Through These Photographer’s Eyes: The Glass House, Part One
Written by Robin Hill
Image copyright Robin Hill ©In September 2011, publisher Rizzoli New York released The Glass House, a photo tour of Philip Johnson’s famous estate. The book includes text by Philip Johnson himself and by architecture critic Paul Goldberger and is the official Glass House book of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Robin Hill’s photo “Glass House Dawn” was selected to appear on the book’s cover.
Below is the first of a three-part installment wherein Robin Hill shares his experience of photographing the Glass House estate.
A handful of iconic houses have reached the public imagination, and the Glass House is among the finest. In this transparent pavilion, surrounded by nature, Philip Johnson designed an architectural gem of quiet depth and epic simplicity. Its power arises from the Earth and exerts itself into a natural auditorium that can suffuse the visitor with a sense of grateful contemplation. It is a chapel in a cathedral of nature. One could be tempted into thinking that the Glass House is just a brown rectangular box with see-through walls, but to follow this line of thinking is to miss the point, because its simplicity hides a raw architectural sophistication that transcends an ordinary interpretation of space, providing the visitor with a unique opportunity to experience nature and architecture as a continuous whole.
My first visit to the Glass House was in the fall of 2006. However, my experiences of Philip Johnson's buildings previous to this had been somewhat contradictory. On the one hand I had loathed the AT&T Building for its post-modernist faux grandeur, but on the other hand I had witnessed an urgent sensitivity in the architect's hands at the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Dallas. So I was in a mood of uncertainty when I was hired to photograph the Glass House. Was the place worthy of all the adventurous architectural commentary? Could it possibly live up to all the expectations? Given the fact that it has been photographed by all the greats, including Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman, would I be able to find something that I could call my own? I shouldn't have worried. The place invites many different interpretations. The Glass House owns its iconic status like Clark Gable owns "Gone with the Wind," like Bruce Springsteen owns "Born to Run," and, yes, like David Bowie owns "Thru These Architect's Eyes." The architect's educated hands are everywhere. It breathes Architecture, with a capital “A.” The glass walls integrate the architecture into the landscape and the landscape returns this favor by integrating itself into the architecture. The pavilion is very much part of its location; in the same way as one cannot imagine Stonehenge being anywhere else except on its geomantic nodal point on the Salisbury Plain of England, one cannot perceive a better, more artful location for Johnson's own Glass House, perched on a New England outcrop overlooking a lake.
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Whilst pondering the undulating hills of the Glass House property, I began to wonder about the debt owed to Mies Van Der Rohe for this exquisite masterpiece. The Glass House is not an original work of architecture. Johnson had already seen Mies's plans for Farnsworth House, and the two houses share much the same geometry and philosophy of construction. Yet they are profoundly different. One (the Farnsworth) floats; the other clings to the Earth. One is white, the other dark brown. One is next to a river, the other overlooks a lake. One is a singular piece of architecture; the other is the first in a series of calculated structures that interweave over a whole estate. One was birthed into existence by a romance, the other by an architect who always knew that his best client was himself. Johnson is clearly the understudy. When there's a bright beacon of real genius in the room, the best one can do is get out of the way and be inspired. Johnson did just that and was deeply inspired by his master, and the greatest compliment he could give him was the Glass House. The Glass House is different enough from Farnsworth House for it to be labeled Philip Johnson 1949, but one would be tempted to put in parentheses "inspired by an idea of Mies Van Der Rohe."
I am up before the crack of dawn. It is 4:20 AM and I am staying in New Canaan at the Maples Inn. A taxi cab arrives, and into the pitch darkness we go. In the spirit of my Boy Scout days, I have been on a mission of "being prepared," and I have arranged for the lights (designed by lighting pioneer Richard Kelly) of the Glass House to be left on… and sure enough, as we pull into the driveway with deer scattering before our headlights, I see that my request has been honored. The taxi arcs around Donald Judd's circular sculpture and tears off into the night. I am consumed in silence. I am alone. It is a perfect solitude, tranquility personified. There are the beginnings of pre-dawn light; a slight mauve tint starts to fill the lower horizon. My senses are heightened. My tripod is steady and my Canon is armed.
