The Glass House was a residential project designed by Philip Johnson and built during 1948-1949. Strikingly modern for its time, the Glass House utilizes industrial materials and enveloped on all sides by glass walls. The design was influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, as Johnson had featured the house in an exhibit he curated at the Modern Museum of Art just a few years earlier. Raised 10 inches off the ground, the house is a 56-foot by 32-foot open plan design with privacy reserved for the bathroom enclosed by brick. Walnut cabinets divide up the rest of the space. The rest of the property features several other modern buildings added by Johnson in the years following the Glass House’s construction including the Brick House, the Painting Gallery, the Kirsten Tower, the pavilion, the sculpture gallery, and the study. Upon his death, Johnson left the entire property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson, born on July 8, 1906, was a seminal American architect whose work has been characterized as modern and postmodern. After working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1930s, Johnson stepped into journalism in 1936 working for a populist and anti-Semitic publication. His Nazi sympathies did not last for long, however, for he enlisted in the military in 1941, just as the United States began its campaign against the Axis. Around this time, Johnson enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design and designed his first building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He went on to work on some of the most iconic modern and postmodern projects including, the Glass House, the Seagram Building, the Lipstick Building, the Crystal Cathedral, and 550 Madison Avenue. Johnson was also recognized as the most prominent homosexual architect in the United States. Though he only came out as gay publicly in 1993, he had his first homosexual relationship back in 1934. At age 98, Philip Johnson died on January 25, 2005, and his longtime partner, David Whitney, died just months later.

When I first approached Couch Center at 8:30 am on a Thursday in August of 2018 I felt a type of nervous anticipation. The almost industrially styled building reached an imposing twelve stories into the sky, and I was to live on the eleventh floor. The architectural style and the scale of the building reminded me that I was entering a whole new world. In the days after I moved in, met my roommate, and made my room my own, I was surprised by how used to this new building I had become. The building that at first reminded me more of barracks now felt more like home.

               Today when I enter Couch Center, I feel a wave of nostalgia for that first year of college. Couch became more than just a home. There I met lifelong friends, made unforgettable memories, and worked long hours as I began my undergraduate career. Couch Center reminds me that home does not have to be especially comfortable or beautiful; home is just a place where we live and grow.