The Glass House artistically, of course, is a descendant of Mies van der Rohe.

He said you could do a

glass house one day in the ’40s and I said you couldn’t because a glass house means that if you have a
wall that sticks into the glass and then you’ve destroyed the glass-ness of the glass house. Therefore,
you couldn’t have any walls. Well, in discussion, it comes out that any walls you want could be a
separate little pavilion in the house, which in the case of my bathroom is the case. But the whole
arrangement inside the house, the planning of the house, was done from a simple, Mies-ian
arrangement of planes and blocks. That is, the closet into the bedroom makes one plane, the kitchen
makes another, both of them anchored by the circular bathroom. That gives you an anchor from which
the others radiate. This is simple asymmetry, simple 1920s thinking in terms of having an architecture
that is not symmetrical. Then I put the whole thing in a symmetrical cage, denying, Mies would have
said, denying the whole point. But the house is not a Mies-ian house either. The symmetrical outside
gave it calmness and organiz-ability of your eye that was very restful to me. Then you step inside and
you get into the wild world of asymmetric planes and volumes. So I don’t know where it all came
from except a great many ideas like Malevich, the Constructivists, but most especially Mies’ early
designs for ideal, how you would arrange ideal spaces next to each other, sliding them, anchoring
them and isolating them. So that’s what I’ve done here and you will notice that you can dominate the
whole place from that room, that you can sit down on the central area, which is a rug, which is also in
front of the fire, which is the aim of any house. When you enter a house, you, metaphorically you
sniff like a dog, and sniffing the way a dog finds his place to sit down is to go round and round until
he finds the epicenter of comfort and then curls up. And you do that without knowing it yourself when
you enter a house. Where can I sit down? Where can I feel that my back won’t be attacked? Where do
I feel in the center of things emotionally?

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