The Rue Saint-Guillaume is a short, narrow, dignified street on the Left Bank of Paris. It begins a few blocks below the river, crosses the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and exhausts itself, in a Chaplinesque T-shape, only two blocks later, at the Rue de Grenelle. That last block, in particular, has a funny hauteur. The only light on the western side of the street is an illuminated sign, which hangs beside a green gate guarding a courtyard. The sign, a blue circle within a red circumference, blinks off and on all night. It means, simply, “No Parking.” Yet at dusk, around the time when the sign is first lit, it is not unusual to see a little clutch of well-dressed Americans or Germans or Japanese, notebooks out, cameras ready, waiting beneath the light as though it were a beacon or a symbol.
They are waiting for the gate to open, so that they can look, for a little while, at a house that sits inside the courtyard. The house is called the Maison de Verre—the Glass House. It was built in 1931 by a minor French interior decorator named Pierre Chareau, who designed it and all its furnishings, never built another house in France, and died, forgotten and alone, in New York in 1950. For most of the past ten years, the house has been uninhabited—closed to all but some friends of the owners and a few architects and designers. The visitors continue to arrive, but after dark the gate is usually shut, and the code to the little electronic keypad that opens it is kept secret.
Nonetheless, over the years a cult and a literature have grown up around the house. “The Louise Brooks of modern houses,” someone once called it, in reference to its mystique, its sleek yet lyrical modernity, and, above all, its tragically interrupted and then revived career as a modern monument. At the end of the century, it seems to stand outside the squabbles of modernism and postmodernism, and point in a direction entirely its own—the house at the end of the road not taken.
Late one afternoon in June of 1989, an old friend, who had moved to France a year before, called my wife and me at our hotel while we were visiting Paris, and said that she thought she might be able to arrange a visit that evening to the Maison de Verre. Dominique Vellay, who was, she explained, one of the members of the house’s family (odd expression, I thought), would be glad to show it to us. I had only a vague, graduate student’s notion of what the Maison de Verre was, but my marriage was built on the extremely shaky foundation of my wife’s illusion, constructed in the first year of our courtship, that in Paris I actually knew my way around town. (I had lived in Paris for a year as a teen-ager, mostly going to see old American movies in dusty repertory houses.) So I said yes, of course, the Glass House—of course we’d love to visit. We arranged to meet at six on the Rue Saint-Guillaume. Then we fell asleep, and woke up at five to six. We ran all the way from our hotel, on the Rue de Montalembert, along the Boulevard, and down the Rue Saint-Guillaume.
Someone had left the gate open. We stepped through, and saw, at the far end of a cobblestone courtyard, a wall of glass, gleaming in the early-evening light. It seemed unsupported—a block of translucent crystal floating in space. Then we saw that the block was cantilevered out over a steel-and-glass entranceway, and that its walls were made of hundreds of small facets of glass—cells of glass brick. It was hard to say how big the wall of glass was. It almost filled the width of the courtyard, and so it filled your field of vision.
Suddenly, the house turned on: the glass front began to glow like a Japanese lantern, lit from without (by two floodlights, I saw after a moment, which were set at a distance from the house on two metal ladders) in a way that made it seem to be lit from within. The articulated facets disappeared, melting into one great glow. On the lower right of the glass-brick block was a simple metal plaque, with red lettering set into it: “PIERRE CHAREAU 1931; COLL—BIJVOET; FERS—DALBET.” The house was signed, it seemed, like a painting.
Afterward, we remembered that first visit as an almost random daze of quick impressions: first, a doctor’s office, which had high ceilings and a floor covered with ancient, eroding rubber matting—the kind of bumpy circles-within-a-square rubber that you see now on the floor of every industrial showroom—and an extendable Cubistic desk of veneered mahogany. On the wall above the desk hung a portrait of an elegant man in a white coat, and with streamlined features and a long French jaw. A bronze Cubist bust of a woman, all facets and angles, sat on a wall cabinet. Dominique Vellay and her boyfriend, the photographer François Halard, met us in the hallway, and explained that the man was her grandfather, Dr. Jean Dalsace, and the woman her grandmother, Annie Dalsace, née Anna Bernheim. They had commissioned the house and its furnishings, she explained. Dominique’s father, Dr. Pierre Vellay, still kept his practice in the office.
Then Dominique and François led us back out of the office and down a long, narrow tiled hallway, the evening light streaming in shafts around us, and we turned a corner and came to the foot of a long stairway. Tall, curving, perforated-metal screens stood at the foot of the stairs, and made the forms of the furniture that we could just glimpse on the landing above look dreamy and softened, like the forms in a Seurat drawing. Dominique parted the screens—they came toward us on a hidden track and then quickly receded into a sheath. The stairway, we saw, had no handrail; it hung in space, and led up toward the light. Somehow, the house had turned us around inside it: the walk through the narrow hallway from the doctor’s office had apparently taken us along a gentle, insinuating spiral, so that the wall of glass was now in front of us again, this time seeming to be the rear wall of the house—the light at the top of the stairs. (The house was to work this trick on me dozens of times in the next few years, and I never quite figured out how.) We climbed the stairs, which were clad, like the doctor’s office, in faded matting, and when we came to the top we turned to our left.
We were facing a room like no other I had ever seen: a vast, two-story salon that was set alongside the great glass wall. A single bookcase, with a running ladder, filled one long wall, floor to ceiling. Over our heads, wrapped around two walls of the two-story space, was a continuous mezzanine, decorated with perforated-metal screens and low bookshelves, and punctuated by panels of burled ash. In the center of the library floor, which was also covered with rubber matting, were sofas, settees, and lots of little tables. Some of this furniture was in a style that I thought of as Art Deco; the rest was in the same jumpy, Cubist style as the desk In the doctor’s office. Some of the pieces were flamboyantly upholstered; others were lacquered wood. A big Surrealist picture—a blue landscape or still-life with an unidentifiable forest of forms—stood on an easel off to one side. The entire ensemble seemed laid out casually, naturally—sofa facing sofa, chair facing chair—as though a party had been interrupted.
Three steel girders, rising right up from the foundation to the roof, stood at the corners of the room. The girders were unadorned-their rows of bolts still visible, painted a bright industrial orange and faced with black slate. The electrical wiring and the plumbing were exposed, too, and rose along the side walls in a series of attenuated, freestanding pipes. An intricate system of wheels and gears, which recalled the factory set in Chaplin’s “Modem Times,” stood at one end of the glass wall. It seemed to be a ventilation system: one of the wheels had apparently been turned in such a way as to push a column of steel vents open.
And yet the room, for all its industrial candor, had nothing raw about it. Each element had been polished or refined so that it seemed festive in its forthrightness. The exposed fixtures, the naked girders were like the fittings on a liner—signs of engineered luxury rather than of raw utility. The industrial materials—brushed aluminum and perforated metal and rubber matting—were so varied that they seemed opulent rather than reductive: a little glossary of utilitarian forms. A principle of transparency ruled. Punched screens, or aluminum mesh, held everything together; light passed even through metal.
Behind the salon was a little sitting room, all in cream, canary yellow, and marine blue, with a ship’s ladder at one end, which communicated with the master bedroom, on the floor above. The ladder, Dominique showed us, could be hauled up on pulleys and hidden away in the room above, to seal it off; you could just pull it up behind you when you went to sleep. Everything in the house seemed movable: perforated-metal partitions slid; ten-foot-high metal cylinders came open at the touch of a finger, revealing themselves to be closets, as beautifully partitioned as steamer trunks. There was a preposterous bathroom upstairs, which you entered from the mezzanine that ran around the salon. It was made of white tile and brushed duralumin, and was designed, like the set of a farce, with complicated partitions, so that a man and a woman could be in it together, bathing and shaving and talking, without ever actually seeing each other.
