One of the thrills of my career...

In 1998, I had an opportunity to meet with Philip Johnson in his Glass House. At the time I worked for Donald Trump who happened to be a friend of Mr. Johnson. In fact, he was the architect on the Trump International building (formerly the Gulf and Western building) at Columbus Circle in New York City. Local architect Rick Gonzalez and I flew up to New York to see if Mr. Johnson was interested in working on the new ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. We ended up meeting for about an hour or so at his estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. It turned out that he wasn't interested in the project - mostly due to the conservative Palm Beach architectural style of Mediterranean Revival. He thought that would be too constricting for his creativity.

After meeting in the Glass House, Rick and I toured the property. Speckled all around it were examples of different periods of Mr. Johnson's work. The last one and one of the most memorable was call the "Monster" that served as sort of a gate house at the entry to the property.

As the video states, the property is now under the auspices of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is open as a museum. If you are in the area this summer, you might want to stop by and take a look at architectural history.

It was truly a memorable event and one that I will always cherish.