Response to Danze and Sonnenberg

Abstract

I am grateful to Elizabeth Danze and Stephen Sonnenberg for commenting on my paper on Philip Johnson's Glass House (Tutter 2011a) and pleased that it has proved something of an inspiration to them. I will respond to just a few of their comments.Danze and Sonnenberg observe that walls of glass-"a material that possesses . . . complex and dreamlike phenomenological properties"provide an inherently ambiguous boundary, calling attention in particular to its reflective surface. They might be interested to know that Johnson deliberately omitted any external overhang that could shadow and thus reduce the reflectivity of the glass curtain, thereby enhancing its optical barrier qualities. However, he soon found the mirror-like surface too much to take at night and illuminated the trees around his glass house in order to soften the reflective barrier between inside and outside. Eventually, transparency, too, was problematic; Johnson described living there as like being in a "vacuum" and chose to sleep nearby, in the opaque Brick House. And thus the glass walls of Johnson's house both crystallize and actualize his lifelong ambivalent search for containment (Tutter in press).I think Danze and Sonnenberg are right to bring attention to the presence of dreamlike processes in the waking brain. While I have used the dream more as a metaphor to look at Johnson's design process, it does seem that his practice involved procedures analogous or directly related to the distortion, condensation, and displacement processes of dream work. Danze, a working architect, explains that architectural design must accommodate and satisfy myriad concrete requirements and constraints, and thus involves problem solving as much as it does creativity. Dreams are thought to help solve problems: hence the phrase "sleep on it."