Everywhere one’s eyes turned a new harmony seemed visible: a grid of glass brick set off against a table as brightly lacquered as a Japanese box; a long stretch of rubber matting interrupted only by the polished surface of a grand piano; a folding screen painted with Cocteau-like figures placed directly behind a black iron girder—a happy marriage of Fritz Lang and Fred Astaire. It was as though everything charming and lovable that modernism had ever produced had been brought together into a single secret storeroom in the middle of Paris.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“No one now,” Dominique said. She had tried for a long time, she said, and now . . . She let the sentence trail off in the air “Un fantôme. A ghost.”
It was only after my wife and I returned to New York that we came to understand that what had felt like a revelation was really a vogue. When we talked to people in New York who knew about modern houses, we realized that a cult had grown up around the Glass House and its architect, Pierre Chareau. An architectural bookstore on Thompson Street had three books about the Maison de Verre constantly on order, including one in Japanese, all of them published in the last ten years. Someone told us about an international organization, the Friends of the Glass House, which exists simply to keep fans of the house in touch with one another. Though its “friends” know the house almost entirely through photographs from the three books—our visit, it turned out, was a special event—some of them had nevertheless constructed full-scale replicas of its glass façade. Not long after we got back from Paris, one popped up on a corner of Duane Park, in downtown Manhattan. A lot of big, spectacular buildings that have gone up in the last twenty years, including such outsized, multivitamin buildings as the Pompidou Center and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, turn out to be the progeny of the little Glass House on the Rue Saint-Guillaume. (On a more mundane level, the value of the furniture inside the house is the subject of a separate, parallel cult, spearheaded by the owner of a men’s store in Beverly Hills.)
But, for all its fame, the Glass House is an oddly reclusive and mysterious building. The mother of a friend of mine in New York, it turned out, had been a patient of Dr. Pierre Vellay’s, and my friend had visited him and his wife, Aline, countless times in their apartment above the house, but had never been invited to go downstairs into the Maison de Verre itself. No one, in the books about the Glass House, could even decide exactly what it is. In the literature about the house, it has been compared to, among other things, a yacht, a classical Japanese temple, a Chinese Communist barracks, a furniture cabinet, Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 A.M.,” and Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass.” It has even been described as a window onto the fourth dimension.
The house was built, I gradually came to realize as I read more about it, as a treasure house to hold all the things that the self-consciously modern people who built it believed in; the office that we had seen on the ground floor may have been the first unofficial family-planning center in France, for instance, and the salon above had been designed to unite the Cocteau generation of French artists with the Communist intellectuals. But as these ideas dimmed or went out of fashion one after another, the house seemed to become, as if by a spell, uninhabitable. I learned that the house had been built for Dr. Dalsace and his wife, that they had had two children—a boy, Bernard, and a girl, Aline—and that Aline had married another gynecologist, Pierre Vellay, with whom she had five children. Three of the children lived in apartments in the courtyard—around, above, and across from the house. It was their legacy, and their burden. The family question was: What is to be done with the Glass House? But none of them lived inside the house.
Over the next five years, my wife, Martha, and I tried to find out why the house was uninhabited. As we did, it became our ambition to live in the Glass House, and our illusion to believe that we could.
“As a little girl, I hid here,” Dominique was saying in July of 1990. Martha and I were with Dominique and Francois again, sitting on the mezzanine overlooking the salon of the Glass House. “We would kneel down here, behind the screens, invisible, to watch the soirées—the women and men talking,” Dominique went on. “Everything is meant to be seen through a scrim or a screen, like this, like a memory. Do you know, the house is like a wave, something shimmering. The magic of the light that went on in the bathroom—seeing it just gleam beneath the black metal doors!” She turned and gestured to her left, toward a pair of black metal doors that led off the mezzanine to the master bedroom. The house was terribly hot. Paris was in the midst of a heat wave. It was a French heat wave, though: intense but shapely. This heat wave began at eight in the morning, rose to a pitch of intensity around noon, subsided a little in the evening, and then, at midnight, nearly to the beat, was swept away by a breeze.
“It’s a passionate object, but a destructive one, like all passionate objects,” Dominique went on. “I lived inside for a long time, you know. Why did I leave? I think I might have stayed.”
François looked at her and then he said, gently, “Dodo, it was the best thing.”
“Yes, it was like Sleeping Beauty,” she said, laughing. Their apartment, across the courtyard from the Glass House, which I had seen, was a world of light and color—Louis XVI furniture and parquet floors and yellow linen curtains. There were three Twomblys hanging on the yellow-washed walls. Only a single Chareau metal coatrack, in the hallway—the hangers of heavy, broad metal, like big French mustaches—reminded you of the proximity of the Glass House. I thought, a little disloyally, that the apartment might have seemed a bit of a relief after the austerities of the house She seemed to think so, too.
“Did you know,” she said after I praised the apartment, “that it was Léon Daudet’s apartment in the thirties?” She shook her head, in apparent wonder. But the name meant little to me, and I let it go by.
We drove to Le Voltaire, a restaurant on the Quai Voltaire that the Vellay family frequents. “It suits me better, doesn’t it?” she said of the apartment, after we had sat down and ordered champagnes framboises. “And the house is still across the way—our parents looking down at us, like two giant overseeing eyes. All families build a Glass House, open to the world, and live inside it: these houses are our inheritance. My family’s house has the burden of being real as well. It needs to be heated and have its taxes paid.”
Now Dominique said, abruptly, “Do you want to know what really led to the Glass House? Did you notice the furniture in the dining room? That is one of the keys to understanding the house.”
Later, when I went back to the house, I looked at the dining-room furniture. The dining alcove, which was tucked away beside the salon, contained a table and chairs that were uncharacteristically simple, clunky, appealing—the kind of dining-room set my grandparents had.
“That was the Bernheim family furniture, and it was always kept in the house, though in style it didn’t really belong,” Dominique said. “But it was important to my grandmother. The house was built because my great-grandfather loved his daughter to distraction. He bought her pictures, furniture, and a house. The Glass House began because of the love of a father for his daughter.”
To understand how the Glass House came to be, I began to see, it was necessary to learn something about French Jews, Parisian houses, and German glass. In France, at the beginning of this century, some Jews tried to keep just below the ordinary surface of French life, while others tried to skim along just above it. The first impulse, which feels familiar to Americans, because Jewish life here followed a similar course, involved merchants and real-estate agents and other newly arrived middle-class people—people who made a little money, spent it somewhat lavishly, and occupied a satisfied, watchful position just outside the mainstream of French society. Many of them had German names. They had fled from Alsace-Lorraine as the Franco-Prussian War ended, in 1871.
The second impulse was more peculiarly French. You saw it in civil servants and Army officers and diplomats—Jews who were not merely “assimilated” but passionately committed to an ideal of French identity that was not commonplace even among other French people. They saw the French nation that had emerged since the Revolution as a place destined to remove Jews from the ghetto and return them to the world. (In the eighteen-nineties, the “Prayer for France” in the standard Jewish prayer book began, “Almighty protector of Israel and humanity.”) This was the milieu that Dreyfus himself emerged from—and, oddly, returned to, even after Devil’s Island.
Pierre Chareau came from the more ordinary milieu. His mother was Sephardic, his father a wine merchant who had fallen on hard times. Though from childhood Pierre wanted to design things, he was not able to study architecture, which in those days was still a grand profession in France, dedicated to teaching its adherents how to construct libraries and operas and triumphal arches rather than houses. (His lack of absorption into the rules of the grand profession, it turned out, was part of his good luck, though it could not have seemed that way at the time.) He worked as a draftsman in the Paris office of Waring & Gillow, the prominent English furniture-and-design company, until 1914.
