A Secret Little Glass Home in the Heart of New York
Sadie Stein
Deceptively unassuming, the architect Philip Johnson’s Rockefeller Guest House is an unspoiled minimalist gem.
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ON A QUIET BLOCK in the East 50s in Manhattan, set between a music school and a prewar apartment building a coin’s toss from the noise of subway construction, sits a discreet, Modernist marvel: Philip Johnson’s 1950 Rockefeller Guest House. One of several private New York residences the architect designed, the house is a designated historic — as well as architectural — landmark. Yet one would be forgiven for overlooking the unadorned brick-and-glass facade; the house doesn’t give up its secrets easily.

New York is not a city that always protects, much less values, its architectural heritage. For evidence, one must only head west on 52nd Street, to the recently shuttered Four Seasons restaurant, designed by Johnson with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, his “guru.” Yet the Rockefeller Guest House stands virtually unchanged, the best preserved — and yet least known — of Johnson’s New York works. Inside, the brick walls could recite a firsthand history of the 20th century’s art world.

The two-story building, one of Johnson’s earliest New York commissions, was built for Blanchette Ferry Hooker Rockefeller between 1949 and 1950, and was intended as both a showcase for her modern art collection and a space for entertaining. The neighborhood of Turtle Bay — described as the East Side’s “riverside back yard” by the 1939 Work Projects Administration Guide — had since the 1920s been an artistic hub of the city, combining a quantity of affordable housing, dedicated studios and elegant enclaves like Beekman Place. Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst lived nearby; in the 1960s, the neighborhood played host to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Here was a natural site for the collaboration between the fashionable architect and his patron.

Blanchette Rockefeller, the wife of oil scion John D. Rockefeller III, was from a young age an impassioned and knowledgeable art lover. She and her husband shared a liking of Asian and traditional art, but her personal enthusiasm was for more modern work; her collection contained such pieces as Alberto Giacometti’s “Man Pointing” and Robert Motherwell’s “The Voyage.” Both works wound up in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and indeed the Guest House became a mini testing ground for several cornerstones of MoMA’s holdings. Blanchette Rockefeller twice served as president of that museum and, in 1948, founded MoMA’s Junior Council. The Guest House would come to function as an extension of MoMA, a space to woo potential donors, to entertain artists and to display Modernism in its purest and most impressive form.

At the time, Johnson had only been practicing in New York for a few years, but he’d already established a reputation as an advocate of the International Style. Although not a licensed architect until the mid-1950s — associates signed off on his projects until he managed to pass the exam — by 1949 he’d built his iconic New Canaan Glass House and had become an unofficial architectural adviser to MoMA, whose department of architecture he’d helped subsidize. Despite his outspoken fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s — with an FBI dossier to prove it — Johnson had remained an art-world social fixture, an in-demand guest at dinner parties and salons who was known for his sophistication and wit.

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