Subsequently employed as a designer and graphic artist on the Governor’s staff in Puerto Rico, he specialized in exhibition design and was later appointed to the Display Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The first director of The Corning Museum of Glass (1950-1960) and then director of the Brooklyn Museum (1960-1971), Buechner simultaneously worked as an illustrator for the Chicago Tribunes’s and the Washington Post’s Book World and did cassette jackets for operas – a major interest of his.

In 1972, he became president of Steuben Glass, chairman of the Corning Glass Works Foundation and president of the Corning Museum of Glass. He helped to establish the Rockwell Museum in 1976, serving as its president for ten years. In 1985 he became a vice president of Corning Glass Works.

As author and lecturer, Buechner is known to glass scholars, artists and collectors. He wrote the glass section for the Encyclopedia Britannica and founded both the Journal of Glass Studies and the New Glass Review. He also wrote Norman Rockwell, Artist and Illustrator, in 1971, and, thirty years later in 2000, How I Paint, both published by Harry N. Abrams. His most recent book, Seeing A Life, was published by the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York in 2007.