Thunderstorms, Wild Turkeys and Broken Glass: A History of Glass Preservation at the Philip Johnson Glass House

by Gwen North Reiss

Updated April 16, 2012

It appeared this winter in the lower lite to the right of the main door—a four to five inch crack almost invisible to the eye, like “a hair in the glass” according to Brendan Tobin, Manager of Buildings and Grounds at the Glass House.  Tobin immediately scheduled a replacement.

The crack appeared in the lower lite to the right of the front door.

Though this year’s crack was a slight one, a few of the broken glass stories are nothing short of frightening.  Before 3/8” tempered glass (safety glass) replaced the original glass, broken lites posed real danger. The shards were the size of a pizza slice and larger, and once a piece of plate glass broke, fragments could hang guillotine-like from the upper steel frame of the house.

Johnson’s original 1949 structure had simple ¼-inch annealed glass, and by the mid-1980s, under Johnson’s supervision, tempered glass from fabricator Oldcastle Glass gradually replaced all of the old plate glass.  Johnson donated his property to the National Trust in 1986, and the Glass House staff has followed his lead on maintenance using the “Glass House Conditions Survey and Recommendations” manual Johnson’s firm prepared for the site.  According to those involved with glass preservation over the years, all of the original glass in the Glass House has been replaced, some of the lites more than once.  The front door, especially vulnerable to cracks, has recently been replaced with laminated glass.

Vincent Walters (right) and Todd Gerstner of Franklin Glass remove the cracked lower lite.

Replacement of the lower pieces is a relatively simple operation, without the scaffoldings and heavy lifting involved in the installation of the largest pieces, which require 8 or 9 people and a 600-pound sheet of glass (that’s the weight of a grand piano).  Vincent Walters and Todd Gerstner from Franklin Glass completed the replacement of the lower piece in a few hours.  Steel stops, which look like simple moldings and which hold the glass in place, are unscrewed from the frame.  Suction cups with handles are attached and the glass is carefully pulled out.  Old caulk and rust are scraped away, rustproofing applied, and then the new glass is gingerly set into place.  The stops are replaced, and a new coat of black paint goes on later in the day.  Walters first replaced glass at the Glass House in 1984.  “It was a pleasure to work for Mr. Johnson. He used to sit on the day bed and watch us work.  He’s smiling now,” Walters said, as he and Gerstner finished the job and headed toward the driveway.

A Violent Storm Causes a Chain Reaction

In an incident recounted to us by engineer and builder Port Draper who worked with Johnson beginning in 1968, a violent thunderstorm during the 1990s brought a tree limb down on the north side of the house near the bed.  Johnson was at home in the living room area.  The force of air from the north-side glass breaking inward then knocked out one of the largest pieces, the 17-by-7-foot lite behind the kitchen facing the Brick House. Draper remembers that Johnson took shelter in the Brick House and called him immediately.  Early the next morning, Draper remembers walking to the front door of the house.  The storm had passed and the sun was shining.  Amid puddles and enormous shards of glass covering the neatly kept lawn and the bedroom area, there was Philip Johnson at the dining table.  When Draper greeted him, he replied “I thought it was the end of the world.”

A Wild Turkey Flew Through It

Wild Turkeys have flown into the glass more than once. In 2005, a turkey broke right through one of the large upper lites. Photo: Seth Tinkham

Of all the broken glass stories, the most spectacular is that of the wild turkey who flew through the large upper lite closest to “The Burial of Phocion” (1648) by Nicholas Poussin.  The bird flew around the house in a daze, landing on the kitchen cabinets.  In an attempt to fly back out he g0uged the Mies coffee table.  A small chip can still be seen on the upper surface.  He made it back out and was never found but he left a mess behind—feathers, blood, droppings, pieces of broken glass, and scratches on the cabinetry.  The accident happened after the deaths of Philip Johnson and David Whitney, and before the site opened to the public.

Damage after a wild turkey flew through the glass in 2005. Photo courtesy of The Philip Johnson Glass House Archives

Less dramatic cracks have been caused by uneven rusting of the steel frame, tree branches launched into the glass during storms, and small accidents as simple as a stone caught and tossed up by a lawn mower.  Building codes require that any time a piece of glass is removed or the steel around the glass repaired, safety glass must be installed.  No small crack is ignored.  Given the nature of glass, a small crack will inevitably make its way through the entire lite, often in an instant.

