Living in Glass Houses

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Kevin Melchionne

In this exposition on aesthetics and the interior, Kevin Melchionne proposes that Philip Johnson's Glass House is a particularly hyper-organised interior environment that has a conception of order embodied in the arrangement of objects. Understood this way, domesticity becomes both an act of making and an art of living, implying that domestic practice is aesthetically and artistically significant. This notion is further expanded upon through the proposition that it implicates 'tidying' and labour in the art of domesticity.

In his Philosophy of Interior Design, Stanley Abercrombie writes that 'we can live happily with art – some cannot live happily without it – but we cannot live in art or even in a "white cube."'¹ This is a strange assertion by someone writing a book on interior design theory. Interior design is presumably an art and since we live in interiors, we must also live in art. Of course, what Abercrombie means is that we cannot live in interiors entirely given over to an aesthetic vision and, consequently, divorced from all consideration of what it might really mean to inhabit them. Abercrombie's examples include Piet Mondrian's Salon de Madame B. and Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau. I think we could add, by implication, a number of what are typically thought of as extreme examples of modern architecture, notably Philip Johnson's notorious Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.² The Glass House is a canonical example of high modernist architecture and interior design. The walls are made of plate glass, enclosing the structure while retaining a complete 360-degree view of the property outside. From the outside, one gets a free view into the interior as well. The interior itself is sparsely but carefully furnished in the characteristic high modernist mode.

Johnson's Glass House captured a great deal of attention when first built. It is still widely hailed as a high modernist masterpiece and is regularly included in surveys of modern architecture. At the same time that Johnson's house is celebrated as great architecture, it is sneered at for being unlivable. Despite its art-historical significance, the Glass House is

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thought by most to be unlivable not necessarily because it is aesthetically displeasing, but because it subordinates all other goals to this aesthetic pleasure. If the interior of the Glass House is thought of as ugly by many, it is perhaps because the attractiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability. The Glass House lacks what we judge today as livability: comfort, casualness, and a certain degree of dowdy familiarity. The building serves more to make an aesthetic point or an art-historical splash, and these motivations turn out here to be separate from the more mundane pleasures of domestic life.

At first glance, the Glass House seems to be very much a work of environmental art. Surrounded by glass walls, the occupant is immersed in, though not physically subject to, the shifting atmospheric conditions of the outdoors. Perhaps no other house allows the occupant a more intimate sense of its natural surroundings. But is this what is meant by an environmental aesthetic of domestic space? A basic precept of any introductory interior design course is that the role of interior design is to provide artistically satisfying and practically effective solutions to the organization of the environments in which we must do particular things, like cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, and lounging. The art of domestic interior design would be to create an environment that facilitates domestic practice while at the same time making the environment worthy of aesthetic attention and admiration. On this view, the Glass House fails as full-fledged interior design (that is, as environmental art) because it never recedes into the background, never becomes an environment for the practices of everyday life.³ The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched; the sparseness of the furnishings and the extreme orderliness of the house, where even table-top bric-a-brac are discreetly marked with indications of their correct location,⁴ mean that one can never feel truly at home. The Glass House contradicts the long-standing Western association of dwelling with enclosure, privacy, and relaxation. As these tendencies are deeply entrenched, one can never get used to the Glass House and so can never truly inhabit it. But what a revealing failure it is! It is my contention that to genuinely understand what it takes to live in the Glass House will bring us a long way in understanding how it is that the ordinary process of inhabiting our homes is an artistic practice, a kind of environmental art.

On the conventional view of interior design sketched above, to truly inhabit the Glass House would require that one 'fix' it by adding some rooms off the back, walling in some of the plate glass, and introducing more furniture and clutter. But then, the building would no longer be the Glass House, the work of art designed by Philip Johnson. In order to live in a work of art, one must respect it as a designed product, that is, one must live according to its rules. This means not moving the furniture or adding objects, lest the composition be destroyed. It also means making sure that mess and clutter do not take over such that we can no longer see the original artistic creation. The respectful occupant must be a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it. This is clearly a difficult

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way to live! Nonetheless, it is possible to inhabit the Glass House, but obviously one must be a special sort of person whom I shall term a 'radical aesthete.'

It is revealing that Johnson did not propose the house as a universal model of 'true living.' As he famously retorted to one visitor who expressed her aversion to living in it, Johnson did not design the house for anyone but himself. Johnson seems to embody this radical aestheticism; he gives to the search for aesthetic pleasure more importance than most people and is perfectly satisfied to live in ways that others perceive as dreadfully uncomfortable, even inhuman. In another of his famous quips, Johnson says that 'comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not.'⁵ Thus, we can assume that Johnson does not experience the Glass House as uncomfortable. Rather, we should believe that Johnson inhabits the house in perfect harmony with its severe rules, which, after all, are presumably his own. Johnson never feels compelled to drag in a book case or a dumpy chair found at a tag sale, leave his clothes on the floor or let dishes pile up in the kitchen sink for days.

