I saw a picture of Philip Johnson's Glass House when I was in college and have wanted to see it in person ever since. So I booked a tour for while Greg and I were in Connecticut last week and we went to check it out. Everything was going swimmingly in the visitors center in New Canaan where the tour begins, until our tour guide mentioned that old Phil had a passing fancy with... um... Nazis. She said that he came to denounce these beliefs and that professing admiration for the Nazi philosophy was "the biggest regret" of his life, but Greg did a deep dive into his biography after the tour and concluded that the "regret" was lip service to save his reputation, made just before the U.S. entered World War II. His affiliation with the Nazi party and his admiration for its doctrine was well documented in the '30s and '40s, and despite being defended [weirdly] by several prominent Jews, including Frank Gehry whom Johnson mentored, from what we read, he was a white-supremacist, anti-Semite, and generally terrible person. There's no denying that the Glass House is exceptional and his architectural designs were revolutionary, but the rest of his story is a huge bummer.
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| This is the guest house, across from the glass house. It's not as bunker-like as it seems, there are skylights and three large windows in the back wall. But given his affiliations, maybe Phil liked the bunker-look. |
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| Andy Warhol was a frequent visitor. |
