Re-brief 1.0

REVERSE-ENGINEERING AN ICON

I was like the silkworm, making the house in which I was to die.1

In 1946, Philip Johnson designed a house in which to die.

He called this tomb for himself The Glass House, a prismatic box at new canaan, connecticut, which according to the designer himself (in an article in Architectural Review, 1950) incorporated “the latest development in ‘skin and bones’ architecture.” 

Yes, he did stay there (especially during weekends, and at the end of his life) for more than half a century, and it may thus be argued that what he designed was a house in which to live rather than one in which to die. But judging from both the precedents listed in the article quoted above, and from the long-lost brief that Johnson wrote to himself and that is reprinted below, Johnson is stretching his architectural imagination, drawing on as many philosophical sources as he can, in order to create a space in which to lie down and close his eyes for the final time. A building made of glass and sunshine and nature and drops of rain. A carefully cut crystal. A place in which to stop breathing. The final space.

The silkworm’s eggs take about ten days to hatch. Hatchlings eat day and night, and are covered with little black hairs. After they have molted four times, their bodies turn slightly yellow and their skin becomes tighter. The larvae enclose themselves in a cocoon of raw silk. These were Johnson’s notes for making his cocoon:

Notes on The Glass House

Philip Johnson, New Canaan, 1946

The property I have bought in New Canaan will be the ‘diary of an eccentric architect.’ I have already sited The Glass House in the five-acre section. I picked the hill within the first five minutes. There was no hesitation, just as there was no hesitation when the pharaoh Khufu’s architect sited first the Great Pyramid of Giza and then, next to it, the mastabas: flat-roofed, rectangular buildings with outward sloping sides that marked the burial site of many eminent Egyptians of Egypt’s ancient period.

I have a site and I have a name. The house will be made of glass. This is one of Mies’s ideas – he recently showed me the sketches for Edith Farnsworth’s house and convinced me it would be easy to build a house entirely of large sheets of glass.

A site, a name, a material. Not a bad start for someone who tries to brush away the cobwebs of infinite possibilities and establish some way out. So what next?

We cannot not know history. I will use three ‘aspects’ for that awful moment in which I have to face the blank paper on the desk; three aspects that determine the direction of my thoughts; that make the shapes of the building. These aspects are the Footprint, the Aspect of the Cave, and the Work of Sculpture. 

The house will be a sculptural cave (or a cave-like sculpture) to walk through. A space with turns, twists, surprise views, framed landscapes, reflections, refractions – all the wonders of the exterior projected onto the interior during the day, and at night, the interior lighting up the exterior. A silent lantern.  

The Footprint: the richness of processionals. The Cave: the silent emptiness within; Lao-tse’s cup. The Sculpture: I will always be a descendant of the intellectual revolutionaries of the Baroque, and the house will have a cubic, ‘absolute’ form; a pure mathematical shape; a cube, a sphere.

A plain box can hardly be an exciting cave; visit your local auto factory building. Nor does size alone count; once more visit your local auto factory. The modulation of interior space must have complexity. The Glass House will not be your local auto factory. It will be a complex space, positioned in line with the writings of Choisy so that one approaches the buildling on the oblique, its surfaces will become deeper and deeper with each step: almost dangerously sitting on steep cliffside like a Schinkel building.

The glass will be given a certain solidity by the multiple dancing reflections playing within it. Why a house of glass? Because a house of glass contains two worlds in one: the outside looking in, the inside looking out. What is interior, what is exterior? On that last page of the diary, as I enter my mastaba, it will go through one final transformation. I will be inside of the house but then gone, away from this universe. In that moment, the walls will turn inside out. The interior will be outside of the house, the world.

1 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Exemplary Stories, translated by C. A. Jones (London, Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 178