Living in Glass Houses

Author: Kevin Melchionne Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint of the essay from 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 of the original; Intimus pp. 228–233) Source type: chapter (from Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 228–233) Raw file: raw/chapters/melchionne-2006-living-in-glass-houses.md

Summary

Melchionne — a philosopher of everyday aesthetics — opens from Stanley Abercrombie's dictum that "we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube'" and inverts it: since interior design is an art and we live in interiors, we must also live in art. The essay's case is Philip Johnson's Glass House, "a canonical example of high modernist architecture and interior design" that is "celebrated as great architecture" yet "sneered at for being unlivable." Melchionne argues 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" — its glass walls keep the occupant "perpetually self-conscious of being watched" and its extreme orderliness means "one can never feel truly at home." Yet the failure is revealing: to genuinely understand what it takes to live in the Glass House is to understand "how it is that the ordinary process of inhabiting our homes is an artistic practice, a kind of environmental art." The successful occupant of a hyperorganized environment must be a "radical aesthete" — a curator of the composition whose habit-repertoire is perfectly adjusted to the conception of order embodied in the arrangement of objects — and this limit case exposes what Melchionne terms the art of domesticity: 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," implicating tidying and labour in the art of domesticity.

Key Claims

The Abercrombie inversion: against Abercrombie's claim that "we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube,'" Melchionne objects that "Interior design is presumably an art and since we live in interiors, we must also live in art" — what Abercrombie really 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" (p. 228). The examples: Piet Mondrian's Salon de Madame B., Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau, and "by implication" the Glass House.
Celebrity and unlivability coexist: the Glass House "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" — unlivable "not necessarily because it is aesthetically displeasing, but because it subordinates all other goals to this aesthetic pleasure" (pp. 228–229).
Livability is an aesthetic criterion: "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" (p. 229). Perceived livability is thus a component of an interior's attractiveness, not an alternative to it.
The art-historical and the domestic separate: "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" (p. 229).
The Glass House as failed environmental art: "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" — the definition of environmental aesthetics drawn from F.E. Sparshott's 1972 article (note 3, p. 233) (p. 229).
The watched interior: "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 (the designer Ward Bennett, note 4), mean that one can never feel truly at home" (p. 229).
The dwelling contradiction: "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" — habituation fails against an entrenched association (p. 229).
The revealing failure: "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" (p. 229) — the essay's central methodological move: the limit case as diagnostic of the ordinary.
The curator-occupant: to inhabit 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… The respectful occupant must be a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it. This is clearly a difficult way to live!" (pp. 229–230).
The radical aesthete defined: "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'" (p. 230) — one who "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" (p. 230).
Johnson's self-design: "It is revealing that Johnson did not propose the house as a universal model of 'true living'" — he "did not design the house for anyone but himself"; his quip that "comfort is a function of whether you think a chair is good-looking or not" (via Rybczynski, note 5) shows the radical aesthete's criterion: Johnson "inhabits the house in perfect harmony with its severe rules, which, after all, are presumably his own" (p. 230).
The stage-set doubt, and its irrelevance: 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"; on this reading "the Glass House remains half stage set, half hotel room." But "For my purposes, it scarcely matters whether Johnson is really the radical aesthete that he makes himself out to be" — the point is to "sketch out the domestic practice of this special person – a limit case of sorts" (p. 230).
Art's function stated through the limit case: "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" (p. 230).
Continuity of the extreme and the ordinary: "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" (p. 230).
The art of domesticity defined: "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" (p. 230).
Homemaking completed: "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" (p. 230).
The double achievement of habit: the successful occupant lives "in perfect harmony with its formal configuration and artistic meaning" 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" (p. 231).
Design leads and habit follows: "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" (p. 231).
The space is a composition: "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" — so correct inhabiting "must also be a form of protection of the original composition" (p. 231).
Perfectly habituated neatness: "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" (p. 231).
The body implicated, habit forced: "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" (p. 231).
Why hyperorganized spaces feel 'uncomfortable': "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" (p. 231).
Embodied, 'synaesthetic' pleasure: "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" (p. 231) — "an admittedly obscure kind of aesthetic experience. But I believe that it is very common" (p. 231).
Nonradical bodily awareness: "The sense that one cannot relax or slouch in a hyperorganized environment, that one must sit up 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" (pp. 231–232).
The social distribution of radical aestheticism: "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. 232).
The headnote (editors): "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."

