Welcome to the Glass House

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MacLear herself just moved into her office, upstairs in Calluna Farms, the nineteenth-century house occupied by Johnson’s companion, David Whitney, a curator and collector whose estate goes on sale at Sotheby’s this month. It is sparsely decorated with her own contemporary-art collection, Bertoia chairs, and a Mies van der Rohe cabinet from the collection. An Andy Warhol depiction of a copier hangs over the copier. On the back it is signed from Andy to Philip for a birthday. “It certainly makes copying more fun,” she says.

Maintaining that intimacy with the architecture and art, plus a sense of fun, are the essentials of MacLear’s still nascent plans. “You can’t talk at people, you need to let them walk around,” she says. “The house is usually treated as an object, but it is really about everything surrounding it”: 11 structures in all, designed or modified by Johnson between 1949 and 1995. A visitor experience MacLear likes is the one Craig Robins uses for his private collection in Miami. “He gives you a deck of cards with the pictures on them,” she says. The front has artist-title-date, the back more information. “You can spend as much or as little time on each piece as you want. It is nicely self-navigated, not cheesy and not staged.”

For the weary tourist, this would be a welcome change. Too many architects’ house visits are ruined by overworshipful, underinformed guides leaning heavily on the word genius. If Johnson was a genius, it wasn’t for design. If the site actually acknowledged the varied quality of his buildings—and both Johnson’s influences and his influence—the tour could be a model of how to deal with the post-Wright, post-Roark architect’s life.

One decision yet to be made is what to call it. MacLear has already talked to obvious candidates, such as Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, about creating a brand. Should it be “The Glass House” (too condo-ish)? “Philip Johnson’s Glass House” (too museum quality)? “The Philip Johnson Estate” (too formal)? The primary audience is the design public, MacLear says, “not a mass market” but a critical one. “It is much more open-ended than a Frank Lloyd Wright property,” Bierut says. “[Johnson] made it a social nexus, and that’s as much tradition as the joint that holds the glass in place. It could stand for the exploratory quality of Modernism, it could be constantly evolving and changing, as Philip did, to make it a living place.”

The idea of continuing Johnson’s work as a power player, if not as an architect, is rightly at the core of MacLear’s plan to keep the site current. Her first goal is for the house to serve as a model of Modern preservation and to develop a “call to action” for Modern preservation across the country. This would obviously be a hot topic in New Canaan, where the tens of Modern houses by members of the Harvard Five (Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, and Eliot Noyes) and their followers are falling prey to developers. Another voice in Modern preservation—one with both glamour and real muscle—is desperately needed.

Her second goal is to continue Johnson’s legendary networking and mentoring by creating residential fellowships for young architects, artists, and designers. They would live in Calluna, work at the site, and be connected to what MacLear calls “thought leaders” to help launch their careers. She imagines future partnerships with furniture companies like Knoll or Kartell to produce the designs of fellowship members, and has already talked to Richard Wright of Chicago’s Wright auction house about holding a competition to furnish the fellows’ rooms. The first two residents would come, she estimates, in 2008, growing to five by 2010. These Glass House fellowships would be naming opportunities and have already attracted serious donor interest.

This is a quirky idea, and one that would indeed bring new life to those 47 acres.