STILL MODERN

Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which is actually a compound of fourteen structures on a rolling hillside in New Canaan, Connecticut, is one of the most photographed pieces of twentieth-century architecture. But when the new executive director of the property, Christy MacLear, started work last summer she discovered that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which now owns the house and will open it as a museum next year, didn’t have the right to use any of the pictures that filled architecture books. “All the pictures belonged to the photographers, so when Johnson died, last year, he couldn’t leave them to us,” MacLear said. “I realized we had to take our own.” That explains why MacLear spent two gray, damp days recently traipsing around Johnson’s forty-seven acres with Julius Shulman, a ninety-six-year-old architectural photographer from Los Angeles. Shulman is to architectural photographers what Philip Johnson was to architects. Johnson was...
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