David Paqua, owner of Franklin Glass, the company that has installed glass at the Glass House since the beginning, explains that the deflection of the glass was another reason to change to the 3/8” glass.  He was finding that glass deflection with the ¼-inch plate glass was as much as ½ inch—¼ inch in either direction, which is too much.

Paqua also remembers that a few of the broken-glass incidents happened around the holidays.  Irene Shum Allen, Curator at the Glass House, found this entry in The Andy Warhol Diaries for Sunday, December 24, 1978  “…. Oh, and in the morning I called David Whitney to wish him a Merry Christmas and Philip Johnson answered the phone and said he was cleaning up because the big winds had blown in a sheet of glass – He was at the Glass House in Connecticut – and it could have cut him in two. Isn’t that scary? ….”

Changes in the Fabrication of Glass

Construction photo of the Glass House showing the frame without the glass. Photograph: Courtesy of the Philip Johnson Glass House

The Glass House’s construction came at an interesting time in the history of the manufacture of glass.  Before the late 1950s, all glass was poured out over iron plates, thus the term plate glass.  The surface of the glass had to go through a grinding and polishing, which made large pieces costly.  The Glass House was designed and built at a time when its largest lites (17 and a half feet by almost 8 feet) were extraordinary by any measure. During the late ‘50s the Pilkington process changed all that.  In the manufacturing plant, glass is now poured out over a bed of molten tin, which has a greater density than the glass.  “Float glass” emerges with a smooth surface.  Tempered glass or safety glass is heated and rapidly cooled to create a greater surface tension, which results in glass that will shatter into tiny pieces on impact.

Many visitors to the Glass House have asked if the glass has been replaced with insulated glass or glass panels with a UV coating.  Glass House preservation policies have steered away from those alternatives in order to keep a sense of minimal separation between the interior and the landscape.

The Glass House today. Photograph: Eirik Johnson

Still, glass preservation often means glass replacement.  Modern buildings have ways of confounding our notions of what it means to preserve.  As Theo Prudon, architect and President of Docomomo U.S. said recently during a Conversations in Context interview with the Glass House Director of Programs Hunter Palmer, “All of the glass is from a later period.  You’ve only got 10% of the building.  The interesting issue here is that if you’re looking at a farmhouse, you’d expect to have much more of the original fabric.  Is this a colonial farm?  Is it a sculpture park?  Is it a suburban house?  All these interpretive questions that we have in preservation terms we have rules for.  And I’m not sure they apply here and that’s what makes it really challenging and really interesting.”

Filed under: About The Philip Johnson Glass House, Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Franklin Glass, Gwen North Reiss, Hunter Palmer, Oldcastle Glass, Philip Johnson Glass House, Port Draper, Preservation of Glass, Theo Prudon

The “Porous Architecture” of Philip Johnson’s Glass House: A Conversation with Theo Prudon and Shashi Caan

Theo Prudon and Shashi Caan speak in the Glass House during the Conversations in Context Program

by Gwen North Reiss

Before the beginning of the Conversations in Context Program on July 21 as our mid-summer heat wave settled in, Theo Prudon (Architect and President of Docomomo US) and Shashi Caan (Director of the International Federation of Interior Designers) sat on the promontory for a brief videotaped interview led by Hunter Palmer, Director of Programs and Visitors’ Experience.

“I’m a child of the sixties,” said Prudon, to introduce himself, “I grew up when modern architecture and preservation were emerging.”  Of the Glass House site, he asked “Is it a Colonial farm?  A sculpture park?  A Colonial house blown apart?  Is it a playground?   In preservation we have rules for things, but how do they apply here?”  It was the beginning of an evening of questions that centered on the philosophical, spatial, and personal aspects of Johnson’s estate.

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Conversations in Context, Landscape Architecture, Shashi Caan, The Philip Johnson Glass House, Theodore H.M. Prudon

L.A.’s Maverick in Modern Preservation Drops in for a Summer Tour of the Glass House

by Gwen North Reiss

Interim Director Rena Zurofsky (left) with Lesley Bulechek and Michael LaFetra in the 1970 Sculpture Gallery on the Glass House site.

