Welcome to the Glass House

Philip Johnson's Glass House opens to the public next April. The curators are linking its fabled, infamous past with a vibrant future

by Alexandra Lange

During her first week of work as executive director of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Christy MacLear 1) wrote to Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, asking her to pull together a list of what turned out to be 300 of Johnson’s closest friends; 2) scheduled emergency tree pruning on the 47-acre property; 3) hired WASA Studio A to design a visitor center; and 4) solidified the opening date for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s first modern site: April 2007. The nearness of that date accounted for much of the urgency. MacLear’s first week was in mid–June 2006, so she had less than a year to prep the site, hire a staff, and plan the events to launch a house always publicized but never open to the public.

“There were so many decisions waiting for the executive director,” she says. A leader had been needed for the property since Johnson’s death in January 2005, when the Trust took possession. MacLear, who has an MBA in real estate finance, was a visitor-experience consultant when she moved to Connecticut 18 months ago. She has long collected contemporary art and started a gallery, Fleur, in Chicago, her former hometown. (She also took part in the master planning of Celebration, Florida, when she was just out of Wharton, and met Johnson there. “If I had known then I would get this job, how much more interesting our conversation could have been!” she says.)

Picking someone like MacLear—an organizer, a businesswoman, an enthusiast, someone focused on the future rather than an academic—is a clear indication that the National Trust wants to treat this site as something more than a preserved-in-amber house museum. “We were not looking for a scholar,” president Richard Moe says. “We wanted somebody who had a broad skill set in terms of management, marketing, and community relations. But also somebody with a passion for and understanding of art and architecture.”

It will be a major architectural pilgrimage site, just like the organization’s other postwar property, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois. But MacLear wants more, at both an institutional and an intellectual level, from this glass house. When she looks at Johnson’s study, for example, she sees the beauty of the books, the clarity of the space—but she also wants to figure out a clever, respectful, and aesthetic way to make Johnson’s lifetime reading list available for purchase. There’s a certain crassness to this idea (“click here to enter the mind of the master”), but also a welcome realism. Johnson was no monk—and as commercial an architect as they come. Exploitation of branding opportunities, at a high level, is an activity well within the bounds of his career. Simple architourism is a break-even business. To keep ticket prices within reason, why not leverage the fascination with an architect’s influences, especially since Johnson wore his on his sleeve?

In addition, the site can never serve crowds. The town of New Canaan wasn’t sure it wanted a major tourist attraction (however niche) parking buses in its midst. An agreement signed in the 1990s prohibits parking and limits the number of visitors. MacLear arrived in time to finalize the details that establish the site as more pop-ulist than the Eames House (which you can’t enter, only view through the windows) but less of a zoo than Fallingwater. Fifty visitors will be allowed each day between April and October, driven in groups of eight to ten from the new visitor center, in New Canaan near the train station. Tours will be 90 minutes, with an extended late-day tour of more than 2 hours for true aficionados. The permit does not allow more than 49 people on the site at one time without a variance, so no buses—and no huge raucous parties either.

Interest is already intense. “I get between five and one hundred e-mails every day asking about advance reservations,” MacLear says—50 percent of them from abroad.