{"id":1062,"date":"2025-07-08T12:02:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T12:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unlockhost.com\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2025-07-14T12:47:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T12:47:08","slug":"the-case-against-glass-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.unlockhost.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/08\/the-case-against-glass-houses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case Against Glass Houses"},"content":{"rendered":"
The transparent box is the ideal of modern living, but hardly ideal for modern living.<\/p>\n I started writing about residential design <\/b>just a few months before Dwell published its first issue<\/a>, and I\u2019ve seen a lot of trends come and go in the last quarter century. Tuscan kitchens<\/a> gave way to farmhouse kitchens; an interior furnished like a Belgian monastery<\/a> would be a cottagecore fantasy today; formal dining rooms have become<\/a> home offices. Even movements that once seemed unstoppably American, like the increasing footprint of the average new house, have revealed themselves<\/a> to be conditional.<\/p>\n The desire for glass is another one of those unwavering patterns in modern home design that turns out to be less than gospel. Glass houses aren\u2019t as covetable as they used to be, and you don\u2019t have to simply take my word for it. This is a trend you can find in Dwell\u2019s archive<\/a>. The low-slung, see-through volumes that the magazine championed at its launch\u2014the antidote to Y2K McMansions\u2014have since been replaced by color-drenched interiors, fluted millwork, and terrazzo surfaces.<\/p>\n Unlike building size, which cycles up and down according to cost, the decline of glass houses isn\u2019t so easy to explain. I\u2019ve noticed their ebbing popularity since before the pandemic\u2014and certainly after, too, when breakdowns in the supply chain caused the price of windows and glass doors to skyrocket. Are homebuyers not interested in the vibe glass houses are selling? Or is there something larger at play?<\/p>\n Perhaps we should pan back for more perspective: One day in 1775, Hendrick Martin walked his grown son Gottlieb to the edge of their Hudson Valley farm for a hard talk. Although Hendrick had expanded the family home at the start of the decade, there was only so much room for his new grandchildren. He paced off a lot bordering the old post road for Gottlieb to “swarm for yourself.” The following year, Gottlieb fashioned a 24-by-42-foot building from rubble and hand-hewn timber with help from his battle brothers in the Continental Army. About a century after that, Gottlieb\u2019s grandson Edward punched windows into the north- and south-facing walls, built a generously fenestrated wing behind the stone volume, and added a south-facing conservatory to the new annex.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Welcome to the house I share with my husband, Rick, which I would also call a case study in Americans\u2019 relationship with glass. Edward\u2019s renovations represented a national appetite for the stuff, as well as its promise: more daylight, better views.<\/p>\n A railroad engineer and land speculator, Edward had the means to be an early adopter, and all those windows ranked high among hot new tech. Architectural glass was an expensive, mouth-blown import when Edward\u2019s grandfather Gottlieb was alive, and his windows would have been filled with milky discs of crown glass. Edward sourced wavy sheets of cylinder-blown glass for his house additions with an enthusiasm that finance bros might feel for pivoting glass doors and disappearing walls today. Industry\u2019s march toward today\u2019s huge expanses of barely there glass includes several milestones in the meantime, such as the introduction of plate glass and float glass in 1902 and 1959.<\/p>\n These inventions might have been achieved less slowly were it not for the architecture that stoked a desire for sleek indoor-outdoor connectivity. Think the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, the Barcelona Pavilion, or the Maison de Verre. But for American homeowners, nothing ignited interest like Philip Johnson\u2019s Glass House<\/a>. When Johnson completed the Glass House in 1949, Architectural Forum<\/i> told trade readers that the building was instantly epochal: “The industrial age explored working with Nature; the present age explores living with it.” Meanwhile, Life<\/i> magazine proclaimed the residence “one big room completely surrounded by scenery” to its five million subscribers. For voyeuristic flourish it added, “From his fireside a storm is exciting, new snow a lovely miracle.”<\/p>\n The desire for glass is another unwavering pattern in modern home design that turns out to be less than gospel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Both popular and professional camps acknowledged that the New Canaan, Connecticut, residence had its faults as well. “Certainly this is a very special house\u2026but of little use to a typical American family,” New York Times<\/i> home editor Mary Roche wrote of its lack of privacy. Forum<\/i> admitted that Johnson\u2019s achievements were more symbolic than functional\u2014and advised the archetypal family to spend most of its time in the adjacent, nearly windowless Brick House that the architect had completed simultaneously.<\/p>\n Perhaps because the acclaim was measured, this first golden age of glass houses didn\u2019t last long. Houston-based architect Troy Schaum, who designed a Shenandoah Valley house featured in these pages two years ago<\/a>, cites 1962 as a turning point. That\u2019s when Robert Venturi began building a house for his mother<\/a> that Schaum calls “a kind of response to the functional prowess that architects were demonstrating with the Miesian dematerialization. Postmodernism followed on Venturi\u2019s thoughts about the frontality and image of a building.”<\/p>\n The glass house returned to vogue three decades later. Sure, up-and-coming tastemakers had rediscovered midcentury design as an antidote to PoMo. Makers of architectural glass had also worked out its insulation, acoustical, and engineering kinks, making it possible to inhabit a cloche as luxurious in comfort as in appearance. In 2013, architects Arjun Desai and Katherine Chia revealed the potential for utmost comfort when their eponymous studio<\/a> completed a 21st-century Farnsworth House not far from Rick and me. Called the LM Guest House<\/a>, this homage to the Mies van der Rohe<\/a>\u2013designed residence\u2014after which Johnson modeled his own project\u2014resolved the performance blind spots of yore with triple-glazed float glass, geothermal heating and cooling, and motorized shades, among other things. It\u2019s also not a fishbowl, thanks to discreet siting on 365 rolling acres.<\/p>\n It sounds like the best of all worlds, so why haven\u2019t LMs proliferated across the contemporary landscape? Chia says she still fields plenty of requests for exquisite glass boxes but often redirects clients to other options. That\u2019s in part because sustainable building has become so mainstream. “LM abides by an older energy code, and nowadays it\u2019s much more restrictive,” she tells me. “To do an all-glass house in California<\/a> is pretty tough, and other states are following suit.” I share this feedback with Schaum, who seconds the observation. Making a glass house has “only gotten more complex in the way the facade has to perform,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
How did we get here?<\/h4>\n
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The pendulum swings twice<\/h4>\n
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