Thursday, May 2, 2024

The Glass House Philip Johnson National Trust for Historic Preservation

glass house ct

Johnson famously quipped that he had the most beautiful and expensive wallpaper the world had ever known. Note that there is no public parking at Glass House itself, nor at the Visitor Center, and all touring guests must enter the grounds via this shuttle. Johnson was wealthy his entire life--born into a rich family, his first fortune as a young man came from the Alcoa stock his father had given him before heading off to Harvard--and over the decades he amassed a staggering art collection. And so in New Canaan Johnson built a pair of galleries to store and display some of this work. Philip Johnson, who died at the age of 99 in 2005, was one of the 20th century's most successful and influential architects, working for 75 years on some of the world's foremost examples of modernist and postmodern buildings. The furniture and artwork form a significant part of the design.

Visit The Glass House

Exhibitions and other programs will allow the public to experience the site in new ways so that the Glass House continues to exist as a site of cultural production, a place of innovation and discovery,” Urbach says. Isay Weinfeld – one of Brazil’s most renowned architects – will discuss his work and current projects, including the new Four Seasons restaurant in New York, with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger. If you’re looking for an outing as you travel through the Northeast, book a tour and explore the Glass House in Connecticut. You’ll be inspired and awed by Johnson’s work and appreciate the beauty of the modern and postmodern design.

Historic Buildings of Connecticut

glass house ct

Mies’s Barcelona furniture is placed in front of Nicolas Poussin’s The Burial of Phocion (1648–1649). In between the dining area and open kitchen stands Elie Nadelman’s sculpture Two Circus Women (1930). A closet behind the Poussin separates the living space from the sleeping area. The Glass House itself is stunning, but there are many other features on the property worth visiting.

Philip Johnson Glass House, Connecticut

Over the decades, Johnson added acreage to the property and continued to design and construct small-scale, almost jewel-box buildings and structures on the land. In 1986, he bequeathed it all to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Two years after Johnson died in 2005 (inside Glass House, by the way), the sprawling site was opened to the public and it has been hosting tours ever since. SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. The 49-acre campus is an example of the successful preservation and interpretation of modern architecture, landscape, and art.

New Canaan's Glass House to open, parking on site - New Canaan Advertiser

New Canaan's Glass House to open, parking on site.

Posted: Thu, 11 Mar 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Pavilion in the pond

Column: With new tech, can CT maintain architectural hub status? - CT Insider

Column: With new tech, can CT maintain architectural hub status?.

Posted: Wed, 28 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

– Enhance your experience at The Glass House with our Digital Guide, a part of Bloomberg Connects. Tours will include the interior of the newly restored Brick House beginning on May 2, 2024.

glass house ct

I finally, in despair of getting the house on the knoll because the knoll is too small, I had to take half the house and put it back against the hill, which is the way it is now. So I put a pavilion out on the end so I could look around the world the way you can from a bandstand in a Middle Western town. You stand on the bandstand in off-season and there’s the town at your feet. In finding that little knoll, I was in the middle of the woods in the middle of the winter and I almost didn’t find it. I found a great oak tree and I hung a whole design on the oak tree and the knoll because this place.

Connecticut Building – Key Recent Architecture

Most of the furniture came from Johnson’s New York apartment, designed in 1930 by Mies van der Rohe. In fact, Mies designed the now iconic daybed specifically for Johnson. A seventeenth-century painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin stands in the living room. The image, Burial of Phocion, depicts a classical landscape and was selected specifically for the house by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. The sculpture, Two Circus Women, by Elie Nadelman stands opposite.

Pick a City/Town

He died in 2005 at 98, and in 2007, the National Trust opened the Glass House property to the public. Also down there, and definitely not undersized, is Johnson's monument to his friend Lincoln Kirstein, who, among many other things, was a co-founder of the New York City Ballet. The 30-foot tower is designed to be climbed (guests are not allowed to do this), which looks way too harrowing but Johnson did it often, and well into his 80s. Please note the Changing Art Gallery and Vicki Netter Fitzgerald Gallery will be temporarily closed to the public between April 30 and June 5, 2024, while we install two new exhibitions. – The Visitor Center is located across the street from the New Canaan train station.

Home of Philip Johnson, one of the 20th century's most influential architects.

On some nights the field opposite the gallery entrance was used for performances, or "happenings," by such luminaries as the Martha Graham Dance Company. The best option is the three-hour "self-guided" tour available on Sundays only, which costs $75 and gives you free reign to wander through all the buildings and across the grounds at your own pace. "Standard" tours last 90 minutes and flash photography is not allowed. There is a pure glass tour that only visits the house and is an hour long. Explore the Glass House campus at your own pace on days dedicated to self-guided visits to the site. Educators will be available across the site to provide information and answer questions.

Glass House is easy to get to from Manhattan, from either Grand Central or 125th Street, via Metro-North. Just take the New Haven line to the New Canaan stop and the train station is conveniently right across the street from the Glass House Visitor Center, where a shuttle van awaits to whisk you off on a five-minute drive to the property. Johnson's Pavilion in the Pond is visible from the Glass House, but if you're on the self-guided tour you can hike down there and check it out up close. This was his library as well, with some 1,400 volumes, only one of which isn't about art or architecture, but a work of fiction. The Glass House itself is the focal point of any tour, whether self-guided or not.

You never know how available parking spaces will be, and you don’t want to drive around to find a place to park and miss your tour time. All children must be at least ten years old to participate in tours, and an adult must accompany them. Car seat regulations prevent the transportation of younger children to and from the Glass House via shuttle bus. The residence Johnson built for himself in 1949 suggests a life pared down to Platonic essentials—and triumphantly ready for fishbowl scrutiny. There is something intimidating to people about the restraint such an existence would demand, as if the house itself were silently judging our own messy choices. Still, the appeal of all that self-control, that rigor, is practically narcotic.

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