Philip Johnson and the Glass House: A Life in Art and Architecture
Hilary Lewis
November 10, 2022
This program was organized by MITArchA co-president, Jose Guillermo Frontado, for MITArchA, MITAA, Universidad Simon Bolivar, DOCOMOMO Venezuela and several other institutions. The program was simulcast in English and Spanish. The lecture examined the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and its architect Philip Johnson who lived at the property for over a half-century and was presented by MITArchA board member, Hilary Lewis ‘88.
First built in 1949, but expanded over decades, The Glass House is now a center for art, architecture and culture, and a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Glass House continues to preserve both its many built structures – there are a dozen beyond the main glass pavilion – as well as a nearly 50-acre landscape that is integral to the architecture of the place. Johnson was best known in the world of architecture – from visits to the Bauhaus in the 1920s to power lunches at the Four Seasons Restaurant in the 1980s – but he played an equally influential role as a curator and patron of art. Indeed, he was the first curator of architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and one the largest donors to MoMA. The talk will look at the property through the lens of architectural history and also at the extraordinary (and problematically complex) figure behind this special property, which served as both a laboratory for architecture and a salon for the arts.
Hilary Lewis is the inaugural Chef Curator & Creative Director at The Glass House, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and former home of the architect Philip Johnson. She is co-author of two books on the architect: Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words (Rizzoli) and The Architecture of Philip Johnson (Time Warner Book Group). For over a decade she worked directly with Johnson on books, exhibitions and other creative projects.
Lewis is the recipient of the AIA International Book Award and was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She is also a grant recipient from the Getty Research Institute. Her undergraduate work was completed at Princeton, while her graduate studies took Lewis to MIT for an S.M.Arch.S. degree in architectural history and theory and to Harvard for the Ph.D. program in Urban Planning. At MIT she taught Course 4 undergraduates and at Harvard she taught both undergraduates and graduate students. She lectures and writes frequently on Johnson, American architecture and the future of cities. She serves on the boards of MITArchA and AMITA.