When are landscapes more successful as immediately accessible and completely revealed? When are they more valuable with elements of hide and reveal, mystery and wonder?

I think one of the most impressive details of Johnson’s landscape at the Glass House is the play on scale that takes place between the follies and the viewer, challenging you to look more closely at your surroundings. Perspectives shift as you move throughout the property, and there is time to absorb the landscape between experiencing each of the architectural interventions.

This question also brings to mind Storm King Art Center, where the landscape is similarly impressive, but experienced in a completely opposite manner than the Glass House. Upon arrival at the site it appears that you can see the entire sprawling property, which gives you a sense of both the massive scale of the landscape, and the sculptures that inhabit it. Then, as you explore the grounds on your own, you discover many hidden and secluded sculptures and landscapes that make the experience feel exploratory and personal.

Tuesday, February 15 at 8:58am

It makes me think about a progression of experiences as you walk through Eliel Saarinen’s Cranbrook campus. At the bottom of the reflecting pools behind the Art Academy, there’s a wrought iron gate leading to a balcony next to a fountain, which pours like a waterfall into a stream below. A narrow pathway by the edge of the stream conceals a limestone bench where kids secretly make out in the woods. The stream is probably the only preexisting natural feature of this completely designed landscape–previously a flat farm nine miles from the edge of Detroit, now ensconced inside a wealthy suburb within a sprawling urban agglomeration.

Past the fountain, near the end of a wide pathway of wood chips cutting through a forest of tall pines, another series of pools descends from above and flows beneath the path into the stream below. The descending fountain is an invitation to climb beside it up the hill on a dirt path, where a Greek theater reveals itself embedded in the forest.

Throughout this human-created landscape, moments of mystery and discovery fill every pathway with a feeling of intention and expectation. It is an odd experience to live in an environment in which ideas are embedded in the landscape, as if the physical world were speaking to you. This sense of immanence in the environment was an expression of Saarinen’s search for form in nature, an attempt to discover secret meanings hidden in the morphology of living things.

Tuesday, February 15 at 9:14am

I think the Glass House is as much about sensory pleasure and luxury as anything else. Johnson’s remarkably straightforward description about how great it is to have sex in the house (Barbara Wolf’s doocumentary Diary of an Eccentric Architect, 1996) speaks to its purpose and his intention to make a pavilion of (personal) indulgence. While I strongly believe that episodically concealing and then revealing aspects of landscape design is valuable in certain contexts, it is not needed or wanted here. The complete visual possession of the entire landscape from the interior(and a most luxurious and perfect landscape at that) is what this emotional experience demands. All this arcadia is here for me, exists for me, and belongs to me. Accepting the egocentric nature of the entire endeavour, I believe that this is a near perfect combination of architecure and landscape design.

Tuesday, February 15 at 10:40am

Several years ago, I wrote an article about the Glass House and its outbuildings for Dwell magazine. I’d never visited before, and confess that, despite the high quality of the architecture (in particular the 1970 sculpture gallery), I was most impressed by the grounds. Apparently – I hadn’t known this before – parts of the site, in particular the original five acres on Ponus Ridge Road, had been heavily wooded, and Johnson had spent decades cutting down and/or moving trees (at times to the consternation of his neighbors, who were afraid he’d denude the site) until he achieved the interleaving of woods and clearings that produced the effect he sought – and as Johnson himself put it, ‘Effect before everything.’

As Emily Leibin notes in an earlier post, one of the most striking outcomes is the way in which this enabled Johnson to play with scale, especially as regards the 1962 lake pavilion, which appears from the ridge above to be much larger than the folly it proves to be (Christy MacLear, former executive director of the Glass House, called it a ‘maquette-aganza’). But what is most evident is how the Glass House – despite Johnson’s desire to make a statement that would put him on the map as an architect – is mostly about the views and experience of nature – ‘a permanent camping trip protected from weather,’ in his words.

As regards Susannah Drake’s question, I am inclined to say, following my experience at the Glass House, that it is the products of landscape architecture and garden design that are most successful when they don’t give away the whole game at first glance. Among the great pleasures of architecture, after all, are the experiences of narrative, procession, and revelation that emerge from the sensitive handling of space, and the manipulation of nature is no different.

On the other hand, while I tend to think of great stunning expanses of natural landscape as being even more appealing – pick anywhere in the American Southwest – in fact even the greatest of natural environments benefit from a certain amount of conceal/reveal. An experience that, some thirty years later, remains burned in my memory is my first experience of Monument Valley. What one first registers is its vastness, its size and scope, which is fully on display; but its exceptional nature is more powerfully revealed as one drives through and experiences the interplay between that vastness and the mesas that rise up from the valley floor.

Whether the designer is a gifted individual like Johnson, or the vicissitudes of time, that interplay always seems to produce success.

Wednesday, February 16 at 10:46am

I am currently in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia in a very different landscape than what we are discussing. My reason for being here is to spend time with students and faculty at Virginia Tech to discuss issues relating to my work and theirs. After a full day of lectures and more informal communications I am now considering just how to respond to the collective comments.

