SECOND IMPRESSION

When I first visited the River Building at Grace Farms two years ago I felt a chill about the place, with its dubious program and precious design. This community center, designed by by SANAA at a purported cost of 150 million dollars, consists of five small, separate, glass-walled pavilions (auditorium, cafe, library/bookstore, basketball court, and tea house) linked with a curving steel canopy. It seemed like a very grand, very expensive folly.

Visiting again, on a chilly, sunny, fall afternoon, the building left an altogether different impression. Rather than the pavilions, it was the canopy that emerged as the primary figure, cutting an easy path through the landscape. Walking beneath it while dipping in and out of the pavilions, it shaped a lively and loosely-structured promenade. The canopy’s low flat roof allowed views to slip through from each side, and its slender steel posts – no wider than a coffee can – sliced them cinematically, framing stretches of the forest and horizon beyond.

The curving glass walls had seemed, earlier, terribly diagrammatic, an element intended to allow the landscape “inside” and the pavilions to “disappear.” On this day they fashioned a compelling membrane between interior and exterior, catching and compounding reflections of sky, clouds, trees and lawn, complicating the profiles of the structures, and enriching one’s walk along them. The building surrendered to the grounds gracefully, making a gorgeous modern park.

Photograph by Nalina Moses

November 06, 2018 by Nalina Moses

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.

October 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

CONCRETE DREAMS

How does one exhibit architecture in a museum? Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building. The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap. It’s a supremely elegant installation. Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls. Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims. The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is.

The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work. But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible. We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built. The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical. But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture. Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture.

Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile. The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal. As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact. That might be true for all the projects included in this show. We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings.

House NA, Tokyo, 2011, by Sou Fujimoto. Photo by Iwan Baan.

July 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses