The Glass Latty

The Glass Latty

Andy Warhol in Philip Johnson’s 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.

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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.

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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 Soane’s 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 Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment (Sanders, 1996, p.53) could be the description of Philip Johnson’s 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 Philip’s 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).

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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.” Johnson’s 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 Johnson’s 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 Johnson’s 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.

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“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 Gehry’s 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 architect’s 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 Johnson’s 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.

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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 Gray’s 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 Johnson’s 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.

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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 Johnson’s connection to the Nazi regime.

www.misterbnb.com

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* 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.

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References Bell D., and Binnie, J. (2004) ‘Authenticating queer space: Citizenship, Urbanism and 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 Gray’s 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 Community in San Francisco’ in Susser, I. (ed.) The Castells reader on cities and social theory.

Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc. p.180 Colomina, B., Brennan, A., and Kim, J. (editors) (2004) Cold War Hothouses. Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Colomina, B. (ed.) (1992) Sexuality & Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Friedman, A. (2006) ‘People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson’ in Woman and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p.126 Hennessy, R. (1994) Profit and Pleasure. Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York and London: Routledge.

Johnson, P. and Stern, R. A. M. (2008) The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern. Edited by Kazys Varnelis. New York: Monacelli Press.

Schulze, F. (2000) Philip Johnson. Life and Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Potvin, J. (2014) Bachelors of a different sort. Queer aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Urbach, H. (2000) ‘Closets, Clothes, disClosure’ in Rendell, J., Penner B. and Borden, I. (editors) Gender Space Architecture. An interdisciplinary introduction. London and New York: Routledge. p.342 Varnelis, K. (1995) ‘"We Cannot Not Know History": Philip Johnson's Politics and Cynical Survival.’, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Nov., 1995), pp. 92-104. Milton: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Inc. Varnelis, K. (2002) ‘Philip Johnson’s Empire: Network Power and the AT&T Building’ in Petit, E. J. (ed.) Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change. London: Yale University Press.

Whitney, D. and Kipnis, J. (editors) (1993) Philip Johnson. The Glass House. New York: Pantheon Book.

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Philip Johnson’s 50-acre site and the buildings of the Glass House The Glass House Archives www.theglasshouse.org by Pentagram

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