Michael LaFetra fell in love with Modernism in his late twenties on a trip to MoMA with his mother.  He remembers telling her “I want to live in a house like this.”  At the time, he was pursuing an acting career in New York.  “I did a lot of off off,” he said, until 1999 when he moved back to L.A. and bought his first Modern house—Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21.  Now a producer who runs Foundation Films, LaFetra is known in Modern architecture circles as a one-man preservation force.

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, A. Quincy Jones, John Lautner, L. A. Modern, Malibu Moderns, Michael LaFetra, Modernism, Painting Gallery at the Glass House, Pierre Koenig, Ray Kappe, Rex Lotery, Rudolph Schindler, Sculpture Gallery at the Glass House, the Case Study Houses, The Glass House

Tatum House by Architect Hugh Smallen

Tatum House by Architect Hugh Smallen, 1962. Photo by Craig Bloom.

The Tatum House designed by Hugh Smallen was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places as an extension of the The New Canaan Modern Home Survey. It is one of an impressive 18 modern homes that were added to state and national registers in 2010 as part of the first ever multiple-property registry for mid-century modern homes.

Learn more about the Tatum House, Modern Home Survey and this impressive Preservation Milestone for New Canaan Houses.

 

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Modern Home Project, Architecture, Hugh Smallen, Modern architecture

A Preservation Milestone for New Canaan’s Modern Houses

Roseanne Diserio, John Black Lee, David Bahlman (photo: Claire Hunter)

Before Roseanne Diserio walked across the lawn in front of the Glass House to receive a certificate in honor of her modern home’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, she hesitated just for a second. Then Diserio emerged from the crowd with architect John Black Lee on her arm.  As David Bahlman, Connecticut’s Deputy Historic Preservation Officer, handed Diserio the certificate, eighty-six year old Lee turned to the audience and said “It was my first house!”

There were cheers for Lee and Diserio from the close-knit group of New Canaan modern house owners who gathered at the Philip Johnson Glass House on an 80 degree September day to celebrate a milestone in the preservation of modern residential architecture.  Twelve houses were added to the National Register of Historic Places and six to Connecticut’s State Register in the first multiple-property registry for mid-century modern houses.  Twenty-six homeowners, representing 15 of the houses, attended to accept their certificates in person.

The registry process was an outgrowth of The New Canaan Mid-Century Modern Houses Survey, executed by Building Conservation Associates and conducted during the tenure of outgoing Glass House Executive Director Christy MacLear.  The survey was a result of a partnership between the New Canaan Historical Society (NCHS), the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation – Philip Johnson Glass House. It was funded by the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism (CCCT).

Gretchen Mueller Burke addresses the crowd (photo: Claire Hunter)

Gretchen Mueller Burke of the Glass House, who coordinated the registry effort on the various local, state, and national levels, began work a year ago with Alicia Leuba of the National Trust’s Northeast office, NCHS Executive Director Janet Lindstrom, architect Richard Thomas of the New Canaan Preservation Alliance and Stacey Vairo of CCCT.  Burke emphasized the importance of the MPDF or Multiple Property Documentation Form. Unlike the single property form, it is in Burke’s words “a detailed overview of the history of the development of modern architecture and design in the State of Connecticut that provides an umbrella-like structure for the nomination of individual modern houses to the State and National Register of Historic Places.”

Ginny Adams and Jenny Scofield of Public Archaeological Laboratory (PAL) conducted research, wrote historical context documents, prepared nominations, and shepherded the nominations through the many official avenues.  The formal process included submission of the documentation to the CCCT, and a review by the Connecticut Historic Preservation Board

Ginny Adams, Michael Fedele (photo: Claire Hunter)

and the homeowners.  Once the state review board approved the nominations, they went to the National Park Service (NPS), the official home of the National Register of Historic Places.  Roger Reed of the NPS was on hand for the September event.  “There have never been so many houses listed at once,” said Adams, “and the multiple registry process has never been used statewide for modern houses.”

The new National and State Register listings include houses designed by Marcel Breuer, Gates & Ford, Willis Mills, Hugh Smallen, Allan Gelbin, Eliot Noyes, Alan Goldberg, Laszlo Papp, and John Black Lee, among others.  Alan Goldberg and Laszlo Papp are owners as well as the architects of their houses. The 2010 group joined some illustrious company already designated as historic houses:  Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Hodgson House, the Landis Gores House, Eliot Noyes’s second house, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Tirranna.