It is interesting to consider the relationships that exist between designers and places. Looking at the comments posted I am struck by the variety of responses to the question. In framing my talk today I knew that I was speaking to landscape architects, architects, engineers, construction and real estate professionals. My talk enables a discussion that brought them together.

In the same way I feel this conversation is bringing together an idea of perception, a view, a vision, a sensory experience. The glass house when set in a landscape and considered as part of a larger of experience of site may hold the same power. But my question was also posed on the eve of Valentines day with intention. Johnson created a very overt architecture embedded within in a pastoral setting. It seems fitting when considered in relation to a day of packaged romance or contrived spectacle of love and lust.

Thursday, February 17 at 9:24pm

The landscapes of Olmsted and Vaux, at least those that have been preserved or restored, play strongly to the “hide and reveal, mystery and wonder” elements. But they also work when one is in the middle of and surrounded by a major feature. For example, Prospect Park’s Long Meadow, when glimpsed through the portal of a stone arch, is a tantalizing distant vista. But when you stand in the middle of the Long Meadow, with its greensward undulating seemingly endlessly into the distance, it is a success in its revelation, though the mystery of what lies beyond that next rise or copse compels you to move forward across the landscape.

In Central Park, the bends in the sinuous paths also reveal new vistas almost at every turn, with more of the hide and reveal strategy, and bridges and arches also frame views. It might have been difficult, however, for Olmsted to anticipate the views from 60 floor above the park that show it in its entirety.

Perhaps the ultimate hide and reveal is at Dumbarton Oaks. Beatrix Farrand’s series of mysterious garden rooms, often hidden one from the other but also revealed from heights, through gates, and from terraces above. Though she was working of earlier formal references, Farrand combined them in a idiosyncratic style with a compelling completeness of vision and repetition and variation of materials.

So I may land somewhat in the middle, where the work of the Olmsted/Vaux team and Farrand make a compelling case for “hide and reveal” but where some elements are also strong when everything can be seen at once.

Friday, February 18 at 12:40am

Natural and designed landscapes have been lifelong if transient companions to me. They’ve offered comfort; places to be “in” but not always entirely “of” the usual world. Places where lawns unfurl, thick, deep forests beckon and trail heads lure me (and others) to explore, to contemplate and to consider their unspoken invitation to “walk this way”, “come see what’s over here”. Find the hidden wonder. To be struck by the fullness of nature, both untouched and created by the human hand.

Long before she was exalted and acclaimed as Tony Kushner’s muse for his play Angels in America, The Angel of Waters statue centered in the Bethesda Fountain on the plaza of Bethesda Terrace had captured my curiosity, swaying my solo and group walks through Central Park and urging me, as if impelled by pilgrimage, to finish my day at her feet.

I’d never considered the elements of “hidden” or surprise; I simply thought I knew what the environs of Bethesda would have waiting for me. Teeming with tourists on its perimeter stone bench, lush with multitudes of people playing in the plaza; relaxing, having fun or merely taking in the wonder emanating from the hub of her presence.

What was less evident and often most interesting was not the angel at the epicenter but the activity along the spoked paths descending in a collective funnel down to the fountain. Or, further out, to the west the urban sounds along CPW mixing with the fountain’s water cycling from the cherubs to the shallow pool below them. And further west, the celebrated towers and roof lines of the Majestic, Dakota, Langham and San Remo; oblique afternoon south westerly light inducing an enlivened murmur of warmth on their cold stone facades.

And then to sit near the fountain and look back from those buildings to watch Olmstead’s treetops sway in the hopeful spring breezes and forlorn autumn gusts. It was, and still is, completely revealed and on the verge of making known something new. Like seeing the moon.

While Bethesda was mostly evident and accessible but with sparks of unraveling mystery, my time in New York & New England woodlands, especially solitary times, are tonight filled with a new awareness of reflective resonance as I think about Susannah Drake’s question. The woodland days/nights have been filled with mystery and revelation, with comforting familiarity and a survivalists urgency that the very next step in the forest be the right one. An aggregated lifetime of experiencial knowledge for what I read in the near and distant landscape.

This second nature life in the field surely is informed by the natural landscapes, and by the landscape designs within which I’ve spent more, but not necessarily more rewarding time.

The mystery revealed here in the woodlands is both externally triggered and also distilled (internally) by instinct. The immediately accessible can aid and hinder immersion in these landscapes. You have to learn what to trust, what to pay attention to. It’s not always obvious.

Unlike urban, designed landscapes these natural ones are driven less by sight (as noted/alluded to in other posts herein) and as much by what hearing and smell indicate. Here, especially when alone, you can not be “in” the landscape. You have to be of it. (This is true of completely natural woodlands as well as designed hunting camps where landscape designers have installed vitrines of wooded brush and cover to camouflage the amateur hunter who’s paid his way.) Moving with purpose in these woodlands is a process of becoming increasingly woven unseen into them. By this process you don’t see the landscape around you as much as you flow within it til you’ve melded, like staying on the curl of an ocean wave. You move to be part of the landscape. What is hidden is at your shoulder, yet apparent to you. What is clearly evident is meant to be as unseen as you try to make yourself be.

