Reflections on Transparency
A basketball court is surrounded by a 360° glass wall (image by Dean Kaufman).
For Disegno’s 10th anniversary, we’re republishing 29 stories, one from each of the journal’s back issues, selected by our founder Joahnna Agerman Ross. From Disegno #10, architecture writer Matthew Allen tours Sanaa’s first US building and tries to get to the bottom of the mysterious yet see-through Grace Farms.
As much as I like an opening party, it’s usually best to visit a new work of architecture in the period shortly after it’s opened, once the frenzy has died down and everyone is figuring out how to live with their new environment. Grace Farms by Sanaa is a case in point.
Constructed in New Caanan, Connecticut, Grace Farms is the first US building by Sanaa’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa since they won the Pritzker Prize in 2010. It has prompted considerable debate. Months on from the grand unveiling in October 2015, there’s still nobody in the world’s architecture press who seems entirely clear as to what sort of building Grace Farms actually is, so the opportunity to visit in December is welcome.
One thing is clear: Sanaa’s creation takes transparency and its social effects to an extreme. Situated on a meadowy hillside in a large, forested site, the building snakes in and out of view, although attention is always drawn in its direction. Maybe it’s the shiny roof, a thin, elegant, pancake of steel and wood. Just as beads of oil in water spread out and float, connected by surface tension to form an amorphous, bulging snake, so it is with Sanaa’s roof, under which sit a series of pavilion-like volumes, most of which are enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glass that forms as 203 custom-curved pieces arranged in roughly circular shapes. It’s classic Sanaa: lots of glass; details pared down to a minimum; nowhere to hide.
Yet despite the numerous magazine covers it has already adorned, Grace Farms is not a turning point for architecture. Phenomenologically speaking, it employs a vocabulary of simple, transparent, minimalist volumes set into the landscape – a design language that has long been a staple of New Canaan, a haven of modern architecture since the post-war period and the home of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Functionally, Grace Farms seems familiar too. Behind the confusion, it appears to be a community centre, although it is admittedly strange to encounter a community centre on a site and in a building like this. Some of the things housed in the pavilions are what you might expect – the library and the café. Others seem out of place – the 700-seat auditorium, the sunken-floor basketball court, the tiny tea room. Wandering among the barely enclosed spaces, you begin to feel that you’re in a bubble diagram turned into a building. Grace Farms stems from an architectural fantasy of sketching a shape with a single line, calling it an auditorium, and then – poof! – seeing it materialise.
If you’ve done your research, you would expect nothing less from Sanaa: Grace Farms borrows elements from the practice’s Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, which blurs interior and exterior space; the fluid forms of its Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne; and the undulating pathways of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. What you might not expect, however, is the way in which the New Canaan building is being used by the community that inhabits it. What sets Grace Farms apart from its predecessors is how the modernist and minimalist tropes it employs are linked up with a peculiar form of idealism. In some respects, Grace Farms is closer to impulses in contemporary art and radical politics than it is to the mega-churches and trophy buildings to which it has been compared. [1] Grace Farms is a utopian experiment that raises subtly updated versions of some of the perennial questions of modernism. Who is the subject of architecture? What does it hope to do to them? And what are the mechanisms by which it enacts these manipulations?
To make sense of Grace Farms, you need to understand a little of the history of the community it houses. New Canaan exists along a series of winding, rural-suburban roads that run perpendicular to the beautiful Merritt Parkway in Fairfield County. It’s a straight shot down to New York, the roads passing through picturesque hamlets and a patchwork of affluent estates. In the 1990s, the hillside that is now graced by Sanaa’s building was a riding school, and before that, a small farm. But the land was privately owned and plans emerged in the 2000s to develop it into multiple estates. To prevent the spoliation of the view, the community resolved to buy the land and turn it into a nature reserve, with a group of people affiliated with the local non-denominational Grace Community Church forming the Grace Farms Foundation to execute the idea. Members of the church raised $40m to buy the land in 2007, an astonishing figure for a private venture. In 2010 the foundation selected Sanaa to design a building for the site that would serve, vaguely, as a public amenity.
