The Glass House

Definition

The Glass House is Philip Johnson's New Canaan, Connecticut residence (1949) — "a canonical example of high modernist architecture and interior design," in Kevin Melchionne's description: "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" (p. 228). In this wiki the concept is the house as limit case of the hyperorganized interior: "widely hailed as a high modernist masterpiece and… regularly included in surveys of modern architecture" and "at the same time… sneered at for being unlivable" — unlivable "not necessarily because it is aesthetically displeasing, but because it subordinates all other goals to this aesthetic pleasure." The house that "seems to be very much a work of environmental art" (its occupant "immersed in, though not physically subject to, the shifting atmospheric conditions of the outdoors") fails as full-fledged interior design because "it never recedes into the background, never becomes an environment for the practices of everyday life" — and "what a revealing failure it is!" (pp. 228–229). The Glass House is the wiki's name for the modernist masterpiece whose unlivability is diagnostic: it shows, in negative, the art of domesticity that ordinary inhabitation performs.

Key Thinkers

• Kevin Melchionne — the wiki's analyst of the house (1998/2006): the unlivability verdict re-read as evidence ("the attractiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability"); the curator-occupant; the radical aesthete as the person the house would require. (Author page: melchionne-kevin.)
• Philip Johnson — the architect and self-declared inhabitant (not yet paged — see log): "did not design the house for anyone but himself"; the quip that "comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not"; the house "always… more of a weekend retreat from New York," remaining "half stage set, half hotel room" (p. 230).
• Stanley Abercrombie — the boundary-setting dictum (not yet paged — see log): "we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube'" — the claim against which Melchionne stages the Glass House as the strongest counter-case (p. 228).
• Hal Foster — the external critic in the wiki's own raw corpus (Recodings, 1985): the Glass House as modernism's "historical closure," its reinscription of historical forms (Ledoux, Mies, Malevich via Johnson's Writings) as "dandyish, narcissistic connoisseurship" — the utopian and socialist sources of the glass ideal "returned to the private estate."

Related Concepts

• hyperorganized-environment — the house's interior condition: "the extreme orderliness of the house, where even table-top bric-a-brac are discreetly marked with indications of their correct location" (p. 229).
• radical-aesthete — the occupant the house requires: "a special sort of person" living "in perfect harmony with its severe rules" (p. 230).
• art-of-domesticity — what the house's failure reveals: the two arts (making and living) whose separation the Glass House enacts and whose connection it demonstrates (p. 230).
• white-cube — Abercrombie's dictum names the museum condition the Glass House approaches from the domestic side: the interior "entirely given over to an aesthetic vision" (p. 228).
• privacy — the glass wall's contradiction: "The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched" (p. 229); from the street, "one gets a free view into the interior as well."
• dwelling — the Western association the house contradicts: 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" (p. 229).
• modernism — the house as "the characteristic high modernist mode" at its canonical extreme (p. 228).
• schroder-house — the sibling audit: the other canonical modernist house tested against livability and found wanting (Croft's "control, not freedom" reading).
• picture-window — the glass-wall lineage at its limit: the framed view extended to 360 degrees, the wall itself becoming picture.
• sterility-of-perfection — Baldwin's decorated-room version of the same condition: "so beautiful, yet so cold."
• house-museum — the curator-occupant's condition: "preserving the house while living in it" (p. 230) is the house museum's paradox made residential.
• environmental-aesthetics — the frame of the verdict: the house "fails as full-fledged interior design (that is, as environmental art)" (p. 229).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — glass as "a model material" (Part A, ch. II): "A Model Material: Glass"; glass as "the ideal modern recipient" and "the most effective conceivable material expression of the fundamental ambiguity of 'atmosphere'"; "a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch"; and the modern house of glass that integrates "the whole world… as spectacle into the domestic universe."
• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the concept's founding source: the unlivability/celebrity paradox (pp. 228–229); the three-part livability deficit ("comfort, casualness, and a certain degree of dowdy familiarity," p. 229); the revealing-failure thesis (p. 229); the curator-occupant and the radical aesthete (pp. 229–230); the stage-set doubt ("half stage set, half hotel room," p. 230); the composition thesis ("The space is a composition. To move… a piece of the composition is to destroy the work of art," p. 231).
• Raw corpus cross-reference (not a wiki page): Hal Foster's Recodings (1985) names "Philip Johnson's Glass House (1949), in which the reinscription of historical forms becomes a matter of dandyish, narcissistic connoisseurship," with Johnson's Writings (1979, pp. 212–26) documenting the house's sources in Le Corbusier, Mies, Ledoux, Malevich and van Doesburg — "the utopian, the visionary, the socialist returned to the private estate."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the Glass House unlivable as a house or uninhabited as a residence? It is "not his primary residence… more of a weekend retreat" and the property's outbuildings "capture the predictable overflow of 'stuff'" (p. 230): is the unlivability verdict partly about full-time dwelling — and does the house prove the art of domesticity only for part-time, single, served occupants? See radical-aesthete.
• Can habituation win? Melchionne holds the dwelling-association "deeply entrenched" so that "one can never get used to the Glass House" (p. 229) — yet Johnson presumably did. Is the claim about occupants generally, or about the entrenchment of the enclosure-dwelling association itself?
• Foster's ideological reading (the socialist glass utopia "returned to the private estate") and Melchionne's aesthetic-ethological reading (the house that demands too much of the body) agree the house fails socially but differ on why. Can the two be combined — is the hyperorganized interior precisely the private-estate form of the failed collective transparency?
• The house is now operated as a museum (the National Trust for Historic Preservation) — the curator-occupant's fantasy institutionalized. Does the museum condition ("observable but not occupiable," per Macken) confirm that the house was always the museum it has become? See house-museum, spatial-document.