What’s so great about the day after Valentine’s Day, you ask? Well, for the fifth year in a row, today is the day tickets go on sale for 2011 tours of the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

A National Trust for Historic Preservation site, the Glass House is an important and influential example of modern architecture. This year the Glass House has added several new tours which run from May through November.

The New York Times mentions, “three new two-hour, $45 tours will focus on specific aspects of the 47-acre site, including 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.” Clearly you wouldn’t be able to keep me away from that art tour though, for me, anything to do with the Glass House would be worth a road trip, a long queue, or an early morning phone call. (Tickets go on sale at 9am.)

Also on offer, according to The New York Times, 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.

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There are a lot of great things to see on the grounds of the Glass House including the Brick House, the Pavilion, the Painting Gallery, the Sculpture Gallery, the Library, Da Monsta, the Ghost House, Kirstein Tower, and three Vernacular Structures. It’s a phenomenal art + design exhibit, all in one visit. Word of warning, tickets go quickly. It’s iconic after all.

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