The Glass Latty

Andy Warhol in Philip Johnsons Guest Brick House, 1964.

From the book "A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol" by David McCabe
The Glass House Archives www.theglasshouse.org

Federico Ortiz
The Subject of Architecture
Douglas Spencer MA HCT 2016

Normally, the Glass House is seen as a single building standing alone in the middle of the
prairie. However, the House is actually a group of buildings designed by Philip Johnson in
the span of almost fifty years. In that sense, it was Jeffrey Kipnis (1993, p.xi) that perfectly
described the Estate "as a collection of buildings, pavilions, and folies assembled by Philip
Johnson the Curator, as a working sketchbook drawn by Philip Johnson the Architect, as
an evolving microcosm designed by Philip Johnson the Landscape Architect, as a diary
reflecting upon developments in architecture written by Philip Johnson the Critic-Historian,
or as a publicity event of remarkable longevity choreographed by Philip Johnson the Media
Star. Nevertheless, these buildings are never described as a house lived by Philip Johnson
the Gay Architect.
Though revolutionary in those years, a transparent glass house for a gay couple in the
suburbs, clearly not a house for a traditional nuclear family of the United States in the
1950s; the house, however, does not resist a queer spatial analysis limited for instance to
the idea of the closet,1 that kind of analysis only reinstates the heterosexual/homosexual
duality, that at the end is functional to heteronormativity and patriarchy. In this case, I will
attempt to make a re-reading of the Glass House, understood as the group of buildings
developed by Philip Johnson and David Whitney from 1945 to 1995, through or together
with overlapping narratives that developed along those years, that might give us a different
approach to both the house and the architect. Furthermore, I intend to make visible how
the distribution and organization of objects and bodies produce certain identities and
subjectivities, specifically a certain kind of gay male subjectivity.
It starts like this: in 1946, the architect Philip Johnson bought a five-acre piece of land in
New Canaan, almost 50 miles from New York. By 1949 a completely transparent metal,
glass and brick pavilion would stand in the middle of the landscape next to an almost
totally hermetic prism, those were the Glass House and the Guest Brick House, where
Johnson would respectively live with his boyfriend David Whitney and would receive all
kind of guests from artist like Andy Warhol to architects like Mies van der Rohe, one of the
references for the design of the house.
After the second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union fought for the
political, economical, and cultural control of the world in what was known as the Cold War.
The 50s was also the time in which colour television would become massively popular in
the States. In 1954, the most famous sitcom was The Marriage, which pictured the life of a
traditional family made of a heterosexual couple, the husband and the wife, and two kids,
the boy and the girl. By 1959, everyone in the States could watch vice president Nixon
next to USSR leader Khrushchev, looking straight into the camera trying to convince the
audience who, whether capitalism or communism, was most advanced in producing all
kinds of consumer goods. The so-called Kitchen Debates in the context of the American
National Exhibition in Moscow, put the whole (production, reproduction, and consumption)
domestic space of the American nuclear family and its suburban house in the centre of
the conflict (Colomina, 2004, p.16). The US most effective weapon was the family house
and it was live on TV.

1

For another kind of analysis of the Glass House see Betsky, A. (1997) Queer Space: Architecture and SameSex Desire. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. pp. 114-117 and Friedman, A. T. (1998) Woman and
the making of the modern house. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. pp. 147-156.