It was not a plum job but not quite a dead end, either. The furniture that Pierre Chareau designed for Waring & Gillow was mostly undistinguished. What he loved was shows. He wrote little operas, and was putting them on as early as 1905; in fact, the first designs of his that are known to have survived are sketches for a series of amateur tableaux vivants. Waring & Gillow designed several theatres while Chareau was there, among them the Gaïté, the Vaudeville, the Ambigu, and the Renaissance, some of which still survive.
He had another enthusiasm as well. In our fixed imagination of the early twentieth century, we have by now assigned technical innovation to America, and bonheur de vivre to France: we fly the rockets and they serve the cheese. At the beginning of the century, though, and even after the First World War, the French tradition of innovation and Invention had a style of its own. You see that alternative civilization at work in Lartigue’s photographs of his family in balloons, or in Méliès’s first movies: airplanes and cars and rockets imagined in a way that allied them, however preposterously, with sport and romance rather than industry. Chareau belonged to this vein of the ingénieux, as the French like to put it, more than to any kind of Beaux-Arts manner. He loved tinkering, thinking up new inventions. Every great designer has a pet object, a motif of self-expression. For most of the major moderns, that object was the chair. Chareau’s medium was closets. His early closets have doors that swing open and spin around like cake stands, or have doors inside their doors, which unfasten to reveal yet more doors, with fragrant cedar panels hidden inside. To the end of his life, Chareau kept coming up with such schemes and inventions, designed to lend romance to everyday necessities. The designer Francis Jourdain, one of his oldest friends, recalls a dream he had just after Chareau’s death: in his dream, he saw an old-fashioned glass elevator, with a wood-burning stove and a telescoping stovepipe inside, scaling up and down the façade of a house. “Pierre Chareau designed that!” he remembers thinking in the dream.
Chareau’s enthusiasm for invention would probably have come to nothing more than a footnote had he not been discovered by a couple who could afford to have him make built-in closets on a dramatic scale. Annie and Jean Dalsace represented a marriage of the two streams of French Jewish life. Annie Bernheim’s father was a self-made man whose family, like so many, had come west from Alsace-Lorraine after 1871. The Bernheims settled in Paris at the turn of the century, and made a small fortune in real estate. Then, around the time of the First World War, they moved to an apartment on the Rue d’Anjou, on the Right Bank. The Bernheims’ only son, Pierre, was killed in the Argonne in April, 1915. All the family’s love and hope (and money) then came to be lavished on its only daughter.
Annie was born in 1896, and as a teen-ager she was already aristocratic—shy, precise, demanding, and gifted. She was one of those women in the early years of the century who, still unable to pursue a profession or “career,” began to invest the “feminine” sphere of life with a wild but systematic passion. Not that her tastes were frivolous or superficial. Once, for her birthday, her father offered her jewelry, and she asked instead for a picture by a young painter named Picasso. By her teens, she had taken over the decoration of the Rue d’Anjou apartment. Fashion, flowers, jewelry, cooking, furniture, the colors of a house, the shape of a living room—all these things quickly came under her precise eye, and were reshaped to a new rule. Annie believed that pleasures benefitted by being made subject to principles. She had rules for looking. If you went to an art gallery, you were to look at five pictures, no more and no less. Four would have been insufficient; six would have been dilettantism. “It was a time of red roses, and she made them white,” Dominique said, epigrammatically, of her grandmother.
Jean Dalsace, whom Annie married in 1918, was a perfect product of the official stream of French Jewish life. His father came from a line of high-ranking civil servants, and he hoped that his son would study law. But Jean wanted to be a doctor instead, and after he got his law degree he went to medical school, and in 1926 got a degree in gynecology. In America, such a choice would have been unlikely for an intellectually ambitious young doctor; gynecology here was still a homely, sympathetic specialty. But in France the scientific study of reproduction had an overtone of courage and optimism. Its displaced subject was sex. To plan babies, without the peasant mystifications of midwifery or the overtones of shame and necessary suffering that a Catholic society still imposed, was to take part in the modern revolution: it was, in an alarmingly, almost comically literal sense, to seize control of the means of production.
Jean Dalsace was a man of the left. After the Second World War, he even joined the Communist Party and visited Moscow. (“Annie was not a Communist,” Dominique told me, “but she declared herself a woman of the left.”) Jean systematically believed in systematic belief. Later in life, he joined Freud to Marx, and became a lay analyst himself (“I asked him once why a gynecologIst would want to be an analyst,” Dominique recalled. “ ‘Fundamentally,’ he said, ‘it is the same investigation.’ ”)
The Dalsaces’ seems like a touchstone “hypergamous” marriage: she supplied the money, and he supplied the social position. She had the style; he had the ideas. But it was more complicated than that. Annie was an obsessive, rather than a fashionable, woman. Her tastes were too intense, and too singular, to be charming or conventionally “social.” She did not supply her husband, as fashionable women are expected to, with conventional comfort or conventional elegance. Theirs was a love based on a set of common beliefs, invested in a set of charmed objects: the clinic; the higher, misty reaches of French Marxism; and, above all, the place where they lived, and the way it was made to look. When they decided to build a house, in 1927, there was only one man whom they even considered to design it.
Annie had met Pierre Chareau when she was still a girl. One of the things that made her so French was her love of things English—a talisman, as in Proust, of advanced taste in Paris at the beginning of the century. It was natural for Annie to ask her father for private English lessons, and during the First World War she studied with an Englishwoman named Louise Chareau, whom everyone called Dollie. (Dollie had admired Pierre’s ability in music, painting, and drawing since their first meeting, when he was sixteen and she was nineteen; they had married in 1904.) Dollie was sixteen years older than Annie, and seems to have been the kind of woman who was always quick to make up her mind, and quick to make up the minds of other people for them. It was through Dollie that Annie became acquainted with modern painting and design, and it was also through Dollie that Annie became acquainted with Pierre Chareau, when he came back from the war. The Dalsaces and the Chareaus became inseparable. Though Pierre and Dollie were the poorer of the two couples, they soon became among the keenest collectors of avant-garde art in France. There is a wonderful photograph of Chareau from the nineteen-twenties, posing in front of his three great early Picasso Cubist collages. He also bought one of the very first Mondrians to enter a French collection. Yet in his own early work—for Waring & Gillow, and also in what he did after he set out on his own—there was very little radical or avant-garde invention. Mostly, he made luxury furniture, in a comfortable, bourgeois style.
The only original characteristic of Chareau’s early design is a vein of gentle and obstinate tyranny. He designed a whole serIes of desks, for instance, with steeply sloping surfaces, just because he hated the look of stray paper. Put your work down on a Chareau desk and a moment later it is on the floor. The sloping desks look out at you from the Chareau catalogues like divas, self-satisfied and impossible. The desks are perhaps an index to his character. His friends, in their memoirs of Chareau, use a descriptive language—“hypersensitive,” “high-strung,” “temperamental”—that has about it a hint of affectionate euphemism. In plain English, Chareau was touchy and moody—charming, but without the commanding self-confidence that makes prima donnas tolerable, or even exhilarating. It isn’t any surprise, really, that he could work only for a small circle of clients—basically, just for the young Dalsaces and the old Bernheims.
Annie and Jean had been living since their marriage in an apartment at 195 Boulevard Saint-Germain—in an arrondissement that, without being unfashionable, still had about it a slight bohemian air, like Greenwich Village in New York at the same time. Eventually, Jean decided that he wanted to incorporate his office, and his practice, into his home, and the Bernheims bought their daughter and son-in-law an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier—a residential building that wraps around a courtyard—on the Rue Saint-Guillaume. They wanted to build a house that could serve as an office, a clinic, a home, and a salon—a house “created under the sign of amity, in perfect affective accord,” Jean wrote later.