I realize that I have never seen the Glass House photographed from behind the swimming pool. I have a natural and almost naive love for reflections, and I think that lying flat on my belly with the camera just an inch above the water will create something compelling. The trick, then, is to support the camera during a long exposure. Technical terms race through my left brain and artistic concerns run through my right brain and happily they meet somewhere in the middle of my armed Canon. Pre-dawn light is now at a happy interstice with dawn light: on the lower horizon mauve has moved to purple, and farther up the sky has turned from its deep inky black to a nebulous quarter light. The shutter releases. In this moment I am both observer and participant in the passing light show. There is no distinction between the vast Architecture of Nature and the little Architecture of man. In such a place there is no distinction. Breathing together in their own crucible, they are one.
I am now in a state of heightened awareness. Part of me wants to sit and meditate and just take it all in. Another part has a job to do. I have many juxtapositions to explore; the light is changing quickly now and soon sunrise will be upon me, offering up entirely new vistas, and a different palette will come into play. Richard Kelly's exemplary lighting is really starting to glow. In fact, all three of his famous lighting concepts – "focal glow," "ambient luminescence," and "play of brilliants" – seem to be coalescing into one beatific show of light. I am now placed fairly and squarely in front of the Glass House. I am a few steps in front of the Brick House with a direct perpendicular view of my subject. The light has moved on, as is its nature, and the sky has faded to a pale blue, but the trees lined up behind the Glass House are underlit by Kelly's lighting, and the colors of the fall saturate the scene with greens, browns, reds, and yellows. Better not mess this up! The air is cool. The shutter releases again and the mood is captured.
As dawn moves onto early morning, I realize that today will be cloud covered. No shafts of sunlight will issue from a glowing sunrise. I love this kind of day. The colors are muted, and nature is painterly. The whole scene is reminiscent of the famous Nicolas Poussin painting, "The Burial of Phocion," which hangs inside the Glass House. I start to move on from the Glass House itself and explore the other structures that dot the landscape. Each one of them is perfectly placed in a way that is eerily similar to an 18th century British stately home landscape with all its abundant follies. Down by the lake is the Lincoln Kirstein Tower, a sculpture that invites personal adventure, with its risk-taking staircase that lacks a hand rail. Atop the summit is a suitable engraving: "The stone which the builders rejected has become the keystone.” It’s a great voyage up this sculpture. One feels a notion of being on the razor's edge, of being deeply aware of each step of ascent. One's steps are noticeably steady, and balance is the order of the day. The summit calls for a pause.
I can see from here the rectilinear shape of the Glass House, in what seems like a stark composition against the bulbous, overflowing landscape. The house, however, is not incongruent with its surroundings. It seems to possess an aura of mellifluous transcendence. It appears that there are no boundaries between the outside and the inside, between the manmade and the natural, between the architect and the landscape. One might think that a slab of modernist glass contained between bronze pillars would be anathema to the landscape, but in fact the very counterpoint is true. This is not Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water," but it does fit beautifully into its chosen location. A descent of the Lincoln Kirstein Tower is now undertaken or, rather, negotiated. Each step is measured, corrected, singular. The void of space surrounding me is anchored by my feet. I am suspended in a mental tennis match between tackling Johnson's staircase and taking in the view. Another pause is in order. The staircase spirals around the sculpture, and new vistas open up as one descends. One step down brings the lake into view; another couple of steps reveals a New England forest burning with color.
The bottom at last! I feel like I have undergone some kind of test, an ordeal, and that survival has brought a sense of achievement. Yes! I have achieved the ascent and descent of the Lincoln Kirstein Tower without fracture. I have pondered the Glass House from an alternate viewpoint, read the inscription, and returned to Earth a wiser person. I can't say if Johnson had in mind the proliferation of wisdom when he designed this piece, but my own experience was cultivated and my awareness expanded through my interaction with it. I have noticed with fresh eyes a beautiful connection between architecture and Nature, between literature and design, between risk and reward.
Image copyright Robin Hill ©In September 2011, publisher Rizzoli New York released The Glass House, a photo tour of Philip Johnson’s famous estate. The book includes text by Philip Johnson himself and by architecture critic Paul Goldberger and is the official Glass House book of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Robin Hill’s photo “Glass House Dawn” was selected to appear on the book’s cover.
Below is the second of a three-part installment wherein Robin Hill shares his experience of photographing the Glass House estate. Read part onehere.