In the middle of the 50s Johnson made the first addition to the Glass House, he more
specifically refurbished the Guest Brick House. Claiming inspiration from Sir John Soanes
Breakfast Room, the architect added a room within a room, a double-domed device to
control the light coming into the room. Perhaps one of the first postmodern buildings, this
little room, challenged the norms of the International Style created by Johnson himself
twenty years before. One of the queerest spaces of the Glass House, possibly
comparable to a brothel, a boudoir, or a closet; except who was in the closet now? A
straight guest in a closet and a gay couple in a glass house? The Glass House has no TV,
nor is it a house for a nuclear family of husband, wife and two kids, even though it is a
suburban house.
Meanwhile, other kind of domestic space challenging the norm of the family lifestyle in the
50s was emerging in another media: the Playboy apartment. In the magazine, a
description of the ideal apartment was trying to establish a new kind of subject, the urban
bachelor. A set of objects, technologies and products would try to put in place a sexual
identity for the heterosexual male urban bachelor, what space he was supposed to inhabit
and what things he was supposed to consume (Sanders, 1996). Next to modern
domestic spaces and furniture, sexual desire became another kind of commodity, a
product to be consumed.
However, I would argue that, with the apartment, Playboy was probably trying to address
another audience: gay male subjects interested in modern architecture and design. After
all, it was the Cold War and strong anti-gay policies and persecution would seem enough
reason to go undercover or to stay in the closet. Not a queer magazine, but a publication
for an urban bachelor subculture that would go hand in hand with the development of the
gay world (Chauncey, 1996). The description of the Playboys Penthouse Apartment
(Sanders, 1996, p.53) could be the description of Philip Johnsons Glass House or any
other gay male apartment. Except for one short comment on how the Knoll cabinet with a
built-in bar would help the bachelor retain the young lady while he is with her preparing
drinks in the same room, all other mentioned visitors to the apartment have no gender:
companions, guests, intended quarry, folks, audience, drop-in guests, or planned
pleasures. The Glass House could be seen as a Playboy bachelor apartment, an
alternative to the family house; nevertheless, it was not an urban house, it was never part
of any kind of urban movement.
The 60s saw the rise of the anti-war and civil rights movements. In this context of militancy
for liberation, the gay movement started to emerge in major metropolitan areas. 1969 was
a definite year in which after the Stonewall Riots in New York the gay community would
start to be defined as a strong political movement that would fight for an alternative way of
living away from heteronormativity. Come out, buy gay, live gay, were important
strategies in that time towards the construction of a solid visibility and a clear territorial
occupation of an oppressed part of society (Castells, 2002, p,188). During the 60s and
specially the 70s, the gay community managed to move away from obscure marginal
spaces and started becoming an integral part of society mostly by the creation of a
lifestyle. In the 60s Philip Johnson started dating David Whitney, an art curator that would
become also Philips adviser for buying art. Between 1962 and 1970, they added three
new buildings to the Glass House: the Pond and Pavilion (1962), the Painting Gallery
(1965) and the Sculpture Gallery (1970).