At first, Chareau intended simply to pull down the old building and put up a new one in its place. But an old woman and her daughter—durable anti-Semites, according to family legend—lived in an apartment on the top floor of the rear quarter, and refused to vacate. So Chareau realized that the house would have to be inserted under the women’s apartment, rather than constructed from the ground up. This suited him fine: the entire house could become a kind of built-in cabinet, a closet. In part because the courtyard didn’t get much light, and in part because it had never been done before, he decided to enclose the house within two walls of glass.
“Tell me what you want to know. Marc Vellay, Dominique’s brother, said, a little impatiently, when we met by the door to the house on another hot evening. “I could spend several days showing you the interior.” Marc is the Dalsaces’ grandson—the fifth child and only son of Aline and Pierre Vellay—and after a long period as a ’68-vintage anarchist he became devoted to the Glass House and the memory of Pierre Chareau. His two books on Chareau (one written with the historian Kenneth Frampton) are the most important and thorough sources of information on his life and work. (“Marc was essentially a Trotskyist, really,” Dominique once explained to me gravely. “The Maoists were too spontaneous for him.”)
I said that I was interested in everything, and he began to show me through the house again.
“The first radicalism of the house lies in the orientation of the entrance, and the series of implied spirals that are as much a part of the architecture of the house as the glass façade,” he said as we walked inside. “It is the first house where you have to enter by making a sharp turn. This brings you in. During the day, the light invites you in toward the office, and you describe a small circle.” He stopped, took a piece of paper from his pocket, and drew the path you had to take to get from the front door to the stairs; it was a diagram of the trick the house kept playIng on me.
“Then at night—when you enter the social realm of the house—you describe a much larger spiral, but still a spiral, as the floodlit glass bricks lead you up toward the now opened stairway.” He drew a second diagram. “So this series of tighter or looser spirals and spiralling movements is a human element of the house, in contrast to the vertical and horizontal orientation of the other elements. The coördination of the human spirals with the steel-and-glass architectonics is the real grammar of the house. The architecture, the furniture, and the human movement of the Maison de Verre are an ensemble.” As we mounted the stairs toward the library, he asked rhetorically, “Does that mean that every piece of furniture must remain in place?” and answered, “No, of course not. In fact, the ensembles of furniture have changed, been moved, several times. The notion of a fixed, invariable ensemble is fictitious. However, the number of possible solutions is delimited. The house itself, like a thinking machine, will reject the wrong solutions.”
Upstairs, we looked at the furniture in the library. “The idea of an ensemble had long been present in Chareau’s work,” Marc said. “The breakthrough or discontinuity in Chareau’s work does not lie there. It is that before this there is no obsession with light.” Gesturing broadly around us, he went on, “The house is an extrapolation of a life space that lies behind so much twentieth-century architecture: the artist’s studio. The single big space and a working, sleeping space above—that’s the controlling idea. Here it is articulated with invisibility. The articulation of space is essentially the same as that of a classic hôtel particulier of the eighteenth century, with the owner’s hobby rooms on the ground floor; entertaining on the first floor, called the ‘noble’ floor; the intimate family life on the second floor; and servants’ quarters above.”
Then he asked himself another question—“Is there any Japanese architectural influence?”—and answered, “No. There are two manifest decorative influences in the house.”
“Deco?” I volunteered.
“Not Deco at all. There is nothing Deco in the Glass House. There are elements of nautical design and of Japanese-influenced design.” He was referring to the popularity of Japonaiserie in the late nineteenth century. “Not Japanese architecture itself. There were no Japanese books available. The technology for the kind of glass brick Chareau used was only six months old when he embraced it.”
Before we went down to the ground floor, we stood for a moment at the top of the stairs. “My grandmother would always greet her guests up here, at the head of the stairs,” he said. “The light behind her would appear . . .” He paused.
“Glowing?” I suggested.
He looked at me again. “She appeared with an aureole of light illuminating the social space behind her,” he said calmly. “The Light House would be a better name than the Glass House, in many ways, since glass is an element here only for the manipulation of light.”
I asked him what future he could foresee for the house.
“I do not want to live in the house,” he said, “but I want the house to live.”
Before 1900, a glass house meant either a hothouse or a railroad station. Glass was as much the material of the nineteenth century as of the twentieth, but found its expression mostly in vast public buildings—the Crystal Palace and its kin. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did architects and designers begin to think about making glass houses for people to live in. The change was partly technical-lightweight steel frames could now support entire walls of glass brick—but mostly intellectual, “ideological.” The functional, positive tradition that had produced the great exhibition halls of the nineteenth century treated glass as a public material, a showcase for the triumphs of civilization. It was this tradition that continued to inform the faith in glass architecture of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. We should live within a “public” skin, they thought, because all life should be communal.
But in Europe just before the First World War a second tradition of what a glass building could be began to be revived—a tradition rooted in fantasy rather than in fact. Its distant roots, as the art historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter has pointed out, lay in the old architectural legend that Solomon had built a palace of glass for the Queen of Sheba. It looked back, as well, to the stained-glass cult of the Middle Ages, and ran through to a nineteenth-century German tradition of nature mysticism—the notion that transparent houses could connect man and nature.
It was Paul Scheerbart, a German writer and designer, who, in 1914, gave this second, fantastic vision a form for modernity. In what may be the most sublimely goofy novel of the twentieth century, “Gray Cloth and Ten Per Cent White”—one part Jules Verne fantasy to nine parts Windex ad—he tells the story of an American architect named Edgar Krug (though the story is set in Chicago, the characters all have German names), who travels around the world in his private dirigible, equipped with a glass gondola, and solves mankind’s problems by building glass houses for everybody. In the end, Mr. and Mrs. Krug relax in their own glass house, leaning back and staring up at the cupola to watch the changing patterns of light.
Scheerbart was somehow able to rein in the fantasy long enough to write, in that same year, a manifesto for glass building—it was called “Glass Architecture”—whIch was taken quite seriously, and became immensely influential; he inspired a whole group of architects and designers in Germany, who called themselves the Glass Chain. In a passage that seems to anticipate the Maison de Verre, he wrote, “In order to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced, whether we like it or not, to change our architecture. And this will be possible only if we free the rooms in which we live of their enclosed characters. This, however, we can only do by introducing a glass architecture which admits the light of the sun, of the moon, and of the stars, not only through a few wIndows, but through as many walls as feasible, these to consist entirely of glass—of colored glass.”
This vein of Expressionist fantasy inspired even Walter Benjamin, whose gloom about modernIty has done so much to make other people gloomy about it, too. In 1940, just before his suicide in the South of France, Benjamin looked back longingly at Scheerbart’ s vision. The children of the twentieth century, he wrote, still “yearn for a world in which they can bring their poverty—the outer and ultimately the inner too—to such a pure and clear validity that something decent will come out of it.” This purity might still be achieved by glass buildings. “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence,” Benjamin wrote. “It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism that we badly need.”
Whether Chareau knew the “crystal” tradition at first or second, or even third, hand will probably never be known. It was his genius to direct his glass fantasy into a classical, rectilinear style. He got to the fantasy by sticking doggedly to the facts. Instead of imagining a vast, crystalline house, transparent Gothic vault piled upon clear Byzantine arch, he simplified the structure of his house, making it an almost absurdly plain sandwich: a glass-brick wall on the front, a glass-brick wall on the back, and floors on stilts between them. Then he lit the house, from outside, with spots. He was thinking just like a cabinetmaker, but the result was a house that held glass fact and glass fantasy in perfect balance. Then, inside the house he used glass the way an interior decorator can—sweetly, on a small scale, and with decorum.
The house took four years to build. In its construction, Chareau had a crucial ally, an ironsmith named Bernard Dalbet. Dalbet is the forgotten genius—perhaps the real maker-of the Glass House. (His is the third name on the signature plate of the house: “Fers—Dalbet.” “Fers” is short for ironwork. Bijvoët, the other name, was Chareau’s Dutch architectural collaborator.) Dalbet was an artisan—just a blacksmith, really—of a very old-fashioned French sort. (He did the wonderful ironwork in the Bofinger brasserie up near the Bastille, which is still intact.) Sensing that something new might be made of forged furniture, Chareau had begun to collaborate with Dalbet the year just before he undertook the construction of the Glass House, and, with Dalbet as his instrument (or, perhaps, as his inspiration), he had begun to make objects—desks, lamps, wardrobes—that had some of the character we associate with the Glass House: openness, a quirky sense of scale, an illusion of freedom, of change and movement. Dalbet, without plans, forged the house’s fixtures—its chairs and rails and doors—every night in his smithy, on the Rue Capron. Although the Glass House is made to look as if it had been factory- or machine-produced, each structural element in the house was in fact custom-wrought. I once came across a photograph of the Dalbet smithy. It is something right out of Goya: three smiths, forearms dense with muscle, hammering away at a forge.
According to the Dalsace family legend, Le Cor busier would come secretly to the courtyard and watch as the house rose. Then he went and built the Villa Savoye. Around this time, Philip Johnson visited the house, too. I spoke to him about it once, over lunch.
“Well, you have to remember the last time I was in the Maison de Verre it was unoccupied,” he said after I began quizzing him about the house. I assumed he meant that he had seen it in the last twenty years, since the Dalsaces had died. Had that been in the late sixties? I asked.
“No, no,” he said crossly. “I mean in 1929, before anybody moved in.”
But Johnson and his colleague Henry Russell Hitchcock left the Glass House out of their big and influential 1932 show, on the “International Style.” They thought, I gather, that it looked too decorative. Its absence meant that throughout the thirties the house had almost no reputation in England and America. The French press, for its part, was contemptuous of the Glass House. When it opened, in 1931, it became a minor scandale in the Parisian papers, with a predictable round of jokes about houses made of glass, and people who live in them. The columnist Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud wrote in Le Figaro, “Didn’t they just build the famous house of glass in a Parisian street? . . . It is neither wisdom nor folly. . . . What does this innovation mean? What advantages does It have? . . . The best use of glass is, still, for drinking.”
Nevertheless, the Glass House became a salon. For a few years, everyone went there. The dramatis personae on the Rue Saint-Guillaume throughout the nineteen-thirties were a nearly astrological configuration of all the intellectual forces at work in France. The Communists and Surrealists were all there: Aragon and Paul Éluard, Cocteau and Tanguy and Miró and Max Jacob.
For the people who loved it, the Glass House was simply a superior salon, a folly, a place to go for talk and dinner, one more amusing place in Paris. For some other people, it had more sinister meanings. When Dominique mentioned that she lived in the apartment where Léon Daudet had lived In the thirties, I thought of him only, and vaguely, as a minor French literary figure. Léon and Lucien Daudet, I found out later, were sons of Alphonse Daudet, the great novelist of the late nineteenth century. Lucien had been a friend of Proust’s, perhaps one of his closest friends. But Léon was a writer, too—a sharp, skillful essayist and editorialist. He was also the most virulent, active, and powerful anti-Semite in France. He was the leading editorial writer of Charles Maurras’s L’Action Française, and every day he explained to his readers, from his apartment looking down on the Glass House, that it was the cosmopolitan, modernizing Jews who were destroying France, and that they ought to be removed from Paris, or killed.
“I was in the house for the first time in 1939,” Pierre Vellay told me one evening over a meal at the restaurant on the Quai Voltaire. “My romance with Aline began in September, we were engaged in October, and we married in November. All in Vichy—I am a Vichyssois.”
We had just come from the apartment over the house—the anti-Semitic women’s apartment—where Pierre and Aline Vellay have lived since just after the Second World War. There had been no light shining on the house that night. It must be broken, I’d thought, and I imagined how complicated and expensive it must be to keep the house lit. In the Vellays’ apartment only a single Chareau lamp as you came in reminded you of where you were. Dr. Vellay, a tall, dapper, gently ironic man in his early seventies, was wearing, in the heat, a short-sleeved white shirt with thin blue stripes. He’d offered us Scotch, not wine, and crackers, which he called “cakes,” using the English word.
“When I saw the house for the first time, I thought that it was terribly cold,” he said now. “I was a petit bourgeois, from a bourgeois place. A house where the rooms were not rooms shocked me. It was terrifying—her parents, this strange house. The first time I saw the house, you see, it was already empty. They had stored all the furniture and all the books in the country. Throughout the war, I came to Paris clandestinely, and I slipped inside the house on the Rue Saint-Guillaume, to see that everything was all right. The Gestapo considered taking the house for a little while, but there was no way to light it after curfew. And soon, before we knew it, Jean and I were both in the Army. After the fall of France, I joined the Resistance in 1940. We had to construct a parallel health corps, and that took some time. I kept coming back to Paris for meetings. Was I frightened? No. I would come back and look at the Glass House. The concierge let me in, to check. Was she a friend of the family? No, just a concierge. The courtyard was empty then. I would come to Paris and look at the house, and then come and sit among the Germans, unconcerned. They never would have thought that I was in the Resistance. I looked—Aryan.” He made the word sound intrinsically comic. “I came here, and liked to sit among the Germans.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
He looked a little puzzled.
“Here,” he repeated.
“ ‘Ici’-où?” I said. Where in Paris, I meant.
“In the cellar. Here-ici.” Suddenly, I realized that by “ici” he did not mean “here in Paris.” He meant “here in this restaurant.” (The next day, I went back to the Voltaire, and belatedly found, on its façade, a plaque stating that its owners had been leaders in the French Resistance, during the Occupation.)
“Jean helped launch me as an obstetrician,” Pierre went on. “It’s a good métier. Jean was a complete man, a man of a sort no longer made in the world. He was the most widely read man I have ever met—medicine, literature, engineering. Look at the double shelves in his library! He intimidated me, believe me, he was so widely read. I am a man of narrowly gauged interests, and I am not ruled by passion. I am a logical man, a demi-bourgeois, only half a man of the left. Jean was a man of constant, immense courage. He fought for birth control in the thirties, when it was still forbidden. He won the Croix de Guerre in the war. It’s a paradoxical thing—we are the most decorated pacifist family in France. My own son, Marc, became an anarchist.” Dr. Vellay used the same tone for “anarchist” that he had used for “métier.” “Dr. Dalsace supported him. For me, the spirit of the house is all of Rue Saint-Guillaume, not just the house so called. It is the spirit of freedom. I want only things that have this spirit to happen at the house. Whoever inherits, it must be someone who really loves Chareau. After Dr. Dalsace’s death, we thought of moving downstairs. But we were comfortable. It was our home. We had a home, we couldn’t leave it. The Maison de Verre is a portrait of another marriage. If I died tomorrow I’d have had a satisfying life—experiences, opportunities. If I died tomorrow, my life would have been complete. The Maison for me is a place where, even if the children should leave, the spirit of the Maison de Verre would remain.”
With the kind of unearned intimacy you can sometimes achieve on a first meeting, I asked Dr. Vellay how he had come to be a humanist. He looked at me gravely, and said, “With a Catholic mother, a Protestant father, a Jewish wife, and a Communist father-in-law, what other choice did I have?”
Chareau went to work for the French Army in 1939. He had a typically Chareauesque idea for fighting the war. He designed a system of wooden packing cases for supplies; at the delivery end, they could be turned into tables and chairs for the soldiers who unpacked them. The French government thought that this was a good idea; Chareau worked on it until the French government surrendered.