Now I am making my way the few steps toward the lakeside pavilion. Here Johnson is up to new tricks. As I approach the lakeside, I am reminded of the London Underground loudspeaker system, which brusquely ejaculates "MIND THE GAP" every time you board or deboard a train. Instead of designing the pavilion to gently nudge the shoreline, there's this intentional but irritating gap that Johnson has deliberately placed in one's way. Why? My first thought is "to mess with your head" or perhaps it is to make you pay attention. OK, so now I'm paying attention, and the impression is that ordinary scale has been obliterated by the architect's hands. This is a perfect modern folly. It is barely functional, save to sit underneath and have an uncomfortable picnic. Through these photographer's eyes excellent framing opportunities are created by the multiple archways. The visual pun is too obvious for my taste, however, and the pavilion does nothing for me in an architectural sense. I begin to feel that this is a dud, a Johnson experiment that doesn't really work very well in either form or function. Perhaps, this is indicative of Johnson's uneven career as an architect, brilliant one minute and mediocre the next. In the space of a few steps I have gone from momentous elevation to ungarnished mediocrity, from design excellence to controlled vacuousness. Still, the adventure of being here leaves my intellect alone for a while and I am left in solitude in the middle of a 46-acre design campus. Heaven! There is a serenity here that is both palpable and meaningful.
That meaning will have to wait for further exploration, until this experience has subsumed itself into my fibers, because I am now off on a different tangent, intent on navigating myself to the next location, which is the Ghost House. In this rarefied atmosphere I am half expecting an encounter with a spectral Johnson. Now if I could only photograph that! My thoughts return to more earthly matters and the living architect that the Ghost House celebrates, Frank Owen Gehry. Johnson and Gehry were friends, and Johnson famously championed Gehry's architecture. In 1998 I saw both of them on Charlie Roseentering Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Johnson entered the lobby and tears were clearly streaming down his cheeks. It was not an affected moment. He was clearly moved by the architecture. The void of space had entered his pores and the awesome power of Gehry's paradigm-shifting architecture had rattled him. That, however, is another story, and this story brings me back to a small shed made of ordinary chain link fencing designed in homage to Gehry's own house in Santa Monica. The Ghost House is open to the elements and now covered with vines and beckons exploration. There are no ghosts here, but there is evidence of great intellect and learned design, of pure geometry and deconstructivist ideas, of open minds and deliberate poise. The Ghost House breathes more than any other structure in the Glass House complex. It changes with the seasons and interacts with nature. It is, in its own way, an organic piece of architecture. It does not surrender itself to the usual laws of shelter; it is existent in its own paradigm, a reflection of the man to whom it pays homage.
Johnson's simple design reminds me of Robert Venturi's Vanna Venturi House (or Mother's House), but it is really Gehry's baby. Who else could inspire such architecture made of chain link fence? The Ghost House is at once both a bit of a prank and an architectural conundrum. It serves no real purpose, save to acknowledge the capacity of architects to play with form. And why not? Why not serve only the tenet of delight? It is with this last Vitruvian thought that I exit the Ghost House and head uphill to the library.
Poised mid-slope and currently painted a somewhat mediocre shade of brown (not always the case), the library is a simple and beautifully lit space, with a Gehry chair at Johnson's desk overlooking the Gehry-inspired Ghost House. Above the desk is a skylight, and rows and rows of tomes on architecture line the walls. I start to scan the selection and find that Johnson's range of reading in architecture is a real panorama of its many and varied practitioners. There's Urban Spaceby Rob Krier (an early exponent of new urbanism) as well as Koolhaas's OMA: Essays in Architecture – opposing viewpoints in the space of the same box in row 4, column 5. It is at this point that I realize that Johnson's mind was a true wide angle: not the average 28mm with a viewpoint of 80 degrees, not even the traditional 180-degree fisheye, but a full-on 360-degree panoramic that takes in everything. Of that fecund soup, he manifests new viewpoints and extends the realms of architectural thought and practice into new areas. Now if only his political thought of the 1930s could stand up to such a wide view, perhaps he would be more fondly remembered. Still, I am on the hunt for architecture, not politics, and my eyes return to the bookshelves: Zaha Hadid, Melnikov, Loos, Michael Graves, the inevitable Le Corbusier, and too many others to list. And there, of all the books that are stacked in vertical manner, sits Moby Dick, conspicuously perched on the horizontal like a lintel stone atop the massive sarsens at Stonehenge. I find this curiously invigorating. It is the only novel in the place. How novel, I thought!
