The Glass House was not the first modernist home built in New Canaan. Eliot Noyes, who had trained at Harvard under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer before Philip Johnson, built a place for his family there in 1947. But over the next decade, a group of younger architects, including those now known as the Harvard Five—Breuer, Noyes, John Johanson, Johnson, and Landis Gore—turned this wooded hamlet into a laboratory for a design theory—open living spaces, removal of the barriers between the inside and outside—that was flourishing in Europe and out West, particularly in California. New Canaan had other draws, among them large, cheap lots, looser zoning codes, and laxer state requirements for architectural licenses than in neighboring New York.
Driving from the Glass House, it's easy to see some stellar examples of this experimental movement. So easy that their current inhabitants ask outsiders to recognize their right to some privacy—sometimes a tall order as an abundance of floor-to-ceiling glass windows means passers-by can even see what's being served for dinner.
Moments after you exit the Glass House gate and turn left, north, on Ponus Ridge Road, Johnson's Hodgson House, built in 1951, is on the right. For a better view of this simply designed structure, a glass box placed atop another, turn into Arrowhead Trail. The house is being renovated by Craig Bassam and Scott Fellows, avid supporters of this design movement, who earlier restored a house designed by Willis Mills.
As you continue north on Ponus Ridge Road, take a right on Wahackme Road—look for Chicester Road, two streets down—and take a left. This winding, leafy street is quintessential New Canaan: Larger colonial-style homes, the newer ones reaching steroidal proportions, tower over crisp and elegant modern houses of more modest and sensible proportions.
The first, 3 Chichester Road, was designed by William Pedersen. Further down the street, the Becker House, No. 136, is distinguished by a large wall. Akin to a minimalist sculpture, this wall runs the length of the structure, as if to protect the house's intricate, open-plan design from the street. Its architect, Hugh Smallen, also designed two highly refined houses at numbers 160 and 188, which have sloping roofs that match the incline of their site. John Black Lee designed the elegant open pavilion that is 202 Chichester Road.
The Fairfield architect Bruce Becker grew up at 136 Chichester, which had been built for his parents, Nathaniel, an industrial designer, and his mother, Theo, whose specialty was furniture. "Jens Rissom lived across the street and no one around us could imagine building a house that wasn't pushing the boundaries of design," Becker lovingly recalls.
If you drive slowly as you go back down Chichester Road and turn left, it's possible to see at No. 237 Whackame, a beautiful house built by Victor Christ-Janer, a Yale-trained architect who settled here in 1949.
After heading back into New Canaan township, take Route 124 north and turn right at Country Club Road. At 210, surrounded by a stand of pines, is Eliot Noyes's second house, built in 1954. The Glass House kept nature at a distance, but Noyes, whose design firm was responsible for IBM's Selectric typewriter, wanted to be immersed in it. "Eliot's philosophy was, 'When you see out, you must know you're in the woods,' " says his biographer Gordon Bruce. The Black Beast, a sculpture by the architect's friend Alexander Calder, once sat in the interior courtyard. "After the house was published in Life," Bruce adds, "the response from across the country was so phenomenal that people wanted to buy the plans and build the home for themselves."
The traditional residents of New Canaan were, however, less enthusiastic, and during the fifties a vigorous debate questioning the merits of modernist design flourished in the local press, some of the barbs even taking the form of poems.
As you head east, turn right on Route 123 and, soon after, left again on Canoe Hill Road. Laurel Road is on the first left. Heading up it, take the left incline onto Sleepy Hollow Road. At No. 178 Sleepy Hollow is a beautifully proportioned home built out of wood designed by Johnson. And No. 218, partially obscured by trees but well worth getting out of the car to peek at, is Johnson's famous 1953 Wiley House. A classically elegant, two-story-high glass enclosure that houses the living area sits atop and at right angles to the rest of the home, an elongated rectangular block made from stone and glass.
As you return to Laurel and head north, it's possible to see the much-altered John Johansen home at No. 701 and John Black Lee's starkly crisp house at No. 729.
Further south, off Weed Street—and soon to be open for public view—is the Irwin Pool House, which Landis Gores designed in 1960. It's in Irwin Park, once part of the estate of Thomas J. Watson, the head of IBM, and can be seen on the right once you enter. Spacious and airy, the Gores Pavilion, as it's now called, offers both a sense of the easy proportions these young architects favored and a greater understanding of why they chose to build in New Canaan. With its dense woodland, this once sparsely settled landscape lent itself to designs that celebrated the drama of nature. "I grew up in a bedroom where one wall was entirely glass," Bruce Becker remembers. "Where else in the North East could a kid experience that…even today?"
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