But perhaps Johnson does not really live in the Glass House as most people live in their houses. After all, the Glass House is not his primary residence. It has always been more of a weekend retreat from New York. There are numerous outbuildings on the property, probably serving to capture the predictable overflow of 'stuff' from the architectural masterpiece. Perhaps Johnson only pretended to live in the Glass House in order to make an aesthetic point or to promote himself as an architect. On this view, the Glass House remains half stage set, half hotel room. Were this an accurate representation of his intentions, Johnson's aestheticism would be posturing. For my purposes, it scarcely matters whether Johnson is really the radical aesthete that he makes himself out to be. It is possible to imagine how he would have to live were he to live in the house as it was supposed to be lived in, that is, to live in it in a way that respects it as art. We can still sketch out the domestic practice of this special person – a limit case of sorts – to help explain how living in a house on a daily basis can be seen as an environmental art.

Perhaps the Glass House is unlivable as a domestic space; but as a work of fine art, the Glass House does exactly what it is supposed to do, namely, to refine and intensify experiences already available to us in everyday life. Though the severity of the Glass House will strike many as perverse, I will argue that it is only an extremely refined version of what any sensitive homemaker creates. The Glass House helps us to see what I term the art of domesticity. The art of domesticity means not just that the house is art, but that the very way of living in it is also an art, made and remade on a daily basis. As we shall see, these two arts, making and living, are connected. Along with the important care-work that often characterizes domestic responsibilities, this is what I take to be the genuine meaning of the term homemaking.

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The successful occupant of the Glass House or any other pristine, severe, and hyperorganized environment lives in the house in perfect harmony with its formal configuration and artistic meaning. On a daily basis, one achieves this harmony by developing a repertoire of habits that simultaneously achieves two things: first, it allows one to do everything one normally does in a home; second, our habits ensure that we always do these things in a way that respects and reflects the artistic integrity of the space.

In a hyperorganized environment, design leads and habit follows. The house is a spectacle to which the inhabitant must adjust. The practice of dwelling must respond to the conception of order embodied in the arrangement of objects. Johnson has created an ideal space, characterized by a clear exposition of formal principles like symmetry, unity, and harmony, in relative abstraction from conventional lifestyle patterns marked by privacy, informality, and comfort. As we have already noted, everything in the Glass House has a place. The space is a composition. To move (at least on a permanent basis) a piece of the composition is to destroy the work of art. Thus, the correct manner of inhabiting the Glass House must also be a form of protection of the original composition. To maintain the composition, the true occupant would have to return everything to its spot. Insofar as sustained domestic practice requires that household objects are used as a matter of unconscious habit, to correctly use them and return them would mean that one's habits are perfectly adjusted to the composition. Someone who habitually puts things back in their places has a habit-repertoire that is fully responsive to the organizational and aesthetic terms of inhabited space. Consequently, in order to successfully inhabit the Glass House, one would have to be extremely, perhaps perfectly neat and organized; neatness and organization would have to be perfectly habituated.

Rather than organizing the space around pre-existing habits, the body is implicated in the idealized order of the Glass House. Domestic practice becomes the art of maintaining the discipline of implication in the order, of more or less forcing habit to follow aesthetic conception. This explains why formal and hyperorganized spaces are felt to be 'uncomfortable' and their radical aestheticist occupants subject to the pop-Freudian epithet anal. The spaces demand too much. But the radical aesthete is less bothered than others by this imposition. The embodied experience – one might say, 'synaesthetic' – of being inside, indeed, part of the composition induces in the radical aesthete the greatest of pleasures. Pleasure resides in the implication of the body in an aesthetically pleasing scheme, not just experience of space as an aesthetically pleasing visual field.

This is admittedly an obscure kind of aesthetic experience. But I believe that it is very common. The fact that even nonradicals (who might still be aesthetes in some less extreme sense) are aware of the way spaces make aesthetic demands on the body can be seen in the discomfort felt by the nonradical in the formal environment. The sense that one cannot relax or slouch in a hyperorganized environment, that one must sit up

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straight, reveals that even the nonradical is aware of the way some spaces seem to require our bodies to aesthetically conform. Unlike the radical aesthete, the nonradical perceives the space as a nest of prohibitions. For the same reason, the fastidious feel uncomfortable in a dumpy room, where the dusty couch invites slouching and where 'good manners' come off as arrogance.

Unlike the radical aesthete, most people today tend to resent immensely the demands of formal rooms. While many are impressed by the strictly designed spaces of which Johnson's Glass House is the extreme example, few wish to live in them. Most of us lack the proper repertoire of habits. Even if we wanted to cultivate such a repertoire, our lives are simply too confusing and overloaded to do so. Not surprisingly, this radical aestheticism is usually practiced by single people living tranquil lives of autocratic self-indulgence or very wealthy families who can pay to have someone else maintain, that is, clean up, the rarefied design. (… p 193)

Notes

1 Stanley Abercrombie, A Philosophy of Interior Design, Harper and Row (New York), 1990, p 135.

2 Philip Johnson, The Glass House, David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis (eds), Pantheon Books (New York), 1993.

3 With this definition of environmental aesthetics, I am relying upon Sparshott's now classic article on environmental aesthetics: FE Sparshott, 'Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environment', The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol 6 no 1, 1972, pp 11-23.

4 As remarked by the designer, Ward Bennett, in Julie Iovine, 'Is There an Art to a Well-Placed Chair?', The New York Times Magazine, 12 March, 1995, p 72.

5 Philip Johnson, Writings, Oxford University Press (New York), 1979, p 138. Cited by Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Viking (New York), 1986, p 211.

Kevin Melchionne, 'Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol 56 no 2, 1998, pp 191-200.

Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

(Excerpt pp 191-3)

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