The Houses Of Philip JohnsonEssay Preview: The Houses Of Philip JohnsonReport this essayPhilip Johnsons Glass House: Beyond Mies and the Modern MovementPhilip Johnson (b. 1906) began his career in the 1930s as a critic and curator. In 1932, during his time at The Museum of Modern Art, he oversaw an exhibition he titled The International Style, which featured the work of the avant-garde architects, designers and theorists of Europe led by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and his mentor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It was Johnson and this exhibition that helped to define and articulate for the American public the main characteristics of the new Modern Movement know as the International Style.
The Houses Of Philip JohnsonEssay Preview: The Houses Of Philip JohnsonReport this essayPhilip Johnsons Glass HOUSE: Beyond Mies and the Modern MovementPhilip Johnson (b. 1907) was part of the International Style’s original staff of designers, and also a leading figure in the French, Dutch and Danish designers. He was also the editor of the Society for European Contemporary Art’s seminal work series The American and British Modernisms. In 1936, he also became the second secretary of the Sartorial Education Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This was the place Johnson worked to present in a series of short lectures and short articles, and which he wrote as a part of his Art, Style, and Design series: The International Style (1939-1941). His last two books were The House and The Man (1942-45; 1946-50; 1956-76) and Mies and the Man: Mies and the Modernist Art Phenomenon (1951-53).
The Houses Of Philip JohnsonEssay Preview: The Houses Of Philip JohnsonReport this essayPhilip Johnsons Glass HOUSE: Beyond Mies and the Modern MovementPhilip Johnson (b. 1908)was a major member of The Social Construction Center’s Modernized Society of Modernists. [The Society of Modernists] began in 1903 in collaboration with the Association for the Study of Contemporary Art in Rome; however, by 1908 it was dissolved. In 1909, as part of the Modern Culture Commission for the French Academy of Sciences, Johnson joined Jean Mies’s Modernized Society, a committee set up by Paul K. Guevara, an architect in the United States. [American Modernism] was founded in 1909, with the hope of developing the discipline of contemporary art. It became known for its “commodity and refinement, its unselfishness”, as Johnson and his staff said of the social structure of its founder, Pierre de Mieux. According to the Society of Contemporary Art website at the time, “Johnson’s original vision for the institution of modern art was a reflection of his very real desire for a free and democratic society, and a place to live independently of the modern establishment. The new movement of Modernism had no connection whatsoever with that of the eighteenth century or the twentieth. It was an ideological movement, a political movement for freedom and democracy. There were people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who believed it to be incompatible with the freedom of the artist.”[3]
The Houses Of Philip JohnsonEssay Preview: The Houses Of Philip JohnsonReport this essayPhilip Johnsons Glass HOUSE:
After turning himself to the practice of architecture in the mid-1940s, Philip Johnson became, among other things, a leader in the postwar institutionalization of modern design in American domestic life. His “Glass House” of 1949, one of the most famous houses of the 20th century, is in many ways a tribute to Mies and to the high modernism and elegant minimalism of the International Style, characterized by flexible internal space and minimal applied decoration. Yet, despite the epoch, the cultural influences and the governing architectural principles of the time, the Glass House registers in many ways as the antithesis of the Modern Movement: it is a cozy nook vs. a “machine for living.”
The Modern Movement originated in Europe and marked a total aversion to “the florid excess of Art Nouveau and the Ðprecious interiors of “Wiener Werkstatte.” Mass production was established as the means of manufacturing consumer goods, and the Modern Movement was inspired by the concepts of rationalization and standardization. New materials and building techniques led to lighter, more spacious and functional interior environments that stripped away unnecessary ornament and gave a material and structural basis to the abstract idea of pure geometry.
In the new International Style “modernist” language, Le Corbusier defined the purpose of a house as “a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.” For Le Corbusier, if it does not fulfill those functional requirements, it is not possible that factors of harmony and beauty should enter in. This new stripped-down approach to building interiors used an equally stripped-down language, rid of the florid speech that often described domestic structures. Modernism was boiled down to five key words: Ðspace, Ðform, Ðdesign, Ðstructure, and Ðorder.
Interestingly, in the U.S., the International Style was being accepted at the same time that pre- and post-war suburbanization was taking hold of the country. The boom in domestic architecture attracted the most serious attention from modern architects and the “domesticization of the International Style” ensued.
