AND THE GLASS HOUSE OF ATREUS

Philip Johnson’s masterpiece—the Glass House—is compared to a dream and conceptualized as containing encrypted and embedded representations of the self. Freud’s masterpiece—The Interpretation of Dreams—is the theo-retical and methodological model for this approach to design-as-dream. Drawing on Johnson’s words and forms set in biographical, historical, and cultural context, interpretive paths are traced from manifest design elements of the Glass House to overdetermined latent meanings, yielding new and surprising insights into the Glass House, its elusive architect, and the process of its design. A mirror that reflects an image, a lens that focuses it, and a prism that reveals its components, the Glass House turns a lucid eye onto its maker.... with the psychical object whose early history the analyst is seeking to recover... we are regularly met by a situation which with the archaeologi-cal object occurs only in such rare circumstances as those of Pompeii or of the tomb of Tut’ankhamun. All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem completely forgotten are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccessible to the subject. —Sigmund Freud (1937, p. 260) It seems an architect is only inarticulate about his own work.... I really don’t know why I designed [my buildings] the way I did. Others will tell me. —PhiliP JohnSon (1979, p. 73)... the simpler the image, the vaster the dream