A clear modern vision
Philip Johnson's house paves way for preservation
NEW CANAAN, Conn. - Everyone who knew him has a story about the late Philip Johnson.
Johnson was an architect who became famous, or notorious, for designing an all-glass house for himself in this bucolic town. Johnson died at age 98 in 2005. The glass house, built in 1949, is now considered a modernist classic. Johnson left it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which last year opened it to the public.
The Trust is doing much more, though, than creating one more house museum. It's breaking new ground in the field of historic preservation. It's making the glass house (the Trust capitalizes it, so it's now the Glass House) the focus of a national movement to preserve American's rapidly vanishing heritage of the modernist period of architecture.
First, though, my story. Back in the 1970s, I visited Johnson in the house on a winter weekend. Johnson was the designer, in those years, of two huge projects in Boston, International Place on the waterfront and 500 Boylston in the Back Bay. I'd never met him. I phoned him at his office and, master self-promoter that he was, he invited me to visit that weekend.
There were just the two of us. We sat on elegant chrome-and-leather furniture designed by Johnson's personal hero, the German-born architect Mies van der Rohe. Between us was a glass table. On the table were a glass vase containing a perfect flower, and two martini glasses containing equally perfect martinis. It was a world of glass within glass.
The New England winter sun was low and bright. There were no leaves on the trees. In the middle of the Glass House is its one solid feature, a brick cylinder that contains the bathroom. The sun was, so to speak, hiding behind the bathroom. As we talked it stalked us, moving closer and closer to the bathroom's edge. Then it suddenly emerged like a flashbulb going off in our faces.
"There's that goddamned thing again," said Johnson, and he got up and led us to another part of the room.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't have suns, I guess. But I loved the house anyway, its monastic air of minimal elegance and the way in which, even in winter, it reached out to include the surrounding trees as its real walls.
The Trust opens the Glass House from April 2 through Oct. 3, allowing only 10 visitors per tour, with six tours per day. Price is normally $25. Every slot sold out last year and all, unfortunately, have already sold for 2008. Sales for 2009 haven't begun yet.
There's a lot more to see than just the house. Johnson eventually owned 47 acres of Connecticut (he kept expanding) and by the time he died he'd built numerous other structures. They stand like mysterious pavilions, each one different in shape, color, and style, scattered across the hilly landscape. There's a gallery for Johnson's collection of modern painting, an underground sculpture gallery, a "guest house" Johnson often used as his bedroom, a marvelous little skylit study, a vaguely classical lakefront folly, and a strange free-form building with reverberant, organ-hall acoustics that Johnson called "Da Monsta," created near the end of his life for no observable purpose, but showing the influence of such friends as architect Frank Gehry and artist Frank Stella.
The National Trust hopes to do more than save the property. "Johnson didn't want to be the only green in a sea of McMansions," says Paul Goldberger, a Glass House trustee. "In the last decade of his life he worried about what he called the 'colleagues' of the Glass House, the other modern houses, which were beginning to be demolished."
The word modernism can be confusing. Modernism in architecture hasn't gone away, of course. But the word is also the name of a style that flourished in the United States from about 1940 to 1975, beginning with the arrival of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, at Harvard in 1937, where he helped train a generation of modern architects including Johnson, I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, and numerous others.
New Canaan was a hotbed of early modernism in the 1940s and 1950s, as were Boston suburbs like Lincoln. But today modern buildings, especially houses, are endangered all over the country. Modern houses typically embody an ethic of modesty and innovation. Today's owners often want not only more space, but more lavish displays of prosperity than one finds in modernism.
Christy MacLear is the executive director of the Glass House. "We didn't want just a house museum," she says. "We didn't want just to preserve the artifact, didn't want people to make a one-time visitation. We wanted to explore how the house resonated with the modern movement. We said, 'Let's go outside the boundaries of the property.' We decided we would be about the broader issue of modernist preservation."
MacLear is in the process of developing a nationwide initiative, not yet publicly announced, for the National Trust to take on the preservation of the modern movement. A windfall gift of art worth about 12 million dollars from the estate of David Whitney, Johnson's partner of 49 years who also died in 2005, is helping make it possible.
MacLear notes, for example, that a Connecticut house by noted architect Paul Rudolph was torn down recently because a judge said he lacked criteria for determining whether it was significant. Developing such criteria is one of MacLear's goals.
She points, too, to legislative initiatives such as the Mills Act in California, which allows owners who restore a historic modern house to reduce taxes to what they were when the house was new. A house by Richard Neutra has thus been returned to its 1940 tax status.
She's also begun a survey of nearly a hundred modern houses in New Canaan, hoping to make it a model for similar surveys in other modernist-rich locales.
MacLear has nothing against adding to modernist houses. She wants them used and lived in. It's demolition that hurts. "Modern was all about innovation," she says. "A species that can't adapt will become extinct."
All of this constitutes a new move for the National Trust, which most people associate with Colonial or Victorian architecture, such as the H. H. Richardson house in Brookline that the Trust recently helped save. But the Trust has been moving cautiously into the modern era. In 2003 it purchased the great Farnsworth House in Illinois, by Mies van der Rohe. Route 66 motels have been another recent Trust concern.
There's a political side to the Trust's move, too. The modernist initiative not only saves buildings. It also helps regenerate the Trust itself, moving its efforts and its image into a whole new era of preservation activity.
I should mention the fine Glass House Visitors Center, which is wisely located in rental quarters downtown, across the street from the New Canaan railroad station. It's easy to reach and it doesn't muck up the estate. In it is a wonderful wall of changing video images of Johnson and his life.
In some ways, a visit today to the Glass House is sad. What's missing is its life. Johnson's personality filled the place. Whatever you thought of him - he was, after all, a onetime Nazi sympathizer - he had immense charm and intelligence. He would proudly squire visitors around the estate to show off his incredible collection of modern art.
But most of the paintings are gone now, many of them, at his behest, to the Museum of Modern Art. Instead we stare at blank panels. Gone too are most of the sculptures.
The maybe-genuine-maybe-not Nicolas Poussin painting, which stood in the living area as if it were a condensation of the surrounding landscape, is off somewhere being restored. Several of the pavilions are torn up for renovation. There's an air, everywhere, of the party being over. I'm sure the Trust will whip the place into shape, but it's going to take some time.
Johnson wasn't a great architect - he was the first to admit he was an egregious imitator - but he was a great proponent of architecture, a cultural mover and shaker. It's appropriate that his house has become not just an object but a force in the life of 21st century architecture.
Christy MacLear will speak on "Preserving the Modern" at the Roberts Studio theater, Boston Center for the Arts, 12:30 p.m., April 6, as part of an expo on Art and Design sponsored by the Boston Architectural College.
Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com 