Design as Dream and Self-Representation

Abstract

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 theoretical 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.