Rena Zurofsky, Janet Lindstrom (photo: Claire Hunter)

Welcoming the preservationists and homeowners to the Glass House was Interim Executive Director, Rena Zurofsky, who greeted every person as he or she stepped off the van at the top of the Glass House driveway.  Zurofsky, along with David Bahlman and Alicia Leuba, offered their thanks to the many preservationists in attendance, including Mary Donohue, Connecticut’s Survey and Planning Grants Coordinator, and Janet Lindstrom, Executive Director of the New Canaan Historical Society (and a modern home owner) who for many years championed the preservation of modern houses.

Bahlman, however, made a point of honoring the homeowners. “The real stars are those of you who agreed to have the designation placed upon these very significant houses…. It’s quite an honor and sets the stage for other homeowners in Connecticut to nominate houses.”

“This is going to be a model,” said Bahlman in his summing up. “Nowhere has the buy-in or enthusiasm been as strong as it has been here in Connecticut.”  As PAL’s documents noted, “Connecticut’s unique contribution to the development of mid-twentieth century Modern residential architecture was nearly unparalleled in scope and impact.”

by Gwen North Reiss

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Modern Home Project, Historic Preservation, John Black Lee, Modern architecture, National Trust Northeast Office, New Canaan Historical Society, New Canaan Preservation Alliance, Philip Johnson Glass House, Preservation of Modern Houses, Public Archaeology Laboratory

Pedro Guerrero and Friend (Frank Lloyd Wright) and their 1958 Visit to the Glass House

by Gwen North Reiss

Frank Lloyd Wright and Pedro Guerrero in 1949 in Pleasantville, New York

There aren’t many people who have spent an afternoon at the Glass House with Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.  Pedro E. Guerrero, Wright’s photographer for 20 years, was one, and in June he visited the Glass House to tell us his story for our Oral History Project.

Guerrero was hired by Wright when he was a young photographer just out of school.  Wright became a father figure to him and relied on Guerrero’s photos to give him essential information on his buildings. Guerrero understood instinctively as a young photographer that the only way to photograph any building, especially a Wright building, was to approach it as sculpture.

Guerrero worked for Wright both at the Wisconsin Taliesin and Taliesin West.  A few years after the architect’s death, Guerrero became photographer to Alexander Calder and later Louise Nevelson.  He lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, for 50 years, photographing many of New Canaan’s modern houses while on assignment for magazine editors in New York.

Guerrero also recalled for us a conversation with Wright in which the architect declined a helicopter ride to help take aerial photos.  “Oh, come on,” said Guerrero to Wright “the worst that can happen is that the copter will crash.  I can see the headlines now: ‘P.E. Guerrero and Friend Killed in Copter Crash.’” Wright waved him off with a twinkle in his eye.  It was the last time Guerrero saw him.

With his hat and cane and silk scarf, Guerrero is an elegant presence, not unlike his old boss.  His visit to the Glass House with his wife, author Dixie Legler, and his daughter Susan and son Ben, was a pleasure for all of us.  He sat on the Mies daybed for the interview, and when his daughter asked him if he’d be okay on a backless chair, he replied. “Oh, I can always lie down, darling.” Here is his story about Wright and Johnson, as he told it this June. The visit took place in 1958, about a year before Wright’s death.

 

Guerrero remembers the phone call from Frank Lloyd Wright.  “I was mowing the grass,” he said.

“There were fifty years between us and he remembered that I lived in New Canaan.  He said ‘Why don’t you come over and have lunch with the Raywards. The Rayward house [Wright’s only house in New Canaan], he had just finished and he had come to see it for the first time. We were walking around the grounds, and Mr. Wright said ‘Let’s go see Philip.’  Mr. Wright called, and Philip said he was delighted to have us.  So we went on a spring day in 1958 about a year before Mr. Wright died and we came up a walk to the house that was white pebbles at the time—very brilliant.  I described the house as not only a window but a mirror as well.

