The Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT, became a National Trust for Historic Preservation site three years ago. Since then the Trust’s careful stewardship of the site limits the number of visitors each day to maintain the quiet reserve of this important estate and its rich collection of structures that served as Johnson’s Modernism laboratory for nearly six decades.

On November 2, 2009, the site served as the laboratory for a group of architects, educators, and allied designers in a meeting with National Endowment for the Arts leaders Maurice Cox and Sarah Cunningham. Our objective: to investigate ways to encourage design literacy among K–12 students. Glass House Director of Visitor Experience Dorothy Dunn led our band of explorers through the variety of designs on the site and gave us the places and tools to develop program ideas for schools and communities across the country.

This setting is an important place – it is a campus of ideas and a workshop for all visitors. It has a place in an important group of American sites: Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin (Arizona), and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, that function as environments that showcase the thoughts and buildings of unique thinkers and designers of the American landscape. Each site illustrates different ideas about urbanism, architecture, and each one is very emblematic of its time period.

As the final Design Literacy event of 2009, the meeting at the Glass House was an inspiration for further collaborations and greater participation in the new Association of Architecture Organizations, which unites non-profit architecture centers across the U.S.