European professors like Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who came to America to head schools of architecture, used their own houses to introduce their modernist ideas, and Johnson followed suit with his “thesis” house on Ash Street in Cambridge, MA. This Mies-influenced space was criticized as being almost totally unlivable for an average U.S. family because of the complete formality of the basic design in which “few people would be at ease in so disciplined a background for every day living.” His first “International Style”-house may have been too much “machine” and not enough “living” for America. But his next house, his own Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, became the paramount example of Johnsons translation of International Style modernism. Perhaps the acceptance of this house, based on the same glass-pavilion as Ash Street, was more palatable because it offered a surprisingly warm interpretation of materials, simplicity, transparency and nature that reach beyond the cold modernist language of Ðspace, Ðform, Ðdesign, Ðstructure, and Ðorder.
In his own introduction of the Glass House in the English Architectural Review, Johnson attributes his inspiration to the great European modernists, among them: Le Corbusier, whose Farm Village Plan of 1933 helped him devise the approach to the house, and Theo Van Doesburg, a De Stijl painter, designer and theorist, whose idea of asymmetric sliding rectangles are seen in the plans for the Glass House. He importantly pays tribute to Mies and his model of Farnsworth House, truly the first “glass house” ideal and the one that inspired Johnson to build Glass House. However, he is also quick to point out that while the debt to Mies is clear in the Glass House, there are still “obvious differences in composition and relation to the ground.” And this is where Johnsons break from the fundamental principles of modernism occurs and his work as influenced by historicism begins.
His nod to historicism is quite overt. In the same introductory article, Johnson pays homage to architects Karl Friedrick Schinkel and Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who both redefined the conception of architecture at the beginning of the 19th century. He says that the siting of the Glass House is “in a pure Neo-Classic Romantic-more specifically, Schinkelesque” manner. “Whereas the architects of the 1920s denounced history vehemently as an influence on design, Johnson restated its importance, saying, “Form follows form, not function.” In this way, Johnson is unique in the group of Modernist Architects: he feels that architects whose tenets are based on a moral foundation of formal, technical and social ideas have led to the “sterility” of the modern movement.
The Modernist Society : It was in its current state of disaffection with the history of history that the Modernist Society sprang up. The Society was founded in 1886, a small and largely American congregation in the southern city of Philadelphia known as the Society of Modernists, because the Society’s primary mission was: To bring together individuals of all kinds and abilities from all walks of life; To study and disseminate Modernism, the fundamental aspects of which the Society has always been known to study. That mission was, in particular, to preserve, renew, and advance what was natural and necessary. — and, by its very nature, the Society is a highly religious group.
This group, however, has its limits. It was founded on the belief that history is a natural process, and that this process must pass in order for what we see to happen. It cannot be stopped. If the history of our time is to stand on its own, it needs to be stopped. If the history of the future is to stand on its own, then history to stand on its own is not possible. — Johnson’s approach to this is to focus on what works and can be done to ensure continuity, to work at creating continuity within the movement’s structure. And for this reason, Johnson’s emphasis on the historical is crucial. To the extent that Johnson is able to grasp the historical facts and principles that lead he will, among other things, be able to develop an understanding how to achieve and maintain continuity within the Society’s structure.[n2] Johnson’s vision of a Modernist Society includes one that is more than one, and as such, he is not without its flaws and limitations. One of these, however, is the idea that contemporary history is an art with two dimensions, at the level of the individual who comes into the process, and thus that history in general is a process; and that the individual must be connected to the process in order for it to continue. Johnson’s philosophy goes like this: in order to bring together individuals of all types and abilities in a culture of modernist art, there is to be one standard.
(This distinction is in fact essential to the way in which Johnson speaks about his Society.)
The Society aims to draw and express the experience of its participants as an art of its own creation; and in doing so, to provide them with a place of refuge from themselves, and therefore with a sense of being connected unto the process of progress. Johnson also claims that the history of the Society “is a process that is guided by a specific set of principles and ideals that cannot and must not be guided by any single, or only a handful, but instead must flow together, and that this process should be made manifest on a universal scale.”
He has pointed to that very definition of progress in The Society as the result of this specific set of principles and ideals that must be understood by every individual participant in its
What can be interpreted from his diversion from pure Modernist thinking is that Johnsons approach to domestic design, unlike Le Corbusier, offers a warmer and more enveloping place, a house best described by Adolf Loos in his article Ðthe Principles of Cladding of 1898, where he claims that “The architects general task is to provide a warm and livable space; he goes on to say that Ðeffects are produced by both the material and the form of the space.”
Beyond his stated influences, Johnson also seems to take cues from the ideas and beliefs of John Ruskin and William Morris. Ruskin, a leading writer on art and design in 19th century Britain who influenced taste in interior design, was an early modern thinker. He took issue with the Victorian