In correspondence, architect Stover Jenkins, co-author of The Houses of Philip Johnson, wrote that the hearth “appears ‘freestanding’ because it is within a glass wall.” Noting Johnson improved on an earlier commission, he added, “the large fireplace is in the wall opposite the spectacular view-its mass doesn’t intrude on the full view through the long wall of glass.”Īccording to Jenkins, Johnson likely set the design direction and made final decisions after discussing and critiquing blueprints with Harvard classmate Landis Gores. Plate glass stretches from corner to corner and from floor to 10-foot ceiling along the lake side of the room-an innovative design for 1949.The opposite wall is dominated by a 16-foot-wide brick hearth. They face the lake with staggered setbacks from the shore.The large transparent torso of the main house is the home’s defining feature. The buildings are sided in cypress and bordered by narrow decking. Johnson’s plans called for a home comprised of two simple and separate rectangular structures, to be built on a 30-acre parcel of the Paine family’s property along the shores of Lake Champlain. The Paine House in Willsboro was modeled after the Resor House that Mies van der Rohe conceived in 1937 to span a creek in Jackson Hole,Wyoming. ![]() Mies van der Rohe became Johnson’s mentor and clearly influenced his early designs. The show popularized modern architecture in America and introduced its German master, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. As founding director of the department of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, he organized a 1932 exhibition of the International Style, a movement characterized by simple, undecorated geometric forms, open interiors and the use of modern materials such as concrete, steel and glass. He may have been connected to the Paines socially or through Harvard, where he studied classics as an undergraduate in the 1920s and where Joan Paine’s great-aunt had donated a library in memory of a son who perished on the Titanic.īefore returning to Harvard in 1940 to pursue an architecture degree at the Graduate School of Design, Johnson was already a distinguished curator and critic. Like his clients, Johnson enjoyed family wealth and privilege. and his bride, Joan Widener Leidy, both in their 20s, belonged to prominent, art-loving families from New York and Newport society. He was 42, had completed only three other homes, and was already hard at work on the Glass House when a well-heeled young couple commissioned the Willsboro residence. Johnson’s career as a practicing architect was barely underway. Philip Johnson, the renowned architect, designed the structure erected on Willsboro Point at the same time he completed his own world-famous residence, the Glass House, in New Canaan, Connecticut. ![]() ![]() These are common characteristics among contemporary homes, but this one stands out for the area and era in which it was built. The minimalist house has flat roofs, high ceilings, expansive open spaces and walls of windows. An early Philip Johnson getaway on Willsboro PointĪmong the Great Camps, peaked roofs and proud lodges of the Adirondack Park, an early modernist work by one of America’s most influential architects remains overlooked and underappreciated by all but a few historians, neighbors and design buffs.
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