Home of Philip Johnson

1949

© Eirik Johnson, Courtesy of the Glass House

 

Glass House at night © Stacy Bass, Courtesy of the Glass House

©  Eirik Johnson, Courtesy of the Glass House

199 Elm St, New Canaan, Connecticut, USA

© Bill Pierce / Getty Images

In 1932, Philip Johnson organized “The International Style: Architecture since 1922,” a show in New York that introduced the United States to modernist European architecture. Johnson later helped find positions in the US for the architects featured in the show. After receiving a degree in architecture, Johnson began his professional life by building his own home. The small house is the embodiment of modernism. The residential capsule is limited to a bare minimum of space, with a minimum of furnishings, no exterior walls (the walls are windows) and no interior partitions (the entire interior is a single room) and blends into the air and green of the surrounding woods. This is an almost immaterial home-idea.

 

© Eirik Johnson, Courtesy of the Glass House

Home of Le Corbusier

1938

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France

© Rogi André

The greatest of the architects built the smallest home for himself. But Corbusier cannot be called inconsistent. He believed it best to live in spaces that you could reach across from wall to wall, with a toilet as tiny as in a commercial airliner and with furniture consisting of two stools. That is the kind of home he built, hardly a home in fact but rather a hut (in French “cabanon”). Built beside a restaurant owned by a friend, the house had no need for a kitchen: a door led directly from home to restaurant. The hut looked like a woodshed from outside but was equipped with plumbing and a primitive system of ventilation. The walls inside were painted with colorful murals.

All photos by Olivier Martin-Gambier © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015