Influential gay architect Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House celebrates fall foliage season with incredible tours and open visitation hours at his former estate in Connecticut.
The National Trust Historic Site is a pastoral 49-acre estate comprised of fourteen structures, including the Glass House (1949). It features a permanent collection of 20th-century paintings and sculptures and temporary exhibitions.
But during the fall, the New England landscape erupts in a riot of color, and where best to view it than a house made of glass?
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Several tours are being offered, ranging from an hour to 2.5 hours. Self-guided tours are also available on Sundays.
From his initial work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which began in 1930 as the inaugural curator of architecture and design, to his prominence in architecture as a practitioner, Johnson’s influence is hard to ignore.
An early proponent of modern architecture who later took various design directions, from postmodernism to explorations of non-Euclidean geometry, Johnson is not easy to pigeonhole stylistically. What is indisputable is that Johnson would go on to build substantial projects worldwide and became one of the central powerbrokers of architecture in America for much of the 20th Century.
Unusually for a man of his generation, Johnson was also openly gay. His longtime partner, David Grainger Whitney, played a critical role in shaping the landscape and collections at the Glass House. Whitney worked as a studio assistant to Jasper Johns, opened a gallery in New York, and served as an art advisor, developing deep friendships with several significant figures in the American post-war art world.
The art on site is all from their combined collection and, for the most part, was produced by artists they knew well. The property was not only their home; it was also a frequent salon for figures in the arts.
Unfortunately, Johnson also espoused fascist, pro-Nazi, and anti-Semitic views in the 1930s. Even though he tried to distance himself from his earlier views starting in the 1940s, the controversy and criticism followed him throughout his career.
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