Glass House on California's North Coast

The design engages not only Philip Johnson’s Glass House and the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, but also the California legacies of Elwood, Koenig and others. Though its architectural lineage is self-evident, this glass house is as indebted to artists’ explorations of glazed enclosures as it is to the precedents of Johnson and Mies. Larry Bell’s elevated cubes and Dan Graham’s many pavilions capitalize more on the reflective and refractive ambiguities of the medium than its transparency, as do mirrored works by Gerhard Richter and the aquarium-like cages of Damien Hirst. The C-Glass House bridged between these ambitions in a new way, opening up to a panoramic vista but also modulating and reflecting back on architecture’s evolving role in the American landscape.