Habitats
Modern and Historic
Iconic residences redefine the style of New England
by Nell Porter Brown
More than 500 people turned out in June for the inaugural gala picnic at Philip Johnson’s Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut. The long-awaited event raised $750,000 for further preservation of the most celebrated modern house in the Northeast. Public tours are sold out into parts of next year, as people from around the world plan pilgrimages to the site.
The deceptively simple transparent box, held up by slim steel pillars, was completed in 1949 and served as Johnson’s home, with the lush grounds his canvas, until he died in 2005. In all, the estate boasts 14 experimental structures unfettered by “clients, function, and money,” as Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43, once said, and is now operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public monument and museum and a central “catalyst for the preservation of modern architecture, art, and landscape.”
Photograph by Eirik Johnson / the Glass House
The celebrated Glass House would startle pious Puritans and Newport nabobs alike.
The Johnson house may be the showiest example of modernism in New England, but it is far from the only one. The majority of modern residences are in private hands, but several are open to the public, including the one-story, red tile-roofed Zimmerman House in Manchester, New Hampshire, a late work by Frank Lloyd Wright; the eccentric Frelinghuysen Morris House in Lenox, Massachusetts, built in the International style and lived in as a showcase for the collection of abstract art of its longtime owners; and two adjacent dwellings, Field Farm (open as a bed and breakfast) and The Folly, on pastoral acreage in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which offer prime examples of one of modernism’s central tenets: that structures be designed in harmony with the surrounding environment.
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