Now Booking | Glass House Tours

Harf Zimmermann“Glass House,” 1949, by Philip Johnson, located in New Canaan, Conn.

Along with the news that Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow,
here’s another harbinger of spring: At 9 a.m. on Feb. 15, tickets for
the 2011 tours of the Philip Johnson Glass House
in New Canaan, Conn., will go on sale. To mark the program’s fifth
year, the Glass House (a National Trust for Historic Preservation site)
is adding several new tours to its already varied menu. (The tour season
runs from May through November.) Three new two-hour, $45 tours will
focus on specific aspects of the 47-acre site: the architecture; the art
(Johnson and his partner, David Whitney, assembled a significant
collection of postwar and contemporary painting and sculpture); and the
landscape, which includes everything from historic trees to Whitney’s
idiosyncratic succulent gardens.
Also on offer is Third Thursdays, a program that features a $150
curated tour (followed by a reception) with prominent figures in the
fields of architecture and design, art, history, landscape and
preservation, including the critic Paul Goldberger, the architect
Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, and Theodore H. M.
Prudon, who founded the Modernist preservation group Docomomo U.S.
Tickets tend to sell out quickly; don’t say you weren’t warned.