“Philip came to the door and said ‘Mr. Wright, welcome to the monkey house.’  And Mr. Wright said ‘Why do you call it that?’  And Philip said ‘it’s because you said I had designed a monkey house.’  Mr. Wright said ‘No, Philip, I said that you were capable of doing it, not that you had.’

“So anyway, he wanted to know if he [Johnson] knew all the people who were there.  He knew the Raywards.  Philip and I had met 20 years before.  I don’t think he remembered me and I don’t blame him for that but I do remember him.  Philip was at Taliesin in Wisconsin getting ready to put on a show at the Museum of Modern Art of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and I was doing all the photography on that.

“He let us in and it turned out to be a sort of a cocktail party.  There was a table over here that had scotch and ice and glasses.  And over there where that sink is was a drawing board that Philip had, and there was a big pad and a crayon on it and Mr. Wright and Alfred Barr and Philip exchanged a lot of barbs.  There was a love-hate relationship between Philip and Mr. Wright, but it was mostly a love relationship because I remember Philip saying ‘Frank Lloyd Wright is a genius and I hate him for it.’

“The afternoon turned out to be a lecture on the part of Mr. Wright with jibes from Alfred Barr and from Philip.  Mr. Wright was giving a history of architecture starting with the cave people, and he kept moving forward with the different techniques from bamboo that had been gathered together–and they had vine leaves on the bottom which eventually became the pillars of Grecian and Roman architecture–and he want on like that for some time.  He’d run out of scotch and he came over here to get some scotch and he noticed that Elie Nadelman’s statue was right in the center where that camera is now and Mr. Wright went and moved it over to where it is now.  He went back to drawing and he talked.  Mr. Wright went on sketching and sketching and he came over and got some more scotch.  Meantime Philip had moved the statue back to center and Mr. Wright didn’t notice that until the third time he got up to get some scotch.

“So it’s really getting to be a wonderful afternoon.  But when Mr. Wright had finished drawing and talking about how little modern architecture had advanced…. Now, Philip had just finished the Seagram Building [which Wright’s sketches now resembled]. He and Mies van der Rohe had collaborated. Mr. Wright was busy building his circular Guggenheim Museum, so they were both competing for attention in New York City, but Philip was through with the Seagram Building first.

“Mr. Wright saw that Philip had put the statue back and as he was going over with his last scotch, Mr. Wright just blew up.  He said ‘Philip, leave perfect symmetry to God!’

And where it [the Nadelman] is now is where Mr. Wright put it.  And he showed what he had done [on the sketch pad] and it was a complete rendition of the Seagram Building, which was his way of getting even with Philip.”

Pedro Guerrero's 2010 interview at the Glass House

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Architectural photography, Elie Nadelman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Glass House Oral History Project, New Canaan Modern, Pedro E. Guerrero, Philip Johnson, Philip Johnson Glass House

An Interview with John Johansen, Part II: John Johansen and Philip Johnson

John Johansen, photo: New Canaan Modern Homes Survey, Philip Johnson Glass House

by Gwen North Reiss

As classmates at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, colleagues, and neighbors in New Canaan, CT, where they built their early houses, John Johansen and Philip Johnson had a lifetime of conversations about architecture.  Their friendship and mutual respect survived the years, though more often than not they disagreed.

Johansen first encountered Johnson at the Graduate School of Design.  “He was ten years older than I.  When we were students, he had been director of the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art.  He was way above us in that experience, and also wealthy.  When he was a student he built his own house there in Cambridge.  That was dazzling to the rest of us.”  Johansen remembered Johnson’s irreverent spirit, and that he distanced himself somewhat from Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.  “He was attached to Mies and nobody else—Mies, whom he had arranged to come to this country and who was the greatest man he borrowed from.”

John Johansen's first house, adjacent to Philip Johnson's property, received its share of press notices. Clipping from the New Canaan Historical Society archives

The title of the landmark 1932 MoMA show “The International Style Exhibit,” curated by a very young  Philip Johnson (the catalog became a history text for architecture students at Harvard), always rankled with Johansen. “It was a movement and not a style…I was offended and I told him so.  And I told Hitchcock too” [curator Henry-Russell Hitchcock].  “However, I think we would all agree that the modern movement was a new idea.  A spirit, regardless of what different expressions it took, and I think that’s very much with us.”