The last two are basically art galleries, to store and display the works of art that the couple
were buying together; they consumed artist like Johns, Warhol, Stella, Heizer, Salle,
Schnabel, and Fischl. Therefore, I would like to focus on the Pavilion floating on the
Pond. The artificial body of water was excavated in 1961 and by 1963 a small out-of-scale
construction stood up. Its purpose is not clear, it is useless, it has no specific program. It
is a piece of landscape architecture. Writing for Show magazine in 1963, Johnson not only
shows his most conservative side, saying that masculine is a tree house, feminine is a
dollhouse, and beauty is blonde; but also he explains the Pavilion as a playhouse for
adults. Suddenly, it becomes an observation point, a moon-viewing deck, a gazebo and a
place to walk to from the House to see back at it. Even though it had no apparent
function, Johnson counts four rooms: the Entrance Hall, the Library, the Living Room and,
my favourite, the Boudoir (Whitney and Kipnis, 1993, pp. 24-25). As Bonnevier (2005,
p.166) describes it, Historically, the boudoir is the first domestic space devoted
exclusively to female use and can be compared to the male marked study or cabinet. The
term boudoir has not only feminine connotations but is charged with sexual pleasure and
privacy. Johnsons description of the Pavilion is all about pleasure and intimacy, the
pleasure of being in a false scale, feeling big or small, isolated from the world. Moreover,
he talks about this space in terms of sport, which together with the pool and canals that
run in and out of the rooms, could open up for another reading of this building as other
two queer spaces: the Gymnasium and the Baths, or the gym and the sauna today.
(Betsky, 1997, pp.30-40)
The oil crisis in 1973 forced rationing in the use of resources and a control in
consumption. The Glass House was almost closed during those years and it certainly
became less active; specifically, in terms of construction there was not a single new
building in ten years. The gay community was shocked in the early 80s by the appearance
and the consequently mass spread of the AIDS epidemic that ended with the life of
thousands of people, most of them white men in their thirties. A whole generation was
confronted with a big loss and solitude, as a friend once told me you would look around
and all your friends, who you thought you would grow old with, were gone. The Federal
government and the LGBT movement started fighting the epidemic, which is still today
affecting many people, especially racial minorities and MSM (men who have sex with men,
a term used to refer to men sexually active with persons of the same sex, regardless how
they identify themselves), affected by stigma and discrimination, homophobia, poverty,
unemployment and lack of access to health care.
Philip Johnsons personal study was built in 1980. It was a place for retirement, for
isolation and introspection. If the feminine boudoir was in the pavilion, this was the
masculine studio or cabinet, or maybe it is a proof of the stupidity of such distinction.
Two more structures were added in 1984/5: the Lincoln Kirstein Tower and the Ghost
House. The first is a monument to Johnsons friend, who was a poet, the founder of the
NYC Ballet and also gay. The sculpture is meant to create a visual vertical hiatus in the
landscape but it is also an experiential object as it is meant to be climbed, a staircase to
nowhere. The second is two halves of an iconic-house-shaped fence to keep animals
away from a lilies garden, a reference to the work of Venturi, Scott Brown and Gehry, or a
comment on loss, disappearance or invisibility, since according to Johnson, depending on
the viewer the Ghost House either exists or not.

In keeping with the aesthetic emphasis on cultural forms, style becomes an increasingly
crucial marker of social value and identity. While the term has a more restricted
sociological meaning in reference to specific status groups, lifestyle as a way of making
sense of social relations crystallized in the 1980s in the United States as new forms of
middle-class professionalism became the focal point for heightened involvement in
consumption and the promotion of cosmopolitanism. In Profit and Pleasure, Rosemary
Hennessy (2000, p.132) rethinks the relationship between capitalism and sexual identities,
explaining how in late capitalism a process of commodification stands behind the visibility
of sexual identities, simultaneously rendering invisible not only the lives of others but also
the divisions of work and capital behind them.
The consolidation of a gay subjectivity through visibility that was once so effective in
creating a political and territorial movement, has become in late capitalism in the hands of
corporate interest, a tool to produce new lucrative markets and gentrification. There has
certainly been an assimilation of gays into mainstream middle-class culture, but it is limited
to the idea of not a social subject but a consumer subject, a subject that can create a
nuclear family unit to benefit the production and reproduction of the capitalist system.
Behind this, still stand values of patriarchy and heteronormativity and the intention to make
invisible and silence other voices. As Hennessy (2000, p.140) puts it, Redressing gay
invisibility by promoting images of a seamlessly middleclass gay consumer or by inviting us
to see queer identities only in terms of style, textuality, or performative play helps produce
imaginary gay/queer subjects that keep invisible the divisions of wealth and labor that
these images and knowledges depend on. These commodified perspective blot from view
lesbians, gays, and queers who are manual workers, sex workers, unemployed, and
imprisoned.
In 1995, Philip Johnson opened his last building in the Glass House, Da Monsta. Taken
from a sculpture of Frank Stella, the shape of the building also reminds us of the Gehrys
early exploration in 3d modelling techniques and Bilbao. The building, or living thing as
Johnson would call it, functions as a visitor centre. Yes, the house is now officially open to
the public. We are invited to explore, look and consume all the architects creations in
these 50 years. It is the ultimate commodification of a domestic space, a professional
work, and a private life, that still refuses to be read in conflict with class, race and gender
questions. Philip Johnson and David Whitney died in 2005 and since 2007 the House is
run by The National Trust for Historic Preservation (Johnson donated the House to the
Trust in 1986). Today, you can take a tour around the house paying from 25 to 100 USD
or you can even rent the house for a dinner party for 25,000 USD.
Finally, I should emphasize that this was an attempt, perhaps too ambitious, to re-read
Philip Johnsons Glass House, through a programmatic reading of all the House
components and a personal association of the buildings as program with overlapping
narratives that developed in a 50 years time.

