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Philip Johnson's Glass House has been heralded as “the pinnacle of modernism,” and the crown of the Cleveland-born architect's long and influential career. The Glass House itself is an iconic structure that Johnson occupied as a summer abode. The entire Glass House estate and enterprise comprises 16 buildings, sculptures, structures and objects situated on 40 acres of land in New Canaan, Connecticut that Johnson constructed over some 50 years of his career. The estate, then, is also known as the Glass House, and has been called a “compact critical catalog” of his life's work. Johnson designed numerous famous buildings in cities across America, but it is the Glass House that remains his undisputed masterpiece (Tutter, 2).
Adele Tutter interprets this architectural masterpiece of the twentieth-century International style equipped with the methodology of classical dream interpretation, drawn predominantly from Freud's own masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). She views the objects she beholds as pieces of a dream narrative whose manifest and latent content can be discerned through the lineaments of the architect's life and career. Whether looking at the Glass House itself and its contents, or the adjacent, complementary Brick House in which Johnson slept, or the several other constructions established on the estate over time, Tutter considers each and all according to dream interpretation. Johnson's writings, interviews and other materials come to bear a rough equivalence to what the analyst might use as associations to the dream material of their analysand. She draws from the vast web of personal and professional documents concerning Johnson to provide further insight. The Glass House then becomes, among other things, a “landscape of a self” (217) and a materialization of memory from which an intimate portrait of the man and his monuments thus emerges.
In the Preface, Tutter describes how by personal experience she came to conceptualize and to envision the