Johnson curated an exhibit of Mies van der Rohe work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, featuring a model of the glass Farnsworth House.

It is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is open to the public for guided tours, which begin at a visitors center at 199 Elm Street in New Canaan.

The interior is open with the space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor-to-ceiling.

[6] Johnson is quoted as saying that his idea for Glass House grew from "a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.

The estate overlooks the valley of the small Rippowam River to the west (seen from the back of Glass House, past a grassy rise).

The building created such a stir that at one point a police officer was posted nearby to keep out trespassers, and Johnson put up a sign near the street, stating: "This House Is Now Occupied Please Respect the Privacy of the Owner.

[14] As a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Johnson had publicized Mies' work, and the American acknowledged his debt to the German architect, particularly in a 1950 interview in Architectural Digest magazine.

Johnson curated an exhibit of Mies work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, featuring a model of the glass Farnsworth House.

During his trips to Germany, Johnson wrote a positive review of Mein Kampf, submitted articles where he decried the "decline in fertility...of the white race", described his visits to Hitler Youth camps, and gave favorable coverage of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

He was investigated by the FBI for his earlier contacts with the Nazis, was eventually cleared for military service, and served in the Army until the end of the War.

[15] For many Yale University architecture students, it was considered a rite of passage for decades after the house was built to sneak onto the property and see how long they could walk around until Whitney discovered them and told them to leave.

The Brick House, also rectangular, faces the Glass House, but a nearby concrete, circular sculpture by Donald Judd (untitled, 1971) and small circular pools on either side of it serve to soften the rectangular effect, although structures and objects throughout the estate are arranged to show patterns or repetitions of curves and angles.

[9] Johnson called other buildings his "follies" because their size, their shape or both made them unusable, such as the low-ceilinged Pavilion on the Pond or the Ghost House, a structure built with chain-link fencing on the foundation of an old barn and with lilies planted inside, inspired by his friend architect Frank Gehry.

Large-scale 20th-century paintings by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman and more are displayed on a system of three revolving racks of carpeted panels.

The gallery still includes an 8-foot tall portrait of Johnson by Andy Warhol, which repeats the same pensive image of the architect nine times in a grid format.

Philip Johnson was a friend and supporter of both Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman – the influence of both seems evident in the form of Da Monsta.

However, Johnson claimed that his original inspiration for Da Monsta came from the design for a museum in Dresden by artist and friend Frank Stella.

The name was chosen after a conversation with architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, as Johnson felt the house had the quality of a living thing.

[7] Tours begin and end at the Visitor Center in downtown New Canaan, Connecticut (across from the train station), where vehicles transport each group to the site near the New Canaan–Stamford border.

"[T]he classical references alluded to by its thin brick base and the symmetrical proportions of its frame demonstrate the range of Johnson's historical knowledge.

"[14] Ouroussoff criticized the underground picture gallery as too "dark and somber", and said the ability to flip the paintings on movable walls is a more rigid situation than it might first appear, since only six works can be seen at any one time.