Mies vs. Johnson

I visited Philip Johnson’s House, known as The Glass House, in New Canaan, CT, designed in 1947 and completed in 1949.  The visit prompted me to compare it with Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Plano, IL, 1945-51 and was struck anew by the fundamental difference in architectural concept that is noteworthy and remarkable. 

The Glass House is a glass box, sitting flat on the ground, with the posts and girders forming a crate; so, the glass defines a transparent but perceptible enclosure.  By contrast, the Farnsworth House floats off the ground and is in effect a roofed platform,  Three factors in the design contribute to this effect.  First, the i-beam posts, though structural, are externalized like stilts, from which the floor and the roof seem suspended from them rather than supported by them.  Secondly, the platform, partially left open as a raised terrace, makes the closed portion, visually equivalent to the open terrace; the glass, therefore, reads more as an invisible barrier, virtually non-existent, than as a transparent wall. Thirdly, the two ends of the floor and the roof are extended as cantilevers; so, the corners, instead of strengthened with posts, are freed of them both out on the terrace and in the enclosed room and vitiate the sense of enclosure.  From within, one looks out onto Nature as from a wall-size window at The Glass House; one is totally open to Nature which flows into and fills up the room in the Farnsworth House.

Having started the design in 1945, the same year as Mies, Johnson may have been trying critically to outdo him with an innovation of his own.  But Mies would surely have thought Johnson was missing the point.  Mies saw how, constructing with steel and glass, he could make a structure appear to defy gravity and dematerialize the walls, too.  The Farnsworth House was a modernist statement.  Johnson eliminated solid walls but the structure is solidly in the tradition of wall construction.  The Glass House is modern only in appearance, not in substance.