In 1950, just after the completion of the Glass House, Johansen bought land next door to Philip Johnson to the north.  “I bought for $10,000 about 10 acres.  I sold half of it for 5,000…and there I was with that wonderful view.”  Johansen’s kids, born while he was living in New Canaan, had an open invitation to Johnson’s round swimming pool close to the Glass House and Brick House.  Johansen remembered sleeping in the Brick House bedroom with its wall panels of Fortuny fabric.  “I didn’t know when it was day,” he said “I slept ’til eleven o’clock.”  He also recalled the 1967 event where Merce Cunningham’s dance company performed on the meadow:  “Wonderful.”  One room appealed very much to Johansen’s love of primordial spaces–the bathroom in the Glass House, which he describes as an enclosure with “a powerful essence.”  Johansen also remembers that Johnson often “referred to me and my wife as kids…I was thinking of myself as a respectable architect!”

"I didn't know when it was day," said Johansen, "I slept 'til eleven o'clock." photo: Guest House by Dean Kaufman, Philip Johnson Glass House

Their conversations about architecture were frequent.  “We’d talk about anything,” said Johansen, “history, architects, the great architects, the old architects,… the design process.”  This is entirely echoed by Johnson’s comments in Robert A. M. Stern’s new book, The Philip Johnson Tapes, where Johnson says “Johansen was my biggest supporter and good friend at school…We talked the same language…I talked more architecture with him than with any other single architect.”

John Johansen's Morris Mechanic Theater in Baltimore. Photo by Andrew Bossi

It was Philip Johnson who recommended Johansen for the Morris Mechanic Theater in Baltimore.  The mass and monumental grace of this 1967 design show Johansen to be akin spiritually to Paul Rudolph. Johansen’s influential Oklahoma Theater Center was done while he was living in New Canaan as was the American Embassy in Dublin, the plans for which he had to rescue from his office during a fire.  He remembered Johnson’s excitement about the Oklahoma Theater design. “Philip took a whole dinner party to my office after dinner to see the model.”

Johansen described the bathroom in the Glass House (inside the cylinder) as an enclosure with "a powerful essence." photo by Jake DiPietro

Johansen also sat in on many architectural discussions at the Glass House, including a famous one with Mies.  “One that pained me,” he said “was how to correctly make a corner…I didn’t like Mies—a silent man, morose.”  That personal impression in no way altered Johansen’s recognition of Mies’s influence and virtuosity.  Mies, Johansen remembered “could design in his mind without paper or pencil a complete major building.”

Johansen referred to a story about someone “writing with a piece of soap on the glass:  ‘Philip, why didn’t you have the courage to design a Glass House.’ It could have been Frank Lloyd Wright. Come to think about it—if he’d really been original and not copied Mies, the ceiling would be glass, the floor would be glass with underlights, and we would walk on glass.”

Of the later years, Johansen said “we parted company because he embraced Post- Modernism and Deconstruction.”  He set up at MoMA all the work that represented this strange venture.  I picketed outside…and even inside, and said ‘You’re wasting your time here.  This is not going to last.’  Post-Modernism didn’t have the strength to even name itself!”

Looking back on Johnson’s curatorial role, Johansen said “At one time I called him the circus ringmaster with that top hat and whip, announcing the next event in the tent.”

“I think we’re on the right track again,” said Johansen, citing the work of a number of architects including Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava.  Johansen sees the engineering aspect of design as crucial.  “The success of most architects depends heavily now on the inspiration or the creativity of the engineer.”

During the ‘70s, Johansen built his Plastic Tent House in Stanfordville, New York and moved away from New Canaan.  He lost touch with Johnson.  “I didn’t see him for 15 or more years.  And then I came to New Canaan to see my other friends there. We drove down his driveway late in the afternoon unannounced and I walked across the lawn, and he walked across to me, and we embraced each other, and he said “You’re just in time for martinis.”

It was “as though not a day had passed,” said Johansen.  “He remained, in spite of our differences, my friend.”

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Connecticut Modern, John Johansen, Modern architecture, New Canaan Modern, Philip Johnson, The Glass House

Architecture and Metaphor: The Career of John M. Johansen

by Gwen North Reiss

Of the five Harvard-affiliated architects who came to New Canaan, Connecticut, immediately after World War II, only one is still living.  At 93, John M. Johansen is an unwavering modernist who loves primordial spaces and the thoughtful use of symbol and metaphor as ingredients of design.