Connections

Concepts: glass-house, radical-aesthete, art-of-domesticity, hyperorganized-environment, environmental-aesthetics, tidying, habit, dwelling, domestic-interior, aesthetic-experience, white-cube, privacy, comfort, homeliness, interior-design, occupant-as-designer, sterility-of-perfection, interiority, everyday-life, modernism, spectacle

Authors: melchionne-kevin, taylor-mark-preston-julieanna

Debates: everyday-vs-iconic-architecture — the debate's opposition staged at domestic scale: the house "celebrated as great architecture" and simultaneously "sneered at for being unlivable"; the art-historical splash "separate from the more mundane pleasures of domestic life"

Related source notes: 'House Beautiful' (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the interview-evidence counterpart: cleanliness/tidiness as the moral standard bearing "a burden of constant effort," the labour Melchionne implicates in the art of domesticity; The Sterility of Perfection (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the decorator's "awful sterility of perfection" against the rule-breaker's lived room, the same opposition as the Glass House vs. the dumpy room; Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — the other modernist-house livability audit (the Schröder House's "comfort, not freedom" register); Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — "long-standing habits in building and living patterns" as the dwelling's ordering force, here inverted (design ordering habit); Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — the habit/inhabit pairing and the stuff spectrum whose "trash" pole the Glass House exiles to its outbuildings; The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski 2000) — the everyday-aesthetics programme (repetition, home, habit) whose aesthetic affirmation Melchionne's argument operationalizes; Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the occupant-arranger whose "lack of control over the end product" the curator-occupant refuses; Documenting interiority (Macken 2018) — the preserved interior that "resists inhabitation," the curator-occupant's condition made institutional; Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the "pristine, untouched" representation the Glass House enforces against habitation's traces; Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the white cube lineage Abercrombie's dictum names; Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the care-work whose aesthetic recognition Melchionne's homemaking thesis extends.

Direct Quotes

"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." (editors' headnote, p. 228)

"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."' 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." (p. 228; Abercrombie quoted from A Philosophy of Interior Design, 1990, p. 135)

"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." (p. 228)

"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." (p. 228)

"At the same time that Johnson's house is celebrated as great architecture, it is sneered at for being unlivable." (pp. 228–229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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, mean that one can never feel truly at home." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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." (p. 229)

"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 way to live!" (pp. 229–230)

"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.'" (p. 230)

"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.'" (p. 230)

"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." (p. 230)

"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." (p. 230)

"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." (p. 230)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"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." (p. 231)

"The sense that one cannot relax or slouch in a hyperorganized environment, that one must sit up 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." (pp. 231–232)

"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." (p. 232)

"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. 232)

Open Questions

The elided half: the excerpt cuts off mid-argument ("(… p 193)"); the original essay runs to p. 200 of JAAC 56.2 (1998). The full version presumably carries the environmental-aesthetics argument (framed by Sparshott's "Figuring the Ground") through the domestic interior to its conclusion. What falls in the gap — and does the full essay generalize the art of domesticity beyond the limit case?
The gender of the labour: the chapter names "the important care-work that often characterizes domestic responsibilities" and the wealthy who "can pay to have someone else maintain, that is, clean up, the rarefied design" — but the analysis never asks who tidies. The radical aesthete's autarkic self-indulgence and the rich family's paid cleaner are the two answers, both leaving the feminist housekeeping question (Madigan & Munro's "burden of constant effort") untouched: is the art of domesticity an art performed on an invisible under-labourer's work? See tidying, gender-and-the-interior.
Perfect habituation vs. brief habits: Melchionne's successful occupant needs "perfectly habituated" neatness; Spuybroek's Nietzschean alternative prizes "brief habits" against unconscious fixation. Is the radical aesthete's habit-repertoire the perfection of dwelling or its ossification — habit at the point where it can no longer absorb change? See habit.
Is livability an aesthetic criterion? "the attractiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability" and livability includes "a certain degree of dowdy familiarity": if the dowdy is part of the interior's beauty, can design aesthetics theorize it — or does the dowdy mark exactly what the aesthetic tradition (built on refinement and intensification) cannot value? See homeliness, comfort.
A house for anyone but himself: Johnson "did not design the house for anyone but himself," and the house is a weekend retreat "half stage set, half hotel room" whose outbuildings capture the "overflow of 'stuff.'" Is the art of domesticity therefore an art whose masterpiece is uninhabitable as a residence — and does the limit case prove the rule only because the rule (daily living) is absent? See glass-house, radical-aesthete.
The curator and the museum: the respectful occupant is "a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it" — the Glass House lived-in as a house museum that sleeps someone. Is the curator-occupant the contradiction that shows living-in-art to be a category error (preservation and inhabitation are opposed practices, per Downey and Macken), or a genuine third term the house museums never attempt? See occupant-as-designer, house-museum, spatial-document.