Editorial Note · 04 / 12

A single glazed prism
set into the New England wood —
transparent, modern, complete.

Philip Johnson's residence on a Connecticut hillside is a 56 × 32-foot rectangular pavilion of glass and steel, completed two years after Mies van der Rohe began the Farnsworth House. Walls are dissolved into a single continuous view; only a brick cylinder containing the bathroom and fireplace asserts solidity. The estate would expand over five decades into a fourteen-building archive of Johnson's evolving idiom.

Ezra Stoller photographed the house in 1949 immediately after completion. His large-format negatives — held now in the National Trust archive — established the visual grammar by which the building has since been read: equal parts dwelling, manifesto and landscape device.