I am now sitting at Johnson's desk, alone and pondering the compelling silence and how well appointed this place is for pure thought. There are no distractions. It is a temple to knowledge. A vibrant atmosphere of intellectual curiosity fills the space. It actually FEELS intelligent.
Three shallow steps greet the entrance to the library, rather similar to the two steps that lead up to the Glass House itself. I find the spacing of the steps particularly inviting. They slow me down as I cross the threshold from one world into another. They act like a small bridge, an easily overlooked detail that might pass many by, but I am fortunate that my chosen vocation keeps me looking and searching for God in the details. My library visit has come to an end, but my journey continues.
I am like a spacecraft that visits many planets and uses the gravitational pull from one planet to pull me to the next, and on this journey the next planet is unlike any other I have visited. It is the Pluto in the solar system of the Glass House complex… an outlier, living in the space between sculpture and architecture. It is "Da Monsta"! A red, angular, unshapely cocoon of a "building" and the last to be finished in 1995, it represents Johnson's climactic period of architectural exploration. Its free-form geometry on the outside is dynamic and visceral, formative and sound. Step inside, though, and the atmosphere changes dramatically. I feel like I have been thrust onto a ship that is lurching violently to one side in a storm. Normal perception of space has been thrown out the window. There is a sense of chaos herein. I am very uncomfortable in this place. It is not soothing or peaceful, but torrid and perplexing. (Its space shifts hither and thither.... arghhhhhhhhhh! I have to get out! And I do so in short order.) I recognize in this episode that for architecture to move forward, it has to experiment, and that this is a perfect place for experimentation to be undertaken. Often, as any scientist will tell you, experiments fail before they succeed (how else to get at the truth?). Da Monsta delivers as a sculpture, but as a work of architecture it needs to be appreciated after consuming certain mushrooms. And there are none on the menu today. In my mind Da Monsta is just like Pluto – beyond categorization. Perhaps that was Johnson's point. My exit from Da Monsta leads me around its base to view the window, within which is reflected the library.
The Glass House complex is full of these visual surprises and all are by design. The window is a seriously odd shape that bends on its vertical axis as it tapers down to its conclusive horizontal plane. The resulting reflections are somewhat distorted, like looking in a house of mirrors at the local fairground. The reflected library now incorporates a skeletal tree rising above the roofline, like a trail of smoke exuded from a chimney. Da Monsta is red. Stop signs are red. Ferraris are red. There is a reason for this. Because it attracts our attention first and beckons the onlooker to consolidate vision onto the subject matter. Photographer's often look to the color red to make a statement, to bring the viewer into the picture. It awakens an assertiveness inside of us that screams “STOP!” In my photographer's guise it is the most obvious color. The one above all others that must be used sparingly and well. 'Da Monsta' certainly makes one stop in one's tracks. It exudes assertion. It is not to be messed with. It says "you lookin' at me?" Through these photographer's eyes the emphatic answer is "I can't stop looking at you!” You are like the unapproachable duchess at a party. You cannot be known. You are aloof and detached. You are not quite of this world. But don't expect me not to look at you. You are red! With this notion in my head I am now determined not to let the red duchess overload my perceptions. She is monumental and fractured. So I move away and develop a new conversation where she is no longer the center of attention, but a guest star in an extra's role. But she is arrogant and really aggressive and does not want to be pushed to the sidelines. Back she comes into view, thrusting herself into the limelight. Who is she? Why does she keep intruding into my composition? At this point I have to surrender. She is all powerful and I allow her half the frame.
Her frozen brow stoops into the picture like the Titanic's nose, all pomposity and thrusting drive. Love her or loathe her, she cannot be ignored. I am now thinking of the Glenn Close character in fatal attraction whose legendary line "I won't be ignorrrrrred, Jack", comes chillingly to mind. 'Da Monsta' is well named! I am now a few feet away from her. But it is her polite neighbor that still attracts my attention, and in particular the way that she (the library) is so classically framed by the well placed trees. It’s no accident, and I love that Johnson was able to see all these wonderful visual connections between the architecture and the landscape. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition. 'Da Monsta' has lost her menace, and despite filling half the frame and being red, she cannot hamper the intricacies of inter-connectedness within my composition. 'Da Monsta' was originally intended to be the visitor's center, so therefore it sits in close proximity to the gate. It is a short walk, just a few steps along the path, and between the gap of a low slung New England stone wall the gate becomes apparent. Before I reach the gate, I recognize the presence of long sinewy branches of cedar trees, that almost inter connect across the gap in the stone wall. Their vigorous horizontality is alluring and adds a welcoming silhouette to my composition. The library still shows its polite face even from here, and 'Da Monsta' has been camouflaged to become another less threatening character.