By the time the Germans arrived, the Dalsaces had abandoned the house and joined the Resistance; Chareau and Dollie had fled to America. They arrived in New York at what might have seemed to be the perfectly auspicious moment. It was a time when the great generation of European architects were all arriving in America—Mies, Gropius, Marcel Breuer—and each was beginning to create a following and a body of work. But not Chareau. Of all the émigré architects and artists whose reputations have held through or grown into our own day, Chareau had the hardest time in New York, and accomplished the least. He built nothing in the city, and very little trace of him remains. He designed a house in East Hampton for the painter Robert Motherwell, but that was about all. (He later built a little cottage for himself: but it was hardly more than a shack.)
Motherwell, who knew and loved French culture, had seen pictures of the Glass House, and asked Chareau to design a house for him. It was the middle of the war, and Motherwell had little money to spend. Chareau, with more ingenuity than conviction, perhaps, remodelled a Quonset hut—one of those semicircular corrugated-metal temporary shelters in which soldiers were housed—cutting away one side and turning it into a rudimentary house and greenhouse. It lasted until 1985 and was, on the evidence of a few surviving photographs, a kind of makeshift Maison de Verre. By a generous eye, it can even be seen to anticipate some of Frank Gehry’s funky California houses.
Why was Chareau so unsuccessful, when all around him the other émigré modernists were in an extase of renewed ambition? It is hard to find a convincing answer. His work depended on an entirely “artisanal” approach to building, of course, and that was not easily adapted to the technological production of American architecture. But other architects—Breuer, for instance—had to make similar leaps from small-scale, handmade domestic work to big corporate work. There were rich men’s houses as well as rich men’s offices to build. Why couldn’t Chareau have designed a few of those?
“He was never really around,” Philip Johnson says, with bewilderment, trying to recall Chareau in the forties. That may be it. Architecture—for good or ill, but inevitably—is a social art. The job is to get the job. Mies and Gropius were masters, with schools that trailed behind them. Nobody trailed behind Pierre Chareau. He probably wouldn’t have known what to do if anybody had.
In the last two years of Chareau’s life, his close friends were a young émigré couple who collected art and summered in East Hampton—Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend. “Chareau was a wonderful man,” Ileana recalls. “He was so lovely, and so funny. He had wit without cruelty, which is a rare thing. He had it, though. He was such a spiritual presence—he never spoke of himself, never pressed forward. Never complained. It would have been ugly. And he never spoke of the Glass House, because it would have been to speak of himself. Dollie was living in New York, and she would come over—they understood each other. But she was in New York, and he was in East Hampton. Things would suddenly bring him up, out of himself. The smallest thing could set him off into joy. Once, Motherwell’s wife was cutting vegetables in the kitchen. It was just—I don’t know—beautiful. Pierre became so excited. Life should be like that, he said, a stage—a house should be a stage, with the smallest things set off: done properly. He loved life—pretty women, good food and wine. He disliked few people. He disliked Harold Rosenberg. Harold would come over, and everyone would drink. He would place a bottle in front of Motherwell, tease him about being a ‘Boy Scout.’ Pierre hated that. He knew very few architects. Perhaps that’s why he had no prospects. I remember once someone, so thoughtlessly, introduced him to a new person as ‘Motherwell’s decorator.’ ”
So Chareau stayed out in the country, playing with the Quonset-hut house. In New York, the bigger or more able or more ambitious architects of his generation all began to build in glass. The glass architecture that had been the expressive utopian-dream style of the first half of the century quickly became the corporate, official, inescapable style of the second half. Scheerbart’s fantasies all came true, but nothing looked the way it was supposed to look. The glass buildings were not even transparent.
When the war was over, the Dalsaces, after a long, clandestine voyage throughout France during the Occupation, managed to reëstablish their life in Paris. But Paris was a different place. The romance of Communism was finished there and, though Dr. Dalsace continued as a member of the editorial board of Pensées, the French Communist philosophical journal, he gradually retreated from the Party, leaving it for good in 1956, after Hungary. He devoted himself to family planning. (His writings on planned parenthood could be a little alarming—or, anyway, very “French.” Toward the end of his life, he was the co-author of a little book about family planning, though the practice was still illegal in Catholic France. Trying to persuade his readers that birth control was a necessary thing, he avoided the Anglo-Saxon line that it made for a better society; instead, he argued that it made for better sex. “In a union contracted by true love, the real danger is monotony, and the boredom that can result,” he wrote. “It is easier to be a lover than a husband. . . . Monotony must be avoided at all costs. . . . That is the psychosexual justification of some sort of regulation of births.”) Annie died In 1968, and Jean two years later.
Chareau died in East Hampton in April of 1950, and it would not be entirely romantic to say that he died of a broken heart. “He came over every morning for breakfast,” Ileana Sonnabend told me once, “And we always expected him. He had built a little house, one room, on the Motherwell grounds, and he loved it. One morning, we waited and waited. And he did not come. Leo went across the street, and found him there. He had no phone, though it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He had a stroke. I cried and cried. He was such a spiritual presence.” In a letter to Annie Dalsace, he had written, at the end, “Say that I fought like a lion for your house. For your house I keep the first beating of my heart.” The Motherwell house survived, in a diminished condition, until the boom of the mid-eighties, when it was bought by an East Hampton entrepreneur and put up for sale—derisively, for a dollar, to anyone who would restore it. No one wanted it, and in 1985 it was destroyed.
The architects and architectural historians who rediscovered Chareau in the nineteen-sixties loved the Maison de Verre because it was one of the few modem buildings to value function and fantasy equally, without succumbing to the lure of historical pastiche—“the one isolated poetic interpretation of the pure glass and steel aesthetic,” the British architect Richard Rogers, who was, with Kenneth Frampton, one of the key rediscoverers of the Glass House, has written.
“I saw the house for the first time in ’56,” Rogers, whose Pompidou Center, in Paris, displays the influence of the Maison de Verre, recalled recently. “I was knocked sideways. At the time, there was the classical tradition of Mies and the romantic, organic tradition of Frank Wright. That’s what was available. This was neither—it was a tone poem about what you could do with glass and steel. It gave the idea of a modular house, too. Of course, it isn’t a modular home itself. It’s a handcrafted one-off if ever there was one. That space between what it seems to be and what it is is probably part of the mystique of the house. The house gives the impression, as you approach it, of being infinitely expandable. The façade is as big as anything could be, though in fact it’s a small house. But it’s not articulated as a façade—there isn’t any sense of how large or small it could be. It seems to have a poetic idea of the module in it: you could expand it endlessly—mass-produce it. Of course, it was handmade, and one knew that—had to keep reminding oneself of that—but the idea seemed so powerful.
“Eventually I got to know the Dalsaces—they were lovely and wonderful to me—and became close to Marc. And then, later, Roo, our son, was delivered by Pierre Vellay. We got the address of an obstetrician and I was startled—it was the Glass House. When my wife and I went in, all I could concentrate on was the detailing in the office. The Glass House has affected everything I’ve done. Look around here.” He waved a hand around the living room of his London town house. There is a blue girder standing upright in the middle of the room—an obvious homage to the girders in the Glass House. “All I need in here is the bookshelves and the piano, and I guess I have it.”
Rogers’ recollection of his discovery of the house in the fifties reminded me that a small postmodernist movement preceded the big one. Though that first postmodernism, which began in the fifties and ran up through the early sixties, involved a rejection of the big, official modem styles, it was, in its way, at least as romantic as the original modern taste had been. It wanted to restore a lost vitality and poetic reach. But romantic postmodernism required constant new infusions of faith; ironic postmodernism required only cynicism, which has been in late-twentieth-century culture the one self-renewing resource.
The rediscovery of the Glass House was a minor event in the history of that early, failed postmodernism. Yet, oddly, the cult of the house persists. This is probably because, though it is easy to think ironically, it is very hard to live that way. Beneath the accepted, official academic stream of postmodern thought, there remains a little stream devoted to things that are self-consciously artificial without being particularly ironic, and this taste devotes itself, above all, to houses and to décor. The revivals of certain houses in the past twenty years—the Tugendhat house of Mies, Wright’s Fallingwater—are in part reflections of that taste, which is not hopeful, exactly, but suggests a nostalgia for hope.
More than any other, the Glass House fills the bill. It is lovely rather than bold, feminine rather than masculine; it is entirely modem without being part of modernism, and witty without being ironic. The ship’s ladder that seals off the bedroom would have been far too frivolous a device for serious modernist design but far too ingenuous for postmodem. It is not an allusion to a ship’s ladder; it is a ship’s ladder. You can pull it up behind you when you go to bed.
One morning in June of last year, my wife and I went, at last, to live in the Glass House. We got out of the cab, punched the code on the little electronic keypad by the gate to the courtyard, and I dragged our bags across the cobblestones and up to the door of the Glass House.
Our invitation to live in the house had come about, after much hoping and scheming, with ridiculous simplicity. Three years before, we had gone back to Paris for Thanksgiving, and had been invited to have dinner with Aline and Pierre Vellay in their apartment, above the house. I walked up the stairs, and, fumbling for the doorbell, flicked a switch just to the left of the door.
A blaze of light appeared—so bright and so sudden that it seemed audible, as loud as an explosion. The house was suddenly alight; all the floodlights on the ladders had come on. I felt at first as if I had accidentally pressed the launch button on a missile and then, just as quickly, I felt disappointed: So there’s no more to it than that. The floodlights are on a switch, and the switch is by the door. When you want to illuminate the house, you do not consult a calendar or a ritual, or even an electrician. You just turn it on, and then (I quickly did this, too) turn it off. You could do it naturally, as part of the flow of life; it’s no different from turning your own bathroom light on and off in the middle of the night.
We were leaving for New York the next day, and I made my thanks and talked about the house.
“Come and live in it,” Dr. Vellay said abruptly.
“Oh, well . . .” we said.
“No,” he said. “The next time you’re in Paris, stay in the house. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You love the house. Why not live in it? It would be good for you.” And then he added, “C’est comme chez vous.”
Now we were back and on the threshold. Dominique had told us that someone might be inside, so we should ring. We did, and at last a young woman appeared.
“Oh,” she said, with less enthusiasm than I had ever before heard in a human voice. “You are the Americans.”
She gave us the key to the Glass House, which turned out to be a goofy-looking two-toothed cylinder—like a skate key—with a fat blue-and-white acrylic pompom on its chain. We carried our bags upstairs and into the master bedroom—Jean and Annie’s room, the one that could be entered either from the mezzanine or by the little ship’s ladder. Our luggage looked wildly out of place, as though it had come from another dimension, through a time warp. There was a curved burled-wood bed, under a coffee-brown cover; a series of cabinets, built in, which were also of honey-colored burled wood and had a curving, oceanic front; a rug with a zigzag pattern; a night table; glassed-in bookshelves over our heads. A passageway led into the bathroom; Martha put her soap next to one basin, and I put my razor next to the other.
For a few hours, that first day, we were entranced by the details of everything we saw: we would lie on the bed, on the settee, on the daybed, and look—luxuriate in the act of looking. One wall of our room—the wall that faced the garden—was a wonder of materials, laid out one against another like an architectural pousse-café: glass on top, then red painted metal, then a larger band of glass, and then copper sheathing.
But we quickly discovered that the freedom that people had always admired in the house—its capacity for infinite change—was largely symbolic. The sliding screens and moving doors and fanning-out tables—all the little fixtures of the house—express an ideal of change, fluidity, and mobility instead of actually providing it. The Glass House is like a poem, and, like any poem, it presents a universe of possible readings to the contemplative mind while remaining fixed, structured, and essentially inalterable—change a word and you’ve ruined the effect. Every day in the house, we would, earnestly, Americanly, try to “experience” it—extend our knowledge, our understanding, of it from that of the day-tripper to that of the inhabitant. But it turned out that all you could really do was change places. You could settle in this chair and then in that chair, and then get up and go to a different room. “This isn’t living,” Martha said at one point. “This is sitting.”
Often, we found ourselves being forced back into the styles of life as it had been led when the Glass House was built. The house dictates a life. After two days of vague disquiet at breakfast, I actually went to Galeries Lafayette and bought a burgundy silk robe with tiny white dots.
But if the house dictates a life, it also makes one aware of life as life—a force that can only be temporarily enclosed by any house. We had arrived with notebooks, intending to document our week in the Glass House in Biosphere 2 fashion But the house seemed to slip away from us, and life asserted itself. Laundry became a major theme of our week in the house. We spent a day schlepping our bagful of dirty clothes around the Boulevard Saint-Germain. What had Jean and Annie done? Given it to the servants, probably—but then where had the servants gone? Or had Jean done the laundry himself, Communistically, carrying a big white bag down to a Zola-style bassin in a working-class arrondissement? Finally, we found a laundromat—a Lavo-Club, on the Rue de Seine—and sat there and read Allo! with all the Algerian gardiens of the neighborhood.
Plumbing became another theme: the meaning of the house immediately shifted from the library and bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen. For one thing, we had to share them. We soon found out who the young woman was who had let us in, and called us “the Americans.” It turned out that one of the Vellay nephews had come to town to study for one of the sets of examinations that are the eternal rites of middle-class life in France, and the young woman was his girlfriend. Sometimes other friends would visit them in the servants’ quarters, over behind the kitchen. They played records, and left wine bottles behind.
We shared the kitchen with them and, all night long, listened to them enjoying themselves in the servants’ quarters At first, we resented them, and then pretty soon we envied them. They were not “living in the house”; they were just living. We smelled cigarette smoke and heard laughter. In the mornings, we would come down into the kitchen for breakfast and see the books that the French students were reading. They were mostly books about New York, the kind of studied, hardboiled American fiction that the French love: Jerome Charyn, Paul Auster, Charles Bukowski. I picked up “American Psycho”—it was a big favorite in France then—and read the blurb. “At night, he leads the typical life of the New York Yuppie,” it read in French. “The lines of coke, the clubs, the significant depravity . . .”
Martha and I had the big bathroom to ourselves, but we all shared the toilet, which was the only working one in the house. It was in a kind of D.M.Z. on the mezzanine, between the kitchen and our bedroom. Books and magazines piled up there. We left copies of Le Monde; they left copies of bandes dessinées: old Marvel comics translated into French—the X-Men, the Avengers. Desperate for something lowbrow to read, I would sneak them back into the bedroom. In “X-Men,” I read bits and pieces about a mythologized New York that was obviously as dear to the French students’ hearts as our imaginary Saint-Germain was to ours. I saw Professor Charles Xavier, up at Columbia, with Low Library behind him (in film-noir chiaroscuro), about to leave for his “hermitage de Westchester”: “Certes, J’aime enseigner aux X-Men et aux Nouveaux Mutants. . . . Mais leur mode de vie, la spécificité de leurs besoins! . . . lci, au moins, mes responsabilités sonts moindres.” (“Certainly I like to teach the X-Men and the New Mutants. But their life style, the specificity of their needs! . . . Here, at least, my responsibilities are reduced.”) The New York present seemed as available to them as the Parisian past had seemed to us.
The façade of the house was always dark. Dominique had asked us not to turn on the floodlights, because they might disturb her parents. Sometimes, as we entered the darkened house, we would hear the sound of the toilet roaring throughout—from the doctor’s office to the top of the library. With all its hard surfaces, glass and metal, the Glass House conducts sound like an amplifier. The simple, familiar sound of rushing water would echo around the steel girders, bounce from hard glass brick to hard glass brick, strike the old matting, and resonate back up to the punched-metal balcony, as loud and reverberant and alarming as a tidal wave striking a rockbound coast. It seemed to pick up the Glass House by the nape, and shake it for a minute. Then the sound would subside—gurgle, like a big animal that has just had dinner—and we would tiptoe up to our room. You enter culture, but you just sneak home.
