New Work: Glass House Visitors Center and Identity

The exhibition wall of the Glass House Visitors Center features 24 monitors.

The much-anticipated public opening of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, takes place this week. James Biber and his team designed the off-site Visitors Center for this acclaimed addition to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s family of sites. Michael Bierut and his team designed the project’s identity, promotional graphics and website  .

All tours of the Glass House site, sold out until 2008, begin and end at the Visitors Center in downtown New Canaan. The center, a renovated 2,000-square-foot former truck loading dock conveniently located across from the town train station, accommodates an exhibition, on-site ticketing and a museum shop. Through the exhibition, visitors learn about Philip Johnson and the Glass House site before they take a short shuttle ride to the site where they embark on a 90-minute guided tour. After the tour, visitors return to the center where they can re-experience the exhibition with new insight.

The Glass House Visitors Center in downtown New Canaan, Connecticut.

Unifying the off-site Visitors Center, the site itself and the website, as well as the promotional and collateral material, is the identity and signage Pentagram has designed. “Designing graphics for the Glass House was an exercise in expressing two things,” says Bierut, “Philip Johnson’s lifelong commitment to modernism on one hand, and the intensely personal, often idiosyncratic nature of the place itself. In the end, we wanted to let the visitor experience Johnson’s vision directly, online, in print and in person, without our work getting in the way.”

The Glass House mark designed by Bierut and his team is a minimalist square with “The Glass House” centered in LMVDR, a new typeface designed by Chester Jenkins based on letterforms drawn by Mies van der Rohe. The mark reflects the modernist spirit of the Glass House as well as the house’s intrinsic dichotomy between public and private and opaque and transparent. All other Glass House graphics designed by Pentagram utilize Gotham designed by Tobias Frere-Jones.

Pentagram also has designed the Glass House visitors guide, unique in that it is a set of forty cards, each with a photograph of a building from the site on the front and a description of the building and the art it contains on the back. Biographical cards for Philip Johnson and his longtime partner, art collector and curator David Whitney, are also included. The 4.5” x 6.5” cards printed on heavy paper serve a dual role as educational tool and souvenir.

The project’s commemorative book, with its custom presentation.

A limited edition commemorative book, of which only a hundred were printed, was also designed by Bierut and his team. Based on the idea of pairings, the book features recently commissioned and archival photographs of the site, its buildings and art juxtaposed to highlight Johnson’s use of the Glass House site as an inspiration and testing ground for later projects. The book is presented in a square gray linen box weighted by a piece of thick etched glass reminiscent of the Glass House mark.

A set of forty cards serve as the Visitors Center guide.

The design of the Visitors Center was also an endeavor to express the nature of Johnson’s work without trying to compete with it. Working with an existing storefront in poor condition, the Visitors Center was transformed into a clean modern space in spite its low ceiling and lack of natural light. Biber explains the thinking behind the design: “The Glass House Visitors Center is both a nod to Johnson’s Miesian beginnings and to the materials and forms on the site. We avoided any direct quotes or re-creations of the work (after all, you will see or have just seen the real thing!) and offer instead a sympathetic environment and a chance to reflect on the experience.”

The Visitors Center’s low ceiling required custom Pentagram-designed lighting fixtures.

Like the Glass House mark, the Visitors Center also works with the dichotomy between public and private and opaque and transparent. A clear glass entrance with a frosted Glass House mark greets visitors and is followed by a frosted glass partition with a clear glass mark. Once inside, monitors built into a custom exhibition wall are the focus of the space. “The exhibition comprises 24 different ’portraits’ of Philip Johnson and his art,” says Biber “all told through a series of slowly evolving computerized loops created with media designer Steve Brosnahan. Each focuses on an aspect of Johnson, the Glass House or David Whitney, and together they attempt to illuminate the complexity, the depth and the range of the Johnson legacy.”

The Visitors Center is temporary, requiring that as many elements as possible be movable and adaptable to a new space, including the storage cabinets that line the wall and serve as display cases for the books in the museum shop. The shop also sells a small, well-edited collection of objects either inspired by, or in the spirit of, Philip Johnson and David Whitney. On the wall behind each object is a statement explaining its connection to Johnson and the site.

“Almost everyone who comes to see the Glass House will start at the Visitors Center,” says Biber. “What a privilege it’s been to create a space to complement Philip Johnson’s masterpiece.”

The museum shop with its carefully-edited collection of goods.