STONE'S GLASS HOUSE.(A. Conger Goodyear House, Old Westbury, Long Island, designed by Edward Durell Stone)

Edward Durell Stone is best known for buildings that people will always feel a little funny about, like the syrupy Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle. But he ought to be remembered for things like the A. Conger Goodyear House, in Old Westbury, Long Island. The Goodyear house, which is one of the most important houses built in the United States between the two world wars, was almost torn down last year to make way for one of those gargantuan Georgian mansions that now clog the suburbs. Then Frank Stella, the painter, stepped in. Stella, who is a trustee of the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, learned that the World Monuments Fund had failed in its effort to have the house declared a local landmark. So Stella offered to have the Newman Foundation fund the purchase of the house to hold off the bulldozers until a permanent owner could be found.

No one has made a deal yet, but, then again, no one has tried very hard to sell the house, whose original owner was a prominent art collector and the first president of the Museum of Modern Art. The house was finished in 1938 and has stood empty for the past seven years, a modernist masterpiece in a state of near-ruin. Stella's partners, the World Monuments Fund and the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, recently began to spiff up the place. Last week, Stella went out to Old Westbury to check on the progress, and he walked around the house with the air of an awestruck student. "It blows my mind that this has survived," Stella said. He walked into the round dining room, which is like a glass cylinder and still contains Goodyear's original built-in round table mounted on a central pedestal. "No one can do that anymore--it's so natural, so unadorned," he said. "Doesn't it break your heart?"

He then walked through a glass door ...