One rainy afternoon while we were living in the house, I walked all the way up to the Place Pigalle—at the other, north end of Paris—in order to visit Madeleine Milhaud, the widow of the composer Darius. She is in her nineties, and one of the last of the circle who shared the Glass House with the Dalsaces. I had been saving my visit to her for last, and I hoped that she could make me see what the house had been like in its prime.
As for her house, it wasn’t hard to find. There was a plaque outside: “In this house lived the composer Darius Milhaud.” Mme. Milhaud turned out to be a small, perfectly poised elderly woman, with the kind of unnaturally pink and youngish skin that the very old sometimes have.
She spoke in English, and her manner was formal. “Our friendship with Annie and Jean Dalsace was not touched by snobbism,” she said. ’We knew both the Chareaus and the Dalsaces. Dollie Chareau had a great influence on Annie She helped her develop a taste for modern painting But there is no influence without inclination.
“You find the house humane? Rather cold, in fact. Let’s be frank. Let’s be candid with each other. It’s not a house at all, but a sort of machine. Do you recall that elevator that rose from the kitchen?” She was referring to a dumbwaiter, which had been out of order all the time we were in the house. “It never worked—the cook was always running after it with the salt. I was quite amused by the idea. There was no comfort in the house. That frightening staircase! I was always sure I would fall. Let’s be frank. It is true, of course, that our tastes change about art. I recall the first time I saw Bernhardt. I thought that she was sublime.” She pronounced the word in the French manner: “sue-bleem.” “I wished to be an actress myself: and imitate her. Her way of singing, chanting, the words. I saw her again a few years later, and I thought, She has no psychology! No inner understanding, no variation! She disgusted me. So, you see, to ask what we thought about the house is simply to offer a bit of our memoirs, no more. Perhaps I will find the house humane sometime in the future.
“What can I tell you about Jean and Annie? Let’s be frank. Politics and medicine were Jean’s concern. He fought for the first transfusions of blood. Her father was a self-made Jewish man who came from Lorraine. They were real-estate people, who bought land and became prosperous. Annie’s father was an extraordinarily simple man, honest and straightforward. Annie was sophisticated, bashful, and didn’t communicate easily. There were two schools of childbirth then, you know. The bourgeois right took the English fashion, and the left followed the Russian school.
“Milhaud and I lived in the house, too, you see.” (It is a sign of respect in France for even the intimates of great men to refer to them by their last names.) “In ’47, we came back and stayed with the Dalsaces. I was always frightened of being locked into one of those black cupboards! Annie came to meet us at the boat—she would have come to meet any of the painters and writers that they cared for. The house was never empty then, and it must never be empty now. A concert was held there for Milhaud’s centenary, in September, 1992. No one should have been back in Paris, but everyone came. I thought it was very touching—a friendly evening. People were there who were daughters of friends. Honegger s daughter, the children of Les Six. All those people who were concerned with Milhaud. The Glass House for me is a symbol of friendship, and friendship is life.”
The phone rang, and Mme. Milhaud began a long, guarded, formal conversation, in French, about a forthcoming concert: “What is the date? At what time will your concert be held? . . . What is the program? . . . Well, I will try to be there. . . . Yes. Very good.”
I assumed that someone was arranging a Milhaud concert, and I asked her what ensemble would be playing.
She shook her head. “No, no, no. That was my granddaughter. She wishes me to attend her recital.” She paused. “I have discovered, in the course of a long life . . .” She paused again, as if to collect herself. “I have discovered, in the course of a long life, that there is nothing more demanding than a small child with a flute.”
On our last night in the house, I went down, alone, into the library and gazed at all the books. They seemed to have been left untouched since Jean Dalsace died. I climbed the ladder and picked out a first edition of the first French translation of “Ulysses.” I opened to the first page. “Majestueux et dodu, Buck Mulligan . . .” Then I turned to the last page, Molly Bloom speaking French: “Pour qu’il sente mes seins tout parfumés oui et son coeur battait comme fou et oui j’ai dit oui je veux bien Oui.”
Finally, after a week of resisting temptation, I walked over to the switch, and turned on the outside floodlights. Everything came alive again. It was another house—brilliant, full of light, waiting for something to happen. It was so lovely, so inviting, that I wondered, in frustration, why, like so many people who had tried to live in the house since the first couple left, we had been defeated by it. We had failed, I thought, angrily, because we hadn’t tried hard enough. We should have stayed up all night long, sat in the library, and planned our lives. Why did we step outside the house even for a moment? But then I thought of our long walks back to the house from dinner, and of how one night, on our way back from Le Voltaire, I had said that I regretted that we had not always stayed put, and Martha had said, “You know, I won’t be sorry to see the last of the Glass House.” We had both laughed, in relief at speaking the unspeakable. It wasn’t that It was less than we had expected. It was just that you couldn’t inhabit the house, really. You could only reinhabit it, and we had been too American, or too lacking in confidence and largeness of spirit, to pull it off—too small for the parts. And, as I said those words to myself, too small for the parts, I suddenly understood, in a moment, that that was it—that the Glass House was not architecture, or interior decoration, or a boat or a barracks, or any of the other things it had been said to be.
I called Martha out to the mezzanine. “Look,” I said, waving toward the light.
“Oh!” she said at once. “We’re onstage.”
It was a theatre. The house, I realized, was a piece of stage design. Chareau, groping to make a new kind of house, had turned unconsciously to the thing he knew—the one kind of building he had actually helped construct. The bandbox theatres of the Boulevards were the real ghosts of the Glass House. The house had a downstairs lobby and a great playing space in the center—the library—with dressing rooms leading to it, and balconies for the spectators overlooking it.
Chareau believed that to build a house was to change the world—that to put on a show was to change the possibilities of life. If we changed our hats, he thought, our hearts would follow. The reduction in scale of the dream of glass architecture over the preceding century—from the nineteenth-century public building to the twentieth-century home, from the Crystal Palace to the Glass House—was in a sense a sign of this belief: not a reduction, in fact, but a vast enlargement of faith in what a house could do.
There had probably never been a chance that the house could become a beacon, or a model, or a temple. “Moral exhibitionism” could not change life, because life is not an exhibition. The house’s fate all along was to become exactly what it is—an empty theatre, a cult object. Still, a cult at least produces a credo; in fact, only a cult can produce a credo. Chareau’s vision—that life can be lived in harmony, with the industrial and the sensual, pleasure and responsibility, domestic pleasure and public responsibility combined—survives, just as a vision. The fantasies can’t change the facts—to think that they could was the modern fallacy. But the fantasies are themselves facts of another order. They count just by being there. The Glass House gives them an address in Paris.
There was a big Chareau exhibition at the Beaubourg last winter, which caused one more flurry of attention to the house and its makers: articles appeared in Le Monde and Vogue and Metropolis and Elle Decor. The cult has by now become so pervasive that it is losing a bit of its cultishness. The future of the house is still up in the air, though. An attempt has been made to interest some private collectors. So far, nothing has come of it.
When I think about the Glass House now, I think a lot about something that Mme. Milhaud told me. We were talking about the house, its strange past and uncertain future, and she said, “It is a difficult thing to have in your family a house of that fashion. I would oblige all architects to live in their own houses. The tyranny of their machinery!
“Let me tell you a story about the troubles of architecture. I knew a person once who was an investor in the Eiffel Tower. It was not a great success, financially. However, he had an illness that was diagnosed as whooping cough. He hated to go to the mountains, so he went to the third floor of the Eiffel Tower to live, and recovered his health.” She paused, and then she explained, “So, you see, it turned out to be an excellent investment after all. The fate of marvels is complicated.” ♦
