Modernism did not emerge in a vacuum.
It gained force during one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century, when the discourse around architecture was surrounded by war, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the use of monumentality as a language of power.
Glass, lightness, openness, and exposed structure became part of a new architectural language. They suggested honesty. Progress. Transparency. A break from the heaviness of the past.
But this new approach started to confuse transparency with virtue. As if a glass wall was automatically more honest. As if openness was automatically more democratic and more morally correct.
Few houses reveal that contradiction more clearly than Philip Johnson’s Glass House and La Casa sobre el Arroyo, better known in Argentina as La Casa del Puente, by Amancio Williams and Delfina Gálvez Bunge.
Please enjoy, and as always, thank you for your support.
The Sketch: A Tale of Two Glass Houses
La Casa del Puente and the Glass House
The Thought: The Trap of Transparency
When weakness becomes beautifulThe Work: Comfort Has to Survive the Budget Cut
A glass box I should have designed differently
I didn’t get a chance to do a live session last week as we were finishing off a competition and didn’t have time to properly prepare, but I have a nice surprise for this session to make it up!
Given that I’ll overlap with a World cup match, I’ve decided to move up the session to 20:00 CET.
Hope you can join me
1. The Sketch
A Tale of Two Glass Houses
There are two glass houses in this story. One is too famous for its own good, while the other is almost not famous enough.
Philip Johnson’s Glass House and “La Casa sobre el Arroyo”, better known in Argentina as “La Casa del Puente”, have a striking resemblance.
La Casa del Puente
Amancio Williams & Delfina Gálvez Bunge
Mar del Plata, Argentina
Glass House
Philip Johnson
New Canaan, U.S.
Both are precise rectangular volumes, both are lined with glass and both stand in a carefully composed landscape.
But the more I look at them, the more I think they represent opposite ideas of modernism. The Glass House turns the landscape into an image. La Casa del Puente takes the landscape and treats it as a problem to be solved.
That difference matters. Because architecture is not only the way a building meets the eye. It is the way a building mediates between the body and the world outside.
In the immediate years after the war, Johnson’s Glass House is usually presented as an architecture of openness. A transparent box symbolizing the ideals of the new society. But that transparency of the house sits uneasily beside the political sympathies of the man.
The radical reduction and open plan have often been coupled with honesty. But that honesty starts to collapse once you understand how much the house had to push out of view. Across the lawn, the Brick House becomes the opaque counterpart to the Glass House: enclosed, private, heavy. Everything the Glass House pretends to overcome returns nearby.
This is important because the Glass House may be one of the most influential houses of modern architecture, and yet its transparency depends on what it pushes out of view.
This does not mean the house should be dismissed, but it does mean the house should be read with suspicion.
La Casa del Puente is different.
It is also undoubtedly modern and elegant. It is also surrounded by trees. But it does not ask the landscape to become a backdrop for the architect’s image.
Williams and Gálvez Bunge could have placed a glass box beside it and built a footbridge nearby. Instead, they made the house become the bridge.
That is the crucial difference.
Johnson’s house can feel like an object placed in nature.
La Casa del Puente feels inseparable from the condition that produced it.
The Glass House could almost be moved elsewhere and still remain itself.
La Casa del Puente belongs to its site in Mar del Plata.
This is why La Casa del Puente feels more honest to me, independently of the biographies of the people behind it.
Not because it is less beautiful nor because it is less iconic.
But because its beauty comes from working with a constraint instead of pretending the constraint does not exist.
The Glass House looks at the landscape.
La Casa del Puente negotiates with it.
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