Instead you gain most on your stalking from obscured surprises hidden within the texture of your movements. Interestingly, as animals we often see more when surprised than when intently focused on a clearly evident and available landscape. When surprised, our eyes, like most animals, widen in the instinctive hope of registering as much info as possible. Absorb as much as you can so you don’t get eaten. Our minds register and remember more information when surprised than they do when intently focusing in a concentrated effort, scanning in segments a completely revealed landscape. With our eyes wide and our brain blank and vulnerably anxious we register in order to survive.

Then, other things hidden and revealed, Am I upwind or down? Where is the light coming from? Am I in snow or in mud? Woodland sound carries drastically different from dry to mud to snow. In winter sound carries. In mid summer it is muted and diluted by foliage. What are the birds doing overhead? What are the forest canopy animals doing? What is the movement in the ground brush. Are insects swarming? There is no more powerful alarm throughout the forest than the panic of a greater mammal. The entire chain is stricken.

Still, you move through the landscape. Look for breaks in living brush, leaves turned from their sun-facing sides. Is there a sharp pungency of animal life; so distinct in close quartered nervous flight?

And I stop once in a while to listen, duck into the shadowed eddies that fringe the torrential rays of sun pouring a backlighted path through the forest along the route of my chase.

Sometimes, but not often, I am as as keen as my quarry and as much of the landscape as it is, yet all it can do is flee. And far more often than not it is the landscape that prevails. The eight point buck is separated from its herd and snorts in perfectly camouflaged exhaustion as I stand in the same landscape maybe 30 yards away knowing I had him right down the shaft of my arrow until he vanished into that stand of pines.

Friday, February 18 at 1:35am

With one day to go I feel like we are just getting rolling. I hope you will all join me again in late April for Earth Week. I think that will be a great time to discuss the climate change impacts at the local and global level.

I wonder if those conversations will elicit such personal responses or if a different kind of passion will surface. The references to great public spaces where one can have a deeply personal experience resonates through all of the comments. Perhaps rather than dwell on the form or typology of places (pastoral picturesque park) we should find other descriptors relating more to experience,function even pleasure.

Friday, February 18 at 8:01am

The best part of Johnson’s compound in New Caanan is undoubtedly the compound itself. Even though it’s called The Glass House and it’s easier to understand the place photographically through its buildings, when visiting I found the buildings to be only a small part of the story. Like the best narrative gardens, this one plays with sometimes revealing itself as an obviously designed terrain, and sometimes having one wonder if this area was designed too. Which of course claims the entire woods and terrain as something for design consideration.

I left the compound with a new sense of what Johnson’s appetites were. I came thinking he was an ok architect who caused a great moment in New York’s architectural scene. I left knowing him as someone who had an omnivorous design attention that did not limit itself to walls or tended lawns.

Friday, February 18 at 9:26am

Perhaps one of Philip Johnson’s best attributes was staging events –placing people and ideas in relation to each other, knowing who to put where and when, likewise in relation to the follies. In many ways, from an architectural point of view, the Glass House stands at the end of a chain of thought about the architecture of glass. It summed up and best expressed ideas of glass and architecture within a single project –in that sense it cannot be surpassed. Architecturally, in relation to the idea of the house, it was not a begining (=presented an idea to be further developed) but a conclusion (a message which could not be mistaken or misinterpretted.) But from a landscape point of view it does represent a begining. It does challenge and question, in relation to the role of the viewer/visitor, domestic/public space of a private house, scale, movement, etc. When architecture has nothing to hide, the Glass house passes the baton of hiding,revealing, mystery or wonder to the landscape.

Friday, February 18 at 10:29am

When most people hear of the Glass House, they think architecture. In my opinion, the landscape IS the Glass House and rarely do we ever see this represented in architectural monographs or images of it. I’ll admit that when I visited New Canaan in 2009, I was only expecting to see the Glass House itself and the surrounding buildings, but what truly makes this building an architectural icon is Johnson’s play between the architecture, the vast landscape and those buildings that surround it.

I also think that having been exposed to Olmsted’s extraordinary Emerald Necklace here in Boston while a student at Harvard as well as during his projects here (500 Boylston Street and the Boston Public Library addition)had a major influence on the way Johnson incorporated elements of surprise at the Glass House. Olmstead’s “romantic” elements in the landscapes of Boston are observed in much of the landscape surrounding the Glass House.

The landscape becomes valuable because Johnson not only respected it with the stonewall and the painting gallery, but also enhanced it with works like Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1971 and Julian Schnabel’s Ozymandias, 1986-1989.

Friday, February 18 at 3:14pm