Paper House

While New York was stricken with design fever last weekend—and, really, is there anyone who didn’t rub elbows with Marcel Wanders on the subway or spot Yves Béhar at a Javits urinal?—Moleskine was busy unveiling the Glass House sketchbook, which features 29 drawings by renowned artists, architects, and designers responding to Philip Johnson’s 1949 monument to Modernism and Windex.

Jens Risom, Toshiko Mori, and Chip Kidd are among the luminaries who offered their own takes on the New Canaan, Connecticut, icon. The Glass House is so iconic, in fact, that tackling it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test: LOT-EK‘s entry is a hyper-functionalist cog-and-gears drawing, Michael Bell goes the Po-Mo collagist route, and Maira Kalman breezily focuses on the people at the inaugural picnic. (As you might recall, the house opened to the public last spring.)

Alongside the drawings, there are plenty of blank pages for your own musings and sketches—but, sadly, they are bound to look somewhat dinky when paired with Mori’s lovely watercolor or Seymour Chwast’s gnomic primary-color mask.

Architectural plans of a stool Jens Risom designed for the Glass House.

A drawing by Steven Holl.

Mattia Bonetti’s grass seats.

Chip Kidd’s caricature of Philip Johnson over a Glass House visitor card.

The sketchbooks were released at a party on Saturday night at the Four Seasons restaurant, in New York’s Seagram Building.

The Glass House Moleskine sketchbook is available at the Glass House visitors’ center, or online. Public tours of the grounds are sold out through this year, so book a private tour or start planning for 2009.