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The Glass House Tours begin at the Visitor Center located at 199 Elm Street in downtown New Canaan, CT, directly across the street from the train station. The 2,000 square-foot Visitor Center features an exhibition and Museum shop. All visits to the Glass House require a ticket purchased in advance of your tour to be presented at the Visitor Center desk. Tours are strictly limited to a ten-person capacity and include a 1/2 mile walking tour across the site with access to the Glass House, Painting Gallery, Sculpture Gallery and Da Monsta. (The Brick House will be closed to the public for a preservation project for the 2008 tour season.) Tours begin annually in April and run through October. Tours are recommended for children ages 10 and up, all children are required to have a ticket. Members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation will receive a 50% discount on standard tours upon check-in.

Cortelyou Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906. Following his graduation from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1943, Johnson designed some of America’s greatest modern architectural landmarks. Most notable is his private residence, the Glass House, a 47-acre property in New Canaan, Connecticut. Other works include: the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art, numerous homes, New York’s AT&T Building (now Sony Plaza), Houston’s Transco (now Williams) Tower and Pennzoil Place, the Fort Worth Water Garden, and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. An associate of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, Johnson worked with the modern master on the design of the Seagram Building and its famed Four Seasons Restaurant.

Before practicing architecture, Johnson was the founding Director of the Department of Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His landmark 1932 exhibition, The International Style, introduced modern architecture to the American public. Johnson continued a relationship with MoMA throughout his life as a curator, architect, trustee, and patron. He donated more than 2,000 works of art to the Museum including works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Johnson was also a singular tastemaker, influencing architecture, art, and design during the second-half of the twentieth century. He referred to the Glass House site as his “fifty-year diary.”

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