YKK AP-sponsored book celebrates Philip Johnson’s Glass House


YKK AP played a key role in publishing Glass House, a tribute to the famous architect Philip Johnson and to the house and nine other structures he built on his property in New Canaan, Connecticut. 

Johnson called the 40-acre estate a “diary of an eccentric architect” that he began creating in 1946, when he purchased the first five acres.  In 1949 he built the first structure, the Glass House, where he resided until his death in 2005.

In 1993 Johnson wrote, “For the last 40 years I have gradually, in bits and pieces, made a landscape punctuated by little buildings grouped casually in mown fields marked by farmers’ stone walls and decorated by trees in rows, in clumps, in leafy copses, conveniently watered by a brook and a pond.”

The tenth structure, the Visitors Center, was completed in 1995.  The property is now operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The story behind Glass House, the book, is almost as unique as the modernistic structures it features with minimal prose and remarkable photography. The 256-page, 13” x 9.6” volume was a brilliantly executed international collaboration:

  1. inspired and edited by Toshio Nakamura, the legendary former editor of Japan’s A+U (Architecture and Urbanism), with Johnson’s full cooperation
  2. photographed over four seasons by Michael Moran, a renowned architectural photographer, New York
  3. and designed by Michael Rock of 2x4, New York
  4. published by Tadahiro Yoshida with YKK AP’s sponsorship
  5. exquisitely printed, first as a private printing in Germany by Grafisches Zentrum Drucktechnik; reprinted by Monacelli in May 2007

The New York Times described Johnson as “known less for his individual buildings than for the sheer force of his presence on the architectural scene, which he served as a combination godfather, gadfly, scholar, patron, critic, curator and cheerleader.”

For a sampling of Michael Moran’s photographs of the Glass House and other structures on the estate, see http://www.arcspace.com/camera/moran/glass_house/index.htm.

Glass House is available for purchase at Amazon.com.