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Glass House Design Store
“The Brits anticipation we Americans didn’t apperceive about ability and we anticipation the Brits didn’t apperceive how to draw,” is how Robert A.M. Stern describes his consequence of the aboriginal (pre-Beatles) British invasion. In 1962, Norman Foster, forth with Richard Rogers and their corresponding partners, confused to New Haven for a year to abstraction at Yale. Stern batten about these years aftermost anniversary at a banquet with Foster on the comfortable area of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.
["698.4"]The accident accustomed attendees to airing about the area of the acreage in all of its abatement adorableness afore the banquet talk. Foster took advantage of this by sprinting with his ancestors through several of the Johnson pavilions. Stern, with his bottom in a brace, adopted to lounge in the abode with a martini and allocution to Peter Eisenman.
Norman Foster at the Glass House. (Courtesy the Glass House)
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The conversation, chastened by Johnson academic and Glass Abode Chief Curator Hilary Lewis, additionally covered the two architects’ accord with Philip and his “startling” Glass House, as able-bodied as Paul Rudolph and the Yale faculty. They both remembered Rudolph’s ambitious studios, decidedly his juries that ability accommodate the brand of Serge Chermayeff and Vincent Scully who all had a “powerful attendance on the campus.”
Stern declared a flat architectonics by Foster and Rogers that allegedly did not affect the jury. The arrangement was for a science center, on the bend of New Haven that featured a axial banal back with “ziggurat-like “laboratory clusters spilling bottomward hillside.” Rudolph, Stern said, “did not like the project, and Johnson airtight off one of the architectonics and said, ‘these will accept to go.'”
["533.5"]Stern was at his quotable best all black and claimed that Foster “has not gotten better, because he was absolute as a student.” Foster was decidedly afflicted with Scully who, he said, “brought history animate for me for the aboriginal time.” Today’s appointment to the Glass House, he concluded, fabricated him apprehend that the New Canaan abode owed its siting to Wright who, Scully claimed, capital houses “to abandon into the landscape.” (Stern claimed that Wright already asked Johnson, derisively, if he was “still architectonics little boxes on the landscape,” but Wright about came to the Glass Abode to alcohol martinis.) Foster accomplished that in actuality the Glass Abode was “not a little abode on and aloft the land, but in actuality disappears into the landscape,” an ascertainment fabricated bright by the agreeable afterglow talk.
(Courtesy the Glass House)
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Stern and Foster agreed that today, it’s adamantine to call how shockingly new the Glass Abode was to their generation. “I was one of the aboriginal acceptance to appointment the house,” Stern said. “I did not apperceive Philip Johnson, but I alleged him on the telephone, and he said, ‘bring the boys down!’ And I showed up with seven women…”
The chat concluded on a added austere agenda as Foster answer the goals of his clandestine foundation in Madrid that abode issues like altitude change and the actuality that a division of the world’s citizenry has no admission to electricity, difficult capacity he thinks the profession of architectonics avoids. He accomplished by advertence that, for best of the world’s citizens, basement is added important than architecture.
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Stern agreed with Foster’s appraisal of the architectonics profession and claimed that best of today’s brilliant architectonics “is about alone ego and not context, [not] a assiduity of the artery or the history of the city.” Stern beatific the admirers off to banquet with one of his quotable bon mots: “I like New Canaan but I wouldn’t appetite to alive here.”
Stern and Foster were beatific home with an official snow globes from the architectonics store of the abode to bethink the evening.
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