DESIGN | ART | ARCHITECTURE

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CULTUREDMAG.COM
FEB/MARCH 2015
DESIGN | ART | ARCHITECTURE
“If you look at Adjaye Associates,
it’s not about making showy,
spectacular things. It’s about
shaping the 21st century.”
—David Adjaye
A RIVER RUNS THR
There’s a new glass house underway in New
Canaan, Connecticut. Writer Linda Lee visits Grace
Farms to chat with SANAA principal Kazuyo Sejima
about the 1,400-foot-long glass “River” that’s
quietly winding its way into a new foundation.
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IMAGE COURTESY GRACE FARMS AND SANAA
OUGH IT
A rendering of SANAA’s design for the
“River” for the nonprofit Grace Farms
Foundation in Connecticut.
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When a singular piece of architecture is commissioned,
the result may seem inevitable. But making the match between client and
architect is a metaphysical process, even more so if the commissioning
agent is a nonprofit with no set idea of a building, but with a mission to build
community. “We started from ground zero,” says Sharon Prince, president of
Grace Farms Foundation. “We weren’t architecture fans or Modernists. We
had a vision. Our contribution was to keep that vision in mind.”
The fact that the foundation is in New Canaan, Connecticut, home to
one of America’s most significant buildings (Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass
House), just raised the stakes. In the end, Grace Farms landed SANAA, not
only one of the world’s most celebrated architectural firms, but one who has
an affinity for glass.
Now under construction, the Grace Farms project, called the “River,” is
a long, snaking glass-walled structure that winds its way through trees and
over knolls, meadows and wetlands on the foundation’s 75 acres of land.
The land is protected from any further development. When finished, the
1,400-foot-long building will include a below-grade gymnasium, a library, a
meeting space and a 700-seat auditorium where Grace Community Church,
an independent nondenominational Christian church, will gather on Sundays.
Prince describes the free-thinking church, which has no membership roll but
around 2,000 participants, as a “porous membrane” that absorbs a flow of
people who are “diverse in gender and race, people on welfare.”
The foundation’s vision for the River was to create a place that sat lightly
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on the land and would build a community. Not a tower or a beacon, but a
modest structure that would embrace people. Shohei Yoshida, the project
architect for the River, says, “I guess the concept of lightness in our
Japanese style must be quite unique compared to Western style.”
The match was the result of a happy coincidence. Bill Lacy, former
secretary of the Pritzker Foundation in Chicago and past president of the
State University of New York at Purchase, was hired as the foundation’s
architectural adviser. Telling them that “spaces communicate,” he led them
first to 25 candidates. With his help, the foundation winnowed the list down
to four, which included the celebrated Shigeru Ban, who ended up winning
the Pritzker in 2014. But it was the work of SANAA that realized their dreams.
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa founded SANAA, which stands for
Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates, in 1995. The firm is best known for
the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion (2006), the shifting floor plates
of the New Museum in New York (2007) and the glittering Dior flagship store
on Tokyo’s fashionable Omotesando Street (2003), where it joined stores
by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, Japanese architects Toyo Ito and
Tadao Ando and Dutch firm MVRDV. More recently, SANAA completed the
roller-coaster-like Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland (2010),
and the satellite Louvre art gallery known as the Louvre-Lens in northern
France (2012).
SANAA’s buildings are mostly divided into three forms: stacks,
especially in urban settings (Dior and the New Museum), donuts (the Toledo
PHOTO COURTESY GRACE FARMS AND SANAA © LISA BERG, 2013
“Our goal with the River is to make the
architecture become part of the landscape
without drawing attention to itself.”
—Kazuyo Sejima
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa at Grace
Farms for the River’s groundbreaking, 2013.
pavilion and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan) and
snakes (Japan’s O-Museum, London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the Rolex
center and the River). Many of the buildings are sheathed in glass,
sometimes curved in upon themselves, sometimes layered with undulating
plastic (which is what gives the Dior store the appearance of being banded
in diamonds). For the LVMH/La Samaritaine project in Paris, which at the
end of 2014 was again halted by preservationists, SANAA plans to create
an undulating glass curtain etched with images of the hodgepodge of
buildings that are being torn down.
Prince and her selection committee, once architectural novices, became
connoisseurs of SANAA design, and chose the firm before it won the Pritzker
back in 2010. “The glass museum in Toledo,” she says, “pushes the
boundaries of lightness and transparency. It amazed us how they used glass
to break down barriers between spaces.” Because of Grace Farms’ interest
in forming community, they were particularly interested in the Moriyama
House in a Tokyo suburb, which was designed by Nishizawa in 2005. The
project, a complex that could be as many as 10 apartments, consists of more
than 30 individual structures with small courtyards in between. “It redefined
shared spaces,” Prince says. “Each space is visible to the other. It makes
an interactive community that blends what’s private and what’s communal.”
Prince also visited the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary art in
Kanazawa, Japan, which is built as one circle surrounded by another circle
made of glass, inviting views outward. “There were children and families
engaged, and a 20-foot-long bench lined the perimeter. SANAA used glass
to create community.”
She especially liked a project Nishizawa had done on a remote mountain
on Teshima Island in the Inland Sea. “If you have one place to go in the world,
this is it. It’s built in the shape of a drop of water,” she says of the low-lying
space, which looks like a flying saucer, open to the elements, that has landed
amid rice paddies. “It’s an art museum, but it’s also a model for revitalizing
a community. We were inspired by what they did there.” She adds that you
can’t judge a SANAA project by drawings or images. “It’s all about the
experience,” she says. “You have to be there.”
“Our goal with the River is to make the architecture become part of the
landscape without drawing attention to itself or even feeling like a building,”
says Kazuyo Sejima. “The project is very open—people are able to come
freely. There are no walls, so people, even cats and dogs, can walk across
without entering the building. It is like a place with only a roof.” Prince agrees,
“If you stand under the River, it’s as if you are standing under a shade tree.
Or a canopy.”
The River, which will open this fall—with Sejima and Nishizawa in
attendance—is on schedule and on budget: $50 million. “At this stage, we’re
just starting to have the River go from two to three dimensions,” says Prince.
“The building blends seamlessly into the setting. It is mesmerizing.”
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