Image copyright Robin Hill ©In September 2011, publisher Rizzoli New York released The Glass House, a photo tour of Philip Johnson’s famous estate. The book includes text by Philip Johnson himself and by architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and is the official Glass House book of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Robin Hill’s photo “Glass House Dawn” was selected to appear on the book’s cover.
Below is the final piece of a three-part installment wherein Robin Hill shares his experience of photographing the Glass House estate. ViewPart One and Part Two for the rest of the story.
My journey continues in its roundabout way, and I am now upon the gate -- the likes of which I have never seen before. It is most unusual. I try to find a historic connection to its design, but find none. What I do find is a beautifully scaled, welcoming structure that entices one to enter. It is everything that an entrance way to a gated community is not. Even when the barrier is down, it feels open. The Pillars rise high on both sides and are painted a welcoming tone of brown, quite different from the brown previously mentioned that smothers the library. Slung low across the bottom quarter is a brushed aluminum tube that splices the composition perfectly, both in terms of its height and its color. The gate is also quite a trick of visual play. There are actually four pillars, not two as is supposed from the full frontal view. The pillars on either side stand back to back with their identical twins behind them. This is a very clever way of hiding the gate mechanism that lifts and lowers the barrier. The wires are hidden from the front view, and delicately balance the barrier between the two pillars. The engineering is sublime, and gives a gentle equipoise to the whole structure. There are not enough ‘o’ s in the word smooth to describe this gate.
The road into the estate leads downhill from here, with trees lining both sides. There is a sense of purpose in this walk, and soon I am in sight of the Donald Judd circular sculpture added in 1971 (officially called untitled/concrete ring) that I had passed earlier in pitch darkness. It is now approaching 10:30 am, but time has become distorted today, because it seems like an eternity ago that I arrived here. At first glance, The Judd appears to be a simple circle. But like much of Judd’s work, it is rather more complex and more sophisticated upon closer inspection.
The perimeter’s top is perhaps eight inches across, and on one side it is parallel to the ground. But as it swings toward the west, one edge of the top rises, while the other stays put. It is at odds with the rectangle of the Glass House, which stands some thirty yards away, and the composition is spliced by a New England stone wall. I am finished with Judd. Further exploration will have to wait until my trip to Marfa, Texas is undertaken.
It is now time to enter the open courtyard between the Glass House and its half sized cousin, the Brick House.
Before I reach that green shag pile carpet of grass, I notice an unbelievable composition of design symmetry that my armed Canon cannot resist. With the Brick House protruding into the diagonal of the frame, I first think that that is all there is to it. But like most everything else here at the Glass House, there is a deeper sophistication to the landscape and the architecture within it. There is one white slab step that leads into the Brick House, and beyond that, in the middle distance, there is one white platform rising slightly above the swimming pool. Beyond that are the white walls of the yet to be explored Sculpture Gallery, which infiltrates the distant scene. But these three white elements are all perfectly aligned along a diagonal through-line. If my Canon could find in its black heart the emotion of delight, it would have exploded in ecstasy. There is an understanding of landscape architecture here which transcends the ordinary, and prior to my visit I had no idea that Johnson was so well grounded in this widely underestimated, though critical, field. The buildings are conversing with one another through the landscape. It is a conversation of beauty, of flow, of pictorial transcendence. It is along this elongated diagonal that I now proceed. “Proceed” being the right word, because this is a processional as much as it is a walk in the country.
I leave the Brick House behind, for my eyes have leaped ahead to the small bridge that connects one side of the property to the other. It has a slight curvature to it and appears to be made of ordinary railway sleepers, but it also resembles the Kirstein Tower in one important aspect: there are no handrails. This fact adds an aura of suspense to the bridge crossing which focuses the mind and lets one know that one has crossed an important threshold into the world of art and sculpture, and out of the world of architecture and design. Of course, on either side of this divide there are exceptions, but the main thrust of the architecture now changes toward that of housing art and sculpture.