Lest this sounds fuzzily idyllic, it is worth emphasising that New Canaan is a product of a specific American dream: a downtown working life that is directly connected to the comforts of home in the suburbs (or a second or third home in the hinterlands). New Caanan is part of the wealthy Connecticut Gold Coast and one of the top-earning towns in the US, with a median annual income of $540,235 as of 2014. The community is predominantly white (93 per cent) and the majority of residents are homeowners (at least 75 per cent). New Caanan is also the only town in the state with a Republican majority. Commuting to New York is common and the Manhattan/New Canaan connection is a perfect embodiment of the downtown/suburbia dream. Chelsea Thatcher, the foundation’s head of marketing and communications, puts it well: “All it takes is an hour by train and six minutes by taxi to get out here.”
But because the town is part of the metropolitan machine, it can take an effort to get in a properly pastoral mood at Grace Farms. Residents seem to have to remind themselves that it is “a place to relax”, sometimes apologising for walking or talking a bit too quickly. “Sejima was very excited about the long driveway,” recalls Thatcher. “It allows you to leave behind whatever is on your mind.” A blockbuster building would hardly have been necessary for Grace Farms to accomplish this. In fact, adding a new building to the newly acquired site seems to have been almost an afterthought. Two structures that were converted from stables already do a fine job of accommodating the centre’s various programmes: children’s art activities, small-scale discussions, a drop-off food pantry, and the day-to-day functions of Grace Church.[2] Offloading most of the site’s hustle and bustle to these buildings does, however, have the effect of making the architectural main event more relaxed. The multiple paths leading to the pavilions create a choose-your-own-adventure atmosphere.
Such indeterminacy seems to have been an essential part of the Grace Farms mission, as evidenced when I sit down with Sharon Prince, the president of the Grace Farms Foundation, in the tea pavilion 10 weeks after the building’s October grand opening. “The opening didn’t take place all at once,” she says. “We really see the last two months as an extended launch.” The foundation unveiled its justice initiatives in November leading to an ongoing internal discussion about what “justice initiatives” might mean alongside the foundation’s other faith, arts, nature and community projects. In addition, Prince says that she and her colleagues were also trying to decide what to call their building.
Why not just call it a community centre? Prince’s response is both direct and diffuse: “We did call it a community centre! We also called it a cultural centre, and a faith and cultural centre... But we didn’t want people to come here with preconceptions, so we settled on the five words on the website: nature, community, justice, faith, and the arts.” Similar openness and questioning is demanded of Grace Farms’ visitors. Although I braced myself on the drive over for an onslaught of faith-heavy conversations, the building and the foundation are, in fact, pleasantly non-denominational. References to grace are so understated that you might put it out of mind entirely, were it not for the fact that the word is in the name of the building.
But if Grace Farms is not a faith centre or a church, what is it? Its official status is vague. Grace Farms Foundation is a tax-exempt 501c3 non-profit organisation, a designation that is pretty open-ended, covering churches, charities and even sports ventures. When I ask the barista in the cafeteria how many staff its initiatives employ, he guesses 50. There certainly seems to be no shortage of helping hands attending to the building and its activities. It may be a luxury to be able to experiment with unusual architecture and a new institution, but the vast sums of money involved create expectation. According to the foundation’s fact sheet, the building cost $67m. Yet Prince emphasises that they are prepared to take their time: “In thinking about what Grace Farms should be, we are thinking about the next 200 or 300 years.”
Perhaps the most interesting way to frame Grace Farms is to think of it as an intentional community. New Haven, home to Yale University and a relatively short drive from New Canaan, was one of colonial America’s first utopian communities: a 17th-century town established in accordance with the puritanism of its immigrant founders. Grace Community Church derives from the less grandiose tradition of informal Bible study, but there is still something about it that seems to re-invent utopian ambitions. Other communities formed around buildings spring to mind – Arcosanti, an arcological community built by Paolo Soleri and his acolytes in the Arizona desert; Drop City, a series of cobbled-together geodesic domes housing a commune in Colorado in the mid-1960s – although Grace Farms operates at a lower key than these earlier social experiments. Its community seems less interested in the heroic gesture of building from scratch than in keeping a building in operation. Are users engaged in a form of maintenance art?[3]
When I visit, at least a dozen people are tidying gravel, repairing flashing, cleaning bathrooms and fixing doors. As I ponder some sandbags near an entrance, a passer-by offers an explanation. “Ah, you’ve noticed our doorstops. On windy days the doors can fly open and tweak these little things,” he says, pointing at the minimalist posts that Sanaa seems to have called doorstops. What follows is the most thoughtful conversation about doorstops, safety and the rigours of minimal design I’ve had in a while.
