People who live in glass houses need to do their homework. Take it from Bob Greenberg, a media executive, and his wife, Corvova Lee, an artist. After purchasing a 240-acre plot in New York’s Hudson Valley nine years ago, the Manhattan-based couple enlisted architect Toshiko Mori to not only design a weekend retreat but also act as their teacher. With Mori, a longtime Harvard professor, the pair studied some of the country’s best-known glass dwellings, among them Mies van der Rohe’s 1951 Farnsworth House, outside Chicago, and Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. If these midcentury marvels offered an education in style, they also presented a few sobering lessons. “Too cold, too hot, fogged-up glass, no ventilation,” Greenberg says, rattling off some of the buildings’ disadvantages. “These…
