SHAKY FOUNDATIONS
Before they were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2010, the Japanese architecture office SANAA accepted a commission from the non-profit organization Grace Farms in Greenwich, Connecticut to build their new facility. That structure consists of five pod-like glass chambers, spread across a gently rising meadow, strung together with a low, snaking, metal canopy. The form, which seems ludicrously naive in drawings and models – cartoon futurism – makes a building that’s both audaciously contemporary and entirely tranquil. The curved glass walls, turning canopy, and flat gravel path are detailed and constructed simply, without calling attention to their assembly, and achieve a radical transparency. So that when one steps inside a chamber it’s as if the structure, and oneself, are suspended in union with the landscape.
What’s not quite clear is what the program of these building are. Grace Farms is not, as many believe, an artistinal farm, and it’s not a church. Its website is deliberately vague, stating only that the facility serves five purposes: nature, arts, justice, community and faith. What’s known publicly is that Grace Farms is a non-profit foundation, with a board made of of local hedge-fund managers and their spouses, that raised about 35 million dollars to buy this land and about another 50 million dollars to build this facility. The glass pods are used rather loosely. Inside the Pavilion a young woman brews teas from blossoms collected on the site. Inside the Court teenagers play basketball. Inside the Sanctuary locals gather for religious services every Sunday morning. Inside the Library activists meet to discuss human trafficking and visitors browse the bookstore. These spaces and the grounds can also be rented out for events.
Grace Farms is an inventive and uncompromised piece of architecture by a major talent. And it gives gorgeous counterpoint to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which is just miles away. But it’s not strongly shaped by program and has no sense of utility. During the design of a building, pragmatic concerns (e.g. square footage, building codes, storage, circulation) typically upset a conceptual design but, almost always, also enrich it, give it texture and complexity. It’s this process of irritation – worldly realities rubbing up against platonic form – that distinguishes architecture from other arts. Here, at Grace Farms, there don’t seem to be pressing concerns other than diversion. It’s a lot of architecture for not much use, a delirious, dreamy folly.
Photograph
©
Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Iwan Baan and Grace Farms Foundation.