Cities and Their Territories Writing Assignment

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Cities And Their Territories: The Glass House by Philip Johnson
Introduction
Great artists have in history created amazing landscapes that have served as great inspirations to other artists and creative designers for many generations that have existed and more others to come (Immerman). It is often interesting to see where legendary artists draw their inspiration from and how their residential places look like, and especially a place they call their home. An example of such a unique landscape that great artists left decades ago is the Glass House created by Philip Johnson, an American architect. The Glass House was inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s work. With its unique balance of simplicity and perfection, the Glass House is regarded to be one of the most inspiring works of contemporary architecture (Perez). In 1997, the Glass House was declared an historic landmark and it still remains to be a modern attraction with its beauty and rolling landscape (Perez). The Glass House rests on a 47-acre estate and can be visited in New Canaan, Connecticut (Perez). By analyzing its design, this paper discusses the role nature and human interventions in creating the landscape and how the forces that continue shaping the House of Glass, a National Historic Landmark developed by Philip Johnson and David Whitney.
The Glass House is best known as a dome for watching the adjacent landscape. The 55 by 33 feet house is rarely visible from the road and sits on a point overlooking a pond (The Glass House). The four exterior walls have centrally-positioned glass doors which open onto the landscape. Johnson’s house inspired the International Style into the residential architectural designs in the United States. The house is considered to be iconic due to its innovativeness in material usage and its unified incorporation into the landscape. The architect lived in the Glass House from 1949 until the year he passed on in 2005 (The Glass House). Today, the building and even the décor have not changed from their original design since it was completed in 1949. The furniture for the house was largely sourced from Johnson’s apartment in New York, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1930 (The Glass House). Mies also made the iconic daybed purposely for Johnson. In the living room stands a 17th century painting that is attributed to Nicolas Poussin. The image entitled “Burial of Phocion” portrays a classical landscape and was particularly selected for the first Museum of Modern Art director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. On the opposite side of the house, there stands a sculpture, “Two Circus Women” done by Elie Nadelman. The creation is a minuscule version of a marble sculpture which is the New York State Theatre lobby at the Lincoln Center (The Glass House). Today, the theater is known as the David H. Koch Theatre.
For architectural and landscape design enthusiasts, the Glass House, shown in Fig 1 below, is always a place that artists want to visit. This area became an epitome of the mid-20th century modern architecture that the designers experimented with minimized geometry, stricture, reflection and transparency effects, and proportion (F...