The mindset that accompanies the daily struggle against entropy seems to trickle up through the Grace Farms hierarchy. “Working with Sanaa and living in their building has made us very aware of everything we do,” says Thatcher. “We are trying to be as intentional and straightforward as they are.” Sanaa’s imposition of extreme deliberateness began in the design process, which Thatcher encapsulates in a story about the width of a staircase. Could it be narrowed by coordinating the handrails and columns more carefully? “They argued with us for months about two inches,” she says. “When we asked why we needed to get rid of them, Sanaa said it was because they weren’t necessary.”
Such hyper-vigilance must have been difficult for the personalities involved. Grace Farms Foundation is headed by former executives from a community of overachievers and their approach was initially top-down. Rather than organising a competition, they hired a project director, Paratus Group,[4] which helped the Foundation draft a lengthy briefing document and brought in a range of high-profile firms in 2009 to submit proposals. After Sanaa was selected, an intense, two-year design process followed. Sejima and Nishizawa’s first scheme was a well-defined shape, more like their Toledo Glass Pavilion or Rolex Learning Center, and two photographs by Thomas Demand (commissioned by the Foundation) document the piles of sketch models the architects produced. Requirements were checked off, one by one. The request for “warmth” translated not only into wood ceilings and furniture (made from the trees felled during construction – another requirement), but also into the warm-hued concrete of the floors.[5]
Because every part of the building was subjected to Occam’s razor, some normal things didn’t make the cut. There are no trash cans in the bathrooms.[6] The stage has no curtain and no backstage. Peter Miller of Handel Architects, the project’s executive architect, says that never before had he gone into such detail when designing a building. “Between the foundation, their project director, Sanaa, and Handel, there was an ongoing discussion about what the project would be, from programming to design to execution,” he says. “Even while the building was being built there was still a questioning about how the foundation would pursue its initiatives and what types of spaces it would need and how they would be used.” As a result, the architecture at Grace Farms rarely recedes into the background; previously unconscious habits demand to be rethought. This may seem like the worst form of modernism – architecture as a sociology experiment – and at Grace Farms the experiment takes place on a considerable scale. According to Thatcher, it is not unusual for 100 people per day to use what must be the nicest basketball court in the world, with its 360° view of grass, trees, and sky. “We want people to be able to use it like any other court,” says Thatcher. But she can’t help adding, with a laugh, “Will it make better teenagers?”
The intentions of Sanaa and the Foundation aside, this sort of question seems to be the essence of the utopian impulse. In his essay ‘Is Utopianism Dead?’ the philosopher Simon Critchley writes that “We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anticapitalist experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic or dangerously misguided.” However, he continues, if there is a new tendency that marks our time, it is “a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity, action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed the idea of the group as such.” Today’s utopianism is modest and personal – based in maintenance and cultivation, and linked to collaborative art and experimental politics – but it is utopianism nonetheless. During a community dinner hosted the evening I visit, I am reminded that cultivation is a large part of what happens in a building like this. Teenagers from a local school stand half-comfortably in tuxedos, singing holiday music a cappella. Being a parent means shaping children, a task that can be partially offloaded to a community – and also to architecture.
What better way to control others than to have them control themselves? One way of instilling self-control is to create a sense of being watched. This is accomplished, architecturally, by the transparency effect. In a famous essay of recent architecture theory, ‘Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal... Part II’, the architectural historian Colin Rowe explains that what is important about transparency is not the physical fact of light going through glass, but rather the psychological effect that accompanies the perception of overlapping and ambiguous spatial phenomena