Philip Johnson’s Not Glass Houses The legendary architect and his companion, the curator David Whitney, spent their weekends in the world’s most famous transparent box. Or did they?.image by Dean Kaufman

The legendary architect and his companion, the curator David Whitney, spent their weekends in the world’s most famous transparent box. Or did they?

When Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., was featured in Life magazine soon after its completion in 1949, architects and designers downed martinis at the Oyster Bar, pondering the future of the International Style. But that probably wasn’t what most people were thinking about as they looked at the pictures. They likely leaned back in their Barcaloungers and wondered: How could he actually live in a clear box, without walls, without privacy, without any stuff?

The answer was that despite our indelible impression of Johnson, the owlish man in the dapper suit and those spectacles,­­ spending his incredibly long life (he died at age 98 in 2005) in the 1,800-square-­foot transparent rectangle, silhouetted against a backdrop of greenery that he called “expensive wallpaper,” he never really did live in the Glass House. At least not in the self-­contained sense in which the rest of us occupy our homes.......Continue Reading

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