house, is a historic house museum on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut built in 1948–49. It was designed by Philip Johnson as his own residence, and "universally viewed as having been derived from" the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois design, according to Alice T. Friedman. Johnson curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohe work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, featuring a model of the glass Farnsworth House. It was an important and influential project for Johnson and for modern architecture. The building is an example of minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection. The estate includes other buildings designed by Johnson that span his career. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997. It is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is open to the public for guided tours, which begin at a visitors center at 199 Elm Street in New Canaan.
  The house is an example of early use of industrial materials in home design, such as glass and steel.
context_section_description: The house is mostly hidden from the street. It is behind a stone wall at the edge of a crest in Johnson's estate overlooking a pond. Visitors walk over grass and gravel strips as they approach the building. The building is 56 feet (17 m) long, 32 feet (9.8 m) wide and 10½ feet (3.2 m) high. The kitchen, dining and sleeping areas were all in one glass-enclosed room, which Johnson initially lived in, together with the brick guest house (later the glass-walled building was only used for entertaining). The exterior sides of the Glass House are charcoal-painted steel and glass. The brick floor is 10 inches above the ground. The interior is open with the space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor to ceiling.
  The house builds on ideas of German architects from the 1920s ("Glasarchitektur"). In a house of glass, the views of the landscape are its  "wallpaper" ("I have very expensive wallpaper," Johnson once said.) Johnson was also inspired by the design of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Glass House contains several pieces of furniture designed by Mies.
  The landscape surrounding the buildings was designed by Johnson and Whitney, with manicured areas of gravel or grass, trees grouped in what Johnson called outdoor "vestibules", and with care taken in the shape of the slopes and curves of the ground. In part, the landscape was a reflection of a landscape painting, The Funeral of Phocion by Nicolas Poussin (circa 1648) placed in a seating area of Glass House. The view through the glass walls to the landscaped grounds was strikingly similar, as Johnson designed it to resemble Poussin's picture. The estate overlooks the valley of the small Rippowam River to the west (seen from the back of Glass House, past a grassy rise). To the north and south are sloping scenery that particularly mimic the painting.
  Johnson's rambling estate, originally 47-acre (190,000 m²), also includes 13 Modernist structures Johnson built, including the "Brick House" (1949–1950), which serves as a guest house, the pavilion (1962), Painting Gallery (1965), sculpture gallery (1970), the study (1980), the ghost house (1982), the Kirstein Tower (1985) (named for Johnson's friend Lincoln Kirstein) and the gate house ("Da Monsta", 1995).
  The collection of structures vary between rectangular and circular. The rectangularity of the Glass House itself is complemented with a circular brick fireplace. The Brick House, also rectangular, faces the Glass House, but a nearby concrete, circular sculpture by Donald Judd (untitled, 1971) and small circular pools on either side of it serve to soften the rectangular effect, although structures and objects throughout the estate are arranged to show patterns or repetitions of curves and angles.
  Several buildings on the property served specific functions: The Glass House was used eventually only for entertaining, and Johnson slept in the Brick House (which was initially used for guest rooms, Johnson's study and a picture gallery), the study was used for work and the galleries for storing and displaying the art collection. Johnson called other builsings his "follies" because their size, their shape or both made them unusable, such as the low-ceilinged Lake Pavilion or the Ghost House, a structure built with chain-link fencing on the foundation of an old barn and with lilies planted inside. Three other existing vernacular houses on the estate (Popestead, Grainger, and Calluna Farms) were remodeled by Johnson.
  The red and black "Da Monsta" gatehouse, built without right angles and from modified gunite, is one of the few structures visible from the road. Near it is a 20-foot (6.1 m)-high entrance gate, fashioned out of a sailboat boom. In the 1997 documentary, Philip Johnson: Diary of an Eccentric Architect, Johnson discusses the  buildings he built on the property (his "diary") with a focus on "Da Monsta", at that time the latest structure. "Da Monsta" was inspired by the work of German expressionist architect Hermann Finsterlin. The name was chosen after a co
caption: The Brick House served as a guest house
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