from a young lady���s 1802 diary that the interior was ���ornamented with some Chinese figures.��� Its view included a rustic hermitage inhabited not by a live hermit but
crowned by the sculpture of one. At its present site, the
Derby Summer House opens onto a walled rose garden.
A
n entirely different species of garden house is Philip
Johnson���s 1949 Glass House, inspired, much to Mies
van der Rohe���s wrath, by a 1947 model, shown in a Mies
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, of
the latter���s famous Farnsworth House. Johnson is celebrated as much for the monastic way he supposedly
inhabited his house, part of a five building compound he
worked on over a forty-year period, as for its actual design. ���Except when entertaining, Johnson lives alone,
servantless and accompanied only by weather, paintings and books,��� LIFE Magazine reported in 1949.
The steel-framed building is 56 feet long, 32 feet wide
and 10 �� feet high and encloses, in its glass walls, the
kitchen, dining and sleeping areas, with the open spaces
divided by low walnut cabinets. Only the brick cylinder
which contains the bathroom reaches the ceiling.
The narrow, temple-like form of the Derby summerhouse reminds us that architecture, in its origins, looked
to the human body for proportion. The Greek Ionic column was modeled on the male, the Doric on the mature
HYLAND
