By Andy Newman of the New York Times

For $3.1 million in New Canaan, you can get a middling, multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction but sufficient grandeur to assuage your distress at not living quite as well as your hedge-fund-managing neighbors who paid twice as much.

Or you could get a house by Philip Johnson, the most celebrated American architect of the last half-century. It’s not just any Philip Johnson house, either: it’s one that a preservationist called “a livable version of the Glass House,” Johnson’s New Canaan home, a temple of transparency that opened to the public last year and now draws worshipful hordes daily to bask within the glory of high modernism.

But who actually wants to buy, let alone live in, a Philip Johnson house, particularly one that, at 1,773 square feet, might make a nice walk-in closet for the chateau down the lane?

Nobody in New Canaan, so far, at least not at that price.

And so not three miles from the Glass House, on one of New Canaan’s most estate-studded thoroughfares, the austere glass-and-concrete confection that Johnson called his “little jewel box,” built in 1953 for Alice Ball, a single woman with apparent passions for pink stucco and ruthless spatial efficiency, faces the prospect of demolition.

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