View from the Bus

by James Sterling, AIA

When I was 10, my family moved from a New York suburban town in New Jersey to a New York sub rural town in Connecticut, the latter being more country-ish with fields, stone walls, orchards, etc. However, in both cases, the city was a short train ride away, and thus defined the culture of the two towns.

My 10-year-old mind sensed quickly than my new town was not Kansas. It was modern as opposed to my previous town, which was distinctly old and business like. It was younger, more transient, progressive and in a curious way experimental. My friends’ parents were democrats, listened to jazz, sometimes divorced, filled their houses with painting, sculpture, weird steel furniture and rarely went to church.

But, ultimately, it was the architecture that made the biggest impression. My bus route to school took me by the strangest houses I had ever seen. From the bus I could see over the high stonewalls and hedges, where rectangular, flat roofed structures sheathed in cedar, stone, aluminum, and great sheets of glass were carefully placed at the end of sinuous pea-stone driveways.

When Philip Johnson died a few weeks ago, I was reminded of that time in my life, because it was the glass house on the other side of one particularly refined stonewall that left the deepest impression. It was transcendent. Instead of dismissing it as another odd house, I saw it as a thing of great beauty. I have reflected on that memory because of the strength of that moment. As it turned out in the end, it was the Glass House.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: virtual() in /home/aiamai/public_html/news/May2005/view_from_the_bus.php on line 56