When Benjamin Sommerhalder, a Swiss publishers, happened upon the architectural drawings of the French artist Philippe Weisbecker in a Tokyo bookstore, he knew he had to do a book of them. But Weisbecker played hard to get. "I'm not much of a social person," the artist admits, "and Benjamin did very well to catch me." Sommerhalder's determination paid off, however, and his two-year pursuit culminated in a new book that explores Weisbecker's latest structure of interest: the greenhouse. Weisbecker, 70, has spent most of an illustrious 40-year career in New York, producing concept-driven editorial illustrations for clients like Time magazine and The New Yorker. But the desire to create his own drawings - unhindered by brief or editor - prevailed in the late 1990s, and in 2006 the artist moved back to Paris to concentrate on satisfying an innate curiosity with the simple objects of everyday life. "I have always been interested by "things,"" Weisbecker explains, "and in trying to understand the feeling of an object, or the mystery of it. That's something that fascinates me about greenhouses: their mystery - the fact they preserve an interior world you can't immediately access from the exterior. I really love the idea of not being able to see inside. With its charming mix of hand-rendered sketches and hastily Xeroxed reference imagery, "Greenhouse Studies" (Nieves, $20) recalls the lo-fi notepad drawings of the canonical starchitects Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe and reveals Weisbecker's fondness for one of the few types of buildings seemingly unaffected by shifting architectural fashions. "The greenhouse is absolutely perfect for the purpose it serves," he says, "and, because it's designed so simply, and so well, its form will never change." It's the simplicity that Weisbecker particularly admires, noting a contemporary tendency to overdesign. So much of today's architecture hides its true essence - what it really means. Often the object beneath is far more beautiful than the design we create around it.