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Christopher Hawthorne previews the restoration of Philip Johnson's Brick House ahead of May reopening

2024-04-29T11:49:00-04:00

The reopening returns a certain architectural equilibrium to Johnson’s estate. The original paired structures, said Kirsten Reoch, who was named executive director of the Glass House campus last summer, “are two parts of a whole. Neither was conceived without the other. So the idea that we’ve been showing and interpreting half the story, it kind of blows your mind.”

The Glass House is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year with a special Paper Log House installation from Shigeru Ban and other public programs through the end of December. Yale’s senior critic Christopher Hawthorne visits the New Canaan, Connecticut, campus for a preview and says, “Bringing visitors back to the Brick House, with its resolute insistence on privacy, is an opportunity to explore the relationship of its architecture to Johnson’s homosexuality,” as well as an opportunity to reexamine its designer’s fraught politics.

The restored Brick House (whose work was overseen by the National Trust’s Mark Stoner) reopens to the public this Thursday, May 2nd.

Shigeru Ban: The Paper Log House opens at The Glass House with the help of Cooper Union architecture students

2024-04-17T06:00:00-04:00

Archinect has received first photos of Shigeru Ban Architects’ new collaborative installation project with students from The Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

A product of this semester’s Building Technology course, Shigeru Ban: The Paper Log House honors the 75th anniversary of one of America’s foremost examples of modernism with a special nine-month run that began this week, April 15th, and will run until December 15th.

Students from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union cut and sort components for the Paper Log House’s top connector in the school workshop. Video still by Hudson Lines

Students slot preassembled sections of paper tube walls into crenelated base panels along the perimeter of the floor. Video still by Hudson Lines

Working together with a team from the Pritzker Prize winner’s New York office, a group of 39 students engaged in a two-day assembly process that created a 13.5 by 13.5-...

Shigeru Ban and the Cooper Union to exhibit Paper Log House at The Glass House's 75th anniversary

2024-02-05T19:37:00-05:00

Shigeru Ban Architects have announced a special project that will help commemorate the 75th anniversary of the realization of Philip Johnson’s soon-to-be restored Brick House, the smaller outbuilding included at the site of the landmarked Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

The firm made public its plans for a collaborative design-build with students from The Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, via LinkedIn.

The project will be enacted on the Glass House grounds beginning April 15 and extending to the 15th of December of this year for public exhibition. On display will be the same Paper Log House prototype Ban and his Voluntary Architects’ Network have deployed recently in Turkey, Morocco, Japan, and Ukraine. Ban says his team will work with a group of 36 students to realize the prototype, marking its first North American installation in six years.

Johnson of cou...

Pavilion inspired by Philip Johnson's Glass House rises in Montréal

2020-05-28T13:08:00-04:00

Inspired by Philip Johnson's Glass House and the Ben Rose House from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a glass-clad pavilion recently completed by Maurice Martel Architecte sits as a tribute to modern architecture in Montréal.

Photos by Adrien Williams.

Complete with a four-season, indoor swimming pool and planted within an expansive, grassy site, this glass pavilion offers refuge for reflection, recreation, and rejuvenation.

Photos by Adrien Williams.

The perimeter glazing gives the flat roof a floating effect and the accompanying skylights offer an ample washing of natural light through the space.

Photos by Raphael Thibodeau.

Inside the pavilion, a core feature is the cylindrical bathroom, clad in red cedar panels, creating a contrast to the white mosaic of the interior.

Photos by Raphael Thibodeau.

Photo by Adrien Williams.

A new ceiling for Philip Johnson's iconic The Glass House

2018-04-30T15:07:00-04:00

The scope of the project included the replacement of the entire plaster ceiling, metal lath, and fasteners. The ceiling replacement began on December 1, 2017 and took approximately three months to complete. The project team included EverGreene Architectural Arts, Silman Structural Engineers, Glass House staff and Ashley Wilson AIA, ASID, Graham Gund Architect of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

To see the new ceiling in person, make plans to visit this summer as The Glass House re-opens May 2018.

Ceiling replacement complete. Photo by Michael Biondo

Two of a kind: photographer Robin Hill contemplates the Farnsworth House and Glass House simultaneously

2015-07-15T17:28:00-04:00

Naturally paired, but too quickly equated. Photographer Robin Hill takes on the iconic and somewhat contending Farnsworth House and Glass House in his photo series, "Side by Side: The Glass Houses of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson". With eighteen magazine-ready spreads, Hill matches shots of each house as a “dyptych”, often aligned to show how one house’s element can be extended into the other, but with clear atmospheric differences. Other shots are paired by their similar perspectives, or proportional beauty – the hinge of the dyptychs serving as the axis of symmetry between the two houses.

The gaze in these photos isn’t critical – the goal doesn’t seem to be to declare a winner in the Glass House battle. Instead the pairings have a composed distance that seems genuinely concerned with illustrating the buildings’ co-evolutionary existence. The series takes a fresh look at these iconic, historical buildings to consider why they appear so similar in the first place, and then br...

Buy a Night in Philip Johnson’s Glass House for $30K at Neiman Marcus

2013-10-16T12:19:00-04:00

Neiman Marcus, purveyor of luxury goods, now also sells luxuries of the architectural variety. As part of its holiday gift catalog, the high-end retailer is offering one night in Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House — for $30,000.