PHILIP JOHNSON: THE GLASS HOUSE

David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis [Editors]

8.75 x 9.25 book with 174 pages profusely illustrated in black and white and featuring 19 essays by architecture critics and art historians including Arthur Drexler, Robert Hughes, Robert A. M. Stern, Peter Eisenman Kenneth Frampton, Paul Goldberger, Calvin Tomkins and others.

PHILIP JOHNSON: THE GLASS HOUSE is obviously a labor of love for authors David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis -- a visual and verbal diary recoding the first 45 years of the Johnson estate in New Canaan.

THE GLASS HOUSE functions as a scrapbook, collecting and reprinting a wide-ranging selection of magazine features, starting with Philip Johnsonıs own illustrated essay from Englandıs Architectural Review (September 1950) where he elaborates on his influences, including Le Corbusier, Theo Van Doesburg, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Claude Nicholas Ledoux, and Mies van der Rohe.

The Glass House inspired a wide range of feeling in the aesthetic community over the years, with both champions and detractors represented in equal measures. Contemporary audiences have the opportunity to read Kenneth Framptonıs 180-degree perspective shift from 1978 where the author confesses to his anonymous hatchet-job on the Glass House in the pages of Architectural Design in 1950. Frampton duly serves his penance by writing the definitive account of the House in Catalogue 9 (September/October 1978).

"The diary is probably complete. There are some new ideas floating in the peculiar recesses of my mind but there may not be the opportunity to build them here. [Anyhow] I do not need any new architecture here. I like it the way it is." ­ Philip Johnson, 2/3/93

Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.

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