John Johansen's Oklahoma Theater Center (originally The Mummers Theater) Photo: Mary Ann Sullivan

When the idea of an oral history project for the Glass House began, its agenda was two-fold: to gather recollections from colleagues of Philip Johnson and David Whitney, and to complement our New Canaan mid-century modern house survey by gathering information about the architects, builders and homeowners.

John Johansen is a strong presence in both categories. With his colleagues from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he moved to New Canaan to set up his own architectural practice. Later they became known locally as the Harvard Five.  Besides Philip Johnson, that group includes Eliot Noyes, Landis Gores, Johansen, and Marcel Breuer.  Breuer, the former Bauhaus director, had been on the faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; the others had all been students together there.  Eliot Noyes was the first of the group to move to New Canaan for its good schools, its a one-hour commute to New York, and its (once upon a time) cheap and available land.  The others soon followed.  They all built their own houses, which they hoped would help get them commissions, a strategy that worked like a charm in the post-World War II boom.

When I ran into Johansen last year at a modern house tour sponsored by the New Canaan Historical Society, he reminded me that there were many important stories still to be told about “the five” as he called them. So this spring, Events and Project Manager Meri Erickson and I made plans to visit him on Cape Cod where he lives now full time in a weathered wood-clad house overlooking coastal conservation land.  He has his own look-out tower with bench seating precariously cantilevered out over the edges of the tower.

Johansen is a pleasure to interview.  Soft-spoken, intelligent and joyful, he thinks in metaphors and speaks in complete sentences.  And as if that weren’t already good enough, he announced to us that he had dressed in a white Shakespearean shirt for the occasion.

Johansen’s architecture is not easily categorized. Among his best known buildings are: the 1970 Mummers Theater in Oklahoma (now called the Oklahoma Theater Center), the 1963 U.S. Embassy in Dublin, and Clark University’s 1969 Goddard Library in Worcester, Massachussetts.

The Goddard Library (1969) at Clark University, Worcester, MA Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan

His modern house designs in New Canaan and elsewhere are wildly different from each other.  “I don’t copy myself,” said Johansen.  “Richard Rogers said copying yourself is suicide.” Johansen was also for many years Philip Johnson’s next door neighbor. (His first house was just behind Eliot Noyes’s Stackpole house.) He studied with Mies, Breuer and Gropius and is married now to Gropius’s daughter Ati. Still firmly in the avant garde, he speaks now to groups on nanoarchitecture and is the author of Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).  His futuristic visions include structures and building materials that on a molecular level will have the potential to change and grow like living organisms. On the side, he has taken up songwriting and is a clever and prolific limerick writer. “Limericks have to have a plot,” he reminded us as he showed us a bound typescript of his verses.

Looking back over his long career in architecture, it is clear that he was closest in philosophy and temperament to his friend and teacher Marcel Breuer.  “Breuer did not like to teach,” he said, “I could see the pained expression after lunch when he opened the door and looked into this vast drafting room with so many eager students.  And then he went to a friend of mind who didn’t work very hard or didn’t have much talent and said “’What has it got with you Brown, love troubles?’”  He encouraged us to invent things.  He was like a child putting things together.  No arrogance at all… [Once] I came up with an idea of having air ducts coming out of the floor to expose everything.  He said “Aren’t you ashamed these sticking out, these little things.”

“He didn’t make very good conversation as Philip Johnson did.  I was always connected with Lajko [Breuer’s friends knew him as Lajko, which Johansen pronounces Loyko].  The gut experience of course was what he felt—not intellectual but gut. In a museum discussion, his opinion about some architect was: ‘He talks the big architecture.’”

If the gut experience was and is primary for Johansen too, it may be in part because of his artist parents. Born in 1916 in New York City, Johansen is the son of two successful portrait painters, both of whom were members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.  “My father and mother had an agreement among themselves that they would never teach us.  Their industry, their work ethic, their talent, their silence, their work inspired my sister and myself.”

John Johansen showing me his house on the Cape

“I came back not to painting but to architecture because I built a boat about 18 feet long when I was 14 years old and sailed it.  It was indicating that I wanted to get into the service arts.  So I say to my students, If you don’t want to perform a service art, get out  now and do easel painting.  And some of them did!”

