About this item
Famous for its transparency, the Philip Johnson Glass House--the icon of modernism that Vincent Scully called "the most conceptually important house of the century"--has nonetheless proven vexingly opaque to interpretation. Its architect, Philip Cortelyou Johnson, has been equally elusive, a polarizing and influential cultural figure on whom no psychological character study yet exists. In her new book, Adele Tutter addresses both enigmas. Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House reveals how this superficially nonrepresentational physical structure encodes aspects of its architect's aspirations, motivations, and conflicts--how it acts as a veritable self-portrait of his inner world. An envious, vulnerable man emerges from this intimate synthesis.
About the Author
Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. A practicing psychoanalyst, author, and art critic, her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on the relationships between loss and creativity and between art and the artist in such subjects as Raymond Carver, Leos Janacek, Philip Johnson, Ovid, Nicholas Poussin, Josef Sudek, and Francesca Woodman. The recipient of the American Psychoanalytic Association Karl Menninger and CORST prizes, among other honors, she is is author of "Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House" (University of Virginia Press, April 2016) ; coeditor, with Léon Wurmser, of "Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, and Creativity" (Routledge) ; and editor of "The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration" (forthcoming, Routledge, May, 2016) . She currently working on a new monograph, "Mourning and Metamorphosis: Poussin's Ovidian Vision."