Coming up on the right is the Painting Gallery, and I feel I am transported back to a trip I made to the island of Gozo in the Mediterranean several years ago. I had been on a photo shoot there, primarily to photograph what is one of the world’s oldest works of architecture, the circle at Ġgantija. But on this same island, so the legend goes, Calypso imprisoned Odysseus in a cave for seven years, and that cave bears a striking resemblance to the opening of Johnson’s Painting Gallery. Other scholars have noted that it is similar to the Treasury of Atreus on Mycenae. Whatever Johnson’s inspiration for this work of earthen architecture (there may well be a connection to the work of earth artist Michael Heizer), it is profoundly different from any of the other structures around the estate. It is certainly the most organic. There is one aspect to this particular experience that has really stayed with me, and that is the shock of entering a work of architecture profoundly influenced by the earth itself, and then seeing Frank Stella’s paintings in full glorious view. It is a provocative and deeply sensuous change of perception. From earth art to modern conceptual painting in a heartbeat. The thrill is in the contradiction and the fun is in the paradox. It’s enough to make me want to channel Brando in Streetcar Named Desire…S T E LLLLAAAAA!!!!!!! And I do… with the sure knowledge that there’s not a chance anyone is going to hear me through fifteen feet of tough strewn New England earth!
The paintings are held up by an ingenious rotating mechanism that allows six paintings at a time to be on view. Up to 42 paintings can be stored this way, and what a collection they are: Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol are all featured. There are whispers in this chamber. The past voices of many conversations fill the air. They have soaked themselves into the very fabric of the building.
I walk out of the painting gallery, hang a right down the path past the Julian Schnabel sculpture, and on to the Sculpture Gallery… or is it a villa in Santorini? I’m not quite sure. Johnson modeled this marvelous atrium after a Greek village, with staircases descending into plazas and courtyards appearing round corners, and in this spirit it is also painted white. Now white is one tricky color for us photographers, because it tends to reduce all else to under exposure.
However, today is one of those days that make photography such a force of creative joy. The cloud cover softens the light, which in turn softens the white of the sculpture gallery, rendering a low contrast to a normally high contrast situation. It is as if an enormous soft box has been placed over the entire complex, enabling me to paint with a light that has a texture not so different from a paintbrush caressing a canvas. Add to this the time of year, and one has a particularly potent mix of natural forces on one’s side.
I am now stalking the sculpture gallery in a wide 360, taking in all the views. But none of this prepares me for the interior charisma of this space. The phrase “light filled” does not do it justice. It is flooded with natural light pouring in through the glass roof. On sunny days the atrium is filled with sharp light and shadow geometries that interplay throughout the day with the sculptures contained therein. But today the light is silent to the ears of shadow. There are none. I descend into the space with a sense of expectation which grows stronger the further I go. There are spaces of intrigue opening up that contain shape shifting sculpture by the likes of John Chamberlain, Robert Morris, Andrew Lord and also Frank Stella and Richard Rauschenberg.
As the staircase gently winds around, the courtyard opens up, revealing new levels of architectural understanding and multiple viewing angles. I again feel the notion of a processional, this time leading down into Johnson’s playground of cultivated spatial engineering. The effect is at once quieting and expansive, silent and profound. Nothing stirs save the interior machinations of my photographic thoughts, which bear witness to an awesome grace.
The day has moved forward in a tableaux of minor visual clues and major philosophical questions. I am a most fortunate participant in this particular movie. I make a quick return to the top of the stairs, my ascent energized by renewed purpose, then I move through the vestibule and start the return journey through the exit doors and into the arms of a beatific New England autumn.
I am on the last leg of this journey, this voyage of architectural discovery. I am now eager to return to my starting point, the Glass House itself, and discover it in the light of mid afternoon. Up the three steps I go, into the living quarters. There is an air of intellectual joy coupled with an unrelenting sadness. The house misses its owner, but it has left behind an atmosphere of great curiosity and humor. I sit in one of the Barcelona chairs, my gaze switching from the Poussin painting and out onto the landscape. The glass is just an apparent boundary between inside and out.
A sobering tiredness creeps in that had its genesis in my thoughts of leaving this place. How much harder would it have been to live here for fifty years and then leave on a permanent basis? Who can say? This realization of impermanence, that all things must pass, leaves me both melancholy and inspired. And it is that word ‘inspired’ that really describes this place. The day has come to a close. I pack up my Canon and leave behind a day of inspiration. It is what Lou Reed would call “just a perfect day,” and I’m happy to spend it with you, Mr. Johnson!
1 comments:
I love the 1st House, i wish I was the owner of that house :))
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