What Johansen learned from painting, however, stayed with him.  “When you’re a painter, it’s you and the canvas.  No one touches it.  I hold that strongly.  I don’t collaborate with anybody.”

Johansen attended Harvard as an undergraduate and as a student in the Graduate School of Design.  Later he drafted for Breuer and worked for three years for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York. He remembers visiting Eliot Noyes:  “He had the first house in New Canaan. We were dazzled by it.  He said ‘Why don’t you come up here and build?’” In 1950, Johansen bought his own land in New Canaan adjacent to the Glass House, which had by then been completed. His classmate Landis Gores worked closely with Philip Johnson on the Glass House and had already built his own Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired first house in New Canaan.  Johansen remembers “the beautiful freedom of that house.” With his own land, Johansen sold off the upper portion (a piece of which would later be sold to Philip Johnson for his sculpture gallery) and designed what he calls his “upside-down house.”

“That’s somewhat from Breuer,” he said, “it’s the Hungarian farm house with the cattle in underneath—it’s masonry, and the lighter thing’s on top. In the old days in Hungary, they had it open so the heat of the cattle came up.  Whereas in the Cathedrals in the Middle Ages, early Mass was pretty cold.  It was heated only by body heat.  That’s how it became the upside-down house. The sleeping quarters were down below, which allowed you psychologically to go back into the earth and come up in the morning and say “good morning, world.”

In the 1950s, before larger commissions started coming in, Johansen designed a series of houses whose plans were in the shapes of crosses or H’s in New Canaan.  Later, there was a telephone pole house in Greenwich (“it looked like jackstraws”) and a shell house in Southport (a series of concrete shells connected by glass).  The latter two and most of the New Canaan houses have been demolished, a subject which causes Johansen much pain.  “They see a house like mine, so modest and small, sitting on four acres of land, so they tear it down and make it available to two buyers and they put up huge houses…the arrogance.  They’re not houses, there’s not anything inside that indicates human or domestic use.  That’s sacrilege.”

Johansen's 1956 Warner House also known as the Bridge House. Photo by Robert Damora from the New Canaan Modern Homes Survey, Philip Johnson Glass House

Johansen’s Bridge House is the one New Canaan house that has made it into the 21st century unchanged.  A new owner has purchased it and has plans to restore it and add to it.  The Bridge house is a modern Palladian villa, the living room of which spans the Rippowam River.  Four box volumes, 2 on each bank, anchor the structure.  It has a vaulted center ceiling, painted with gold leaf, and dark pink (almost terra cotta colored) stucco on the four volumes that enclose kitchen, bedrooms and study areas.

“I had after the war gone to Italy, Vicenza, studied Palladio and came back amazed at statements by him, his architecture—strength and play—the baroque.  Beautiful.  I was smitten by that.”  Johansen remembers the first siting problem:  “The idea came to me to make a bridge when the client showed me the property they had…I said what about the land next door [across the water], is that for sale?  They said “oh yeah that’s for sale. You’re going to live here looking at a house and you’ll hate each other.  You better buy it.  So he bought it, and that of course in my mind said this is your big opportunity. And then not only was it neo-classical but it was one of the great primordial symbols. The forest of columns, the labyrinth, the cave…this then was the bridge house.”  Johansen remains proud of his strongly symbolic houses.

In his impassioned description of one of his best designs, Johansen is firmly in his element, the territory of symbol and metaphor. “The bridge represents in mythical forms the leaving of one region familiar to you,” he says. “Throw yourself on a bridge and you are separated from time and space and then you find your way down to another reality hitherto previously unknown to you.  This is big stuff. That’s what I tried to bring back to architecture.”

“Modern Architects, Modern Houses” will bring you stories on modern residential design in the U.S.  Some of the subjects will come from the various phases of our Glass House Oral History Project.  Others will feature endangered moderns, new moderns, and people and places that shed light on the modern movement and its 21st century legacy.

In a future blog:  Part II of our interview with John Johansen, which will concentrate on Johansen and Philip Johnson.

Filed under: Modern Architects, Modern Houses, Connecticut Modern, Glass House, Harvard Five, John M. Johansen, New Canaan, Philip Johnson