See Seagram, Susan Sontag and sun. (Plus Philip Johnson.)

“The Seagram Building gleamed like a switchblade in the autumn sun.”

“The elevator swished up like a gigolo’s hand on a silk stocking….”

–Susan Sontag, (herself as lovely, dignified and interesting as the Seagram.)

.

The Glass House Gang

The Philip Johnson Glass House launches Glass House Openings. Three interesting online videos:
“A Place in History, Vision of Place & Power of Place.”

A film project commissioned on the occasion of the Glass House’s 2007 Inaugural Gala Picnic. These films capture the thoughts (reflections?) of guests who attended the opening of this National Trust Historic Site.

Featuring Paul Goldberger, Hilary Lewis, Kurt Andersen, Julius Shulman, Pentagram, Michael Manfredi, Marion Weiss and others.

Shouldn’t the Farnsworth House (which is even better architecture) and other landmarks do something similar? The web is the way to get people to understand what they should look at. And to whet the appetite.

I also like the Glass House web page called
“Glass House Conversations.”

Philip Johnson’s Glass House has been described as “the longest running salon in America.”

Vincent Scully told the New York Times, “I visited first when the house was under construction, in 1948. And when it was first built it was wide open. Yale students were there every weekend. It was sort of a running seminar. There was always a conversation about architecture. You’d go in and get a martini. It was a real salon — something we don’t have much of in America.”

Looks like a beautiful place to get some therapy.
Just lay back on that daybed…
And Lord knows Philip Johnson needed it.

Designers create places in which they can finally find some comfort, don’t they? The Glass House seems meant to purify. But it’s also an essay in narcissism.

This year the curators have also launched an exciting oral history project:

“Artists from Robert Raushenberg to Frank Stella, architects and scholars from Vincent Scully and Robert A.M Stern, clients such as Gerald Hines, and close friends of Philip Johnson and David Whitney will be target of this Glass House project to capture and collect conversations, musings, and insight from people who frequented and contributed to the Glass House since it’s completion in 1949.”

We need to see more modernist landmarks record their histories and make them available. Now is the time.

via
Top photo: Steve Brosnahan
Second photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
With a shout-out to the “Gas House Gangs” of 1890’s New York and 1934 St. Louis.

Instant Architect

Instant Architect via Coudal

Instant Architect

Instant Architect via Coudal

He said, She said

Philip Johnson

“I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?”

Architectural Digest has a slideshow of quotes from architects.

Designers don duds to visit Philip Johnson’s Glass House

Johnson’s Glass House is about the senses, exhibitionism, display, and class, isn’t it?

Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote
wear Prada and Lanvin.

Matthias Hollwich, Christy MacLear, and Stephen Apking
sport Jil Sander, Calvin Klein and Dior.

Wouldn’t this Men’s Vogue photo shoot look very different in Mies’ less physical Farnsworth House? Wouldn’t they look out of place?
.

Philip Johnson the lonely whore

“Johnson often wept for art. Never for himself, that I know of, and rarely for mankind. His services, like those of most architects, and for which he called himself a ‘whore,’ were for the rich, not the poor. It was all ‘Acropolis’ for him, never really ‘the town;’ for whose complex problems his attention span was too short, and his impatience too demanding. ‘Community’ was not for him. He was fundamentally lonely.”

From a Vincent Scully video you’ll love.

Watch Scully speak of the fireplace and chimney cylinder in

Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. It’s on 47+ acres and will open to the public this April.

Scully quotes an article by Johnson in the Architectural Review.

Philip Johnson:
“The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house, was not dervied from Mies, but rather from a burnt wooden vilage I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.”

Vincent Scully:
“And where had Johnson been likely to see a burnt village, if not in Poland, to which he traveled with the German army in 1939, as correspondent for Father Coughlin’s anti-semitic rag, ‘Social Justice.’

If so, what is this thing doing here? Is Johnson exorcising it all through art? Expiating it through art? Or more likely, is it merely the amoral working in him of the artistic process? Ruthlessly making use of whatever is useful to itself? Whatever the case, he seems compelled to refer to it.”

-E

About 57:00 minutes into Scully’s lecture – he’s got a picture of Mies’ Seagram Building up on the left, he’s trying to explain it, and the slide projector on the right goes out. No Powerpoint for Vincent Scully. It’s very funny. Scully gets very impatient.

“That can’t be! … It’s not working! We are over-mechanized. Ruskin in the 19th century used to have fellows come in carrying big pictures! Much simpler! You must do something!…”

He likes things to work. He gets uncomfortable feeling out of control, all of this in front of one photo of Seagram. “Hope for the best, expect the worst, stiff upper lip….”

And then, an image comes on the right… but the slide is in wrong. Yes its Mies’ Seagram Building, but it’s on its side.

An impossible moment for the rather upright Vincent Scully.

Philip Johnson the lonely whore

“Johnson often wept for art. Never for himself, that I know of, and rarely for mankind. His services, like those of most architects, and for which he called himself a ‘whore,’ were for the rich, not the poor. It was all ‘Acropolis’ for him, never really ‘the town;’ for whose complex problems his attention span was too short, and his impatience too demanding. ‘Community’ was not for him. He was fundamentally lonely.”

From a Vincent Scully video you’ll love.

Watch Scully speak of the fireplace and chimney cylinder in

Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. It’s on 47+ acres and will open to the public this April.

Scully quotes an article by Johnson in the Architectural Review.

Philip Johnson:
“The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house, was not dervied from Mies, but rather from a burnt wooden vilage I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.”

Vincent Scully:
“And where had Johnson been likely to see a burnt village, if not in Poland, to which he traveled with the German army in 1939, as correspondent for Father Coughlin’s anti-semitic rag, ‘Social Justice.’

If so, what is this thing doing here? Is Johnson exorcising it all through art? Expiating it through art? Or more likely, is it merely the amoral working in him of the artistic process? Ruthlessly making use of whatever is useful to itself? Whatever the case, he seems compelled to refer to it.”

-E

About 57:00 minutes into Scully’s lecture – he’s got a picture of Mies’ Seagram Building up on the left, he’s trying to explain it, and the slide projector on the right goes out. No Powerpoint for Vincent Scully. It’s very funny. Scully gets very impatient.

“That can’t be! … It’s not working! We are over-mechanized. Ruskin in the 19th century used to have fellows come in carrying big pictures! Much simpler! You must do something!…”

He likes things to work. He gets uncomfortable feeling out of control, all of this in front of one photo of Seagram. “Hope for the best, expect the worst, stiff upper lip….”

And then, an image comes on the right… but the slide is in wrong. Yes its Mies’ Seagram Building, but it’s on its side.

An impossible moment for the rather upright Vincent Scully.

Philip Johnson the lonely whore

“Johnson often wept for art. Never for himself, that I know of, and rarely for mankind. His services, like those of most architects, and for which he called himself a ‘whore,’ were for the rich, not the poor. It was all ‘Acropolis’ for him, never really ‘the town;’ for whose complex problems his attention span was too short, and his impatience too demanding. ‘Community’ was not for him. He was fundamentally lonely.”

From a Vincent Scully video you’ll love.

Watch Scully speak of the fireplace and chimney cylinder in

Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. It’s on 47+ acres and will open to the public this April.

Scully quotes an article by Johnson in the Architectural Review.

Philip Johnson:
“The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house, was not dervied from Mies, but rather from a burnt wooden vilage I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.”

Vincent Scully:
“And where had Johnson been likely to see a burnt village, if not in Poland, to which he traveled with the German army in 1939, as correspondent for Father Coughlin’s anti-semitic rag, ‘Social Justice.’

If so, what is this thing doing here? Is Johnson exorcising it all through art? Expiating it through art? Or more likely, is it merely the amoral working in him of the artistic process? Ruthlessly making use of whatever is useful to itself? Whatever the case, he seems compelled to refer to it.”

-E

About 57:00 minutes into Scully’s lecture – he’s got a picture of Mies’ Seagram Building up on the left, he’s trying to explain it, and the slide projector on the right goes out. No Powerpoint for Vincent Scully. It’s very funny. Scully gets very impatient.

“That can’t be! … It’s not working! We are over-mechanized. Ruskin in the 19th century used to have fellows come in carrying big pictures! Much simpler! You must do something!…”

He likes things to work. He gets uncomfortable feeling out of control, all of this in front of one photo of Seagram. “Hope for the best, expect the worst, stiff upper lip….”

And then, an image comes on the right… but the slide is in wrong. Yes its Mies’ Seagram Building, but it’s on its side.

An impossible moment for the rather upright Vincent Scully.

That east coast Glass House

lots of links on Philip Johnson

before the Glass House opens to the public in April.

Vincent Scully in print and audio and even video!

These memories are priceless.

Especially David Childs on how “it suddenly and momentarily appeared as a child’s playhouse in the Garden of Eden. The unexpected appearance of innocence and nakedness—it really couldn’t have been staged—suggested its own inescapable metaphor for the Glass House: a naked house, a house with no clothes.”

I doubt the little boy was the only naked young man our Philip saw running around there. We’ve all heard the stories of the voyeurism, and…
I’ll see if I’m free to tell some in print here. Do check back.

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In the meantime,

Mies’ Farnsworth House is pure, right?
lol,
-E