Philip Johnson was gay. His boyfriend was David Whitney. They lived together in the Glass
House. Why is this important? Is it relevant to make this clear? Yes, it is. In a profession
ruled by heteronormativity we cannot continue to have the privilege to take gender issues
as something irrelevant or even funny. The profession has to be able to produce
professionals that can be personally involve in gender, class and race struggles.2 Visibility
within the discipline is a main step towards a critique of the heteronormative matrix
underlying it. In A queer analysis of Eileen Grays E.1027, Katarina Bonnevier (2005), reading
Judith Butler, suggests that the heterosexual matrix describes an invisible norm which
does not appear to be constructed but comes through as natural () The norm
inscribes other ways of living with unnaturalness, deviance or invisibility. The heterosexual
matrix is a precondition for how we understand our built environment. I would add that it
also defines how we built that environment and how we position ourselves as workers
within the environment.
However, I tried to show how visibility itself can turn against a group that is fighting for its
rights, when commodified, when co-opted by the same patriarchal and heteronormative
system that it is trying to critique, in order to avoid binaries and limited categories. From
Philip Johnsons group of buildings in a now 50-acre site in New Canaan to Misterbnb,3
the gay Airbnb platform where homes of gay people are offer to be rented in not cities all
over the world but specific neighbourhoods or so called gay villages, commodification
and gentrification have entered the domestic and urban spaces of the gay community
depicting it as a specific niche market and limiting it to a specific representation based on
homonormativity. As we have seen, architecture and architects play a fundamental role not
only in the production of certain subjectivities but also in the visibility and invisibility of the
LGBT community. It is our responsibility to tackle these issues and to talk about them
within academic and disciplinary circles that usually present themselves as detached from
broader social concerns.

Regarding class and race issues, it is interesting to point out that Philip Johnson was basically rich and Nazi.
Or at least he was the son of an upper-middle class family and before 1940 he was sympathizer of Hitler and
his ideas, a fact that is still controversial and usually not widely acknowledged within the canonical discourses
or narratives of the discipline. It is not the aim of this essay to discuss such concerns, therefore I would suggest
Kazys Varnelis essays on these topics (see References). Furthermore, as I was writing this essay, a new book
entitled 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, A Divided America in a World at War was published by Grove Atlantic
(NY) and written by journalist Marc Wortman, in which he tracks Philip Johnsons connection to the Nazi regime.

www.misterbnb.com

* In reference to the title of this essay, Latty means house. It is a word from Polari, a kind of language or slang
used in Britain in the early 20th century mainly by underground gay subcultures in order not to be recognized
as homosexuals (it was a crime) and as opposition to mainstream society.

References
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Governance, Urban Studies, 41 (9), pp. 1807-1820.
Betsky, A. (1997) Queer Space. Architecture and Same-sex Desire. New York: HarperCollins.
Bonnevier, K. (2005) A queer analysis of Eileen Grays E.1027 in Heynen, H. and Baydar, G.
(editors) Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture. New
York: Routledge. p.162
Castells, M. (2002) Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation and Urban Structure: The Gay
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Colomina, B., Brennan, A., and Kim, J. (editors) (2004) Cold War Hothouses. Inventing
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Johnson, P. and Stern, R. A. M. (2008) The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M.
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Varnelis, K. (1995) "We Cannot Not Know History": Philip Johnson's Politics and Cynical
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Philip Johnsons 50-acre site and the buildings of the Glass House
The Glass House Archives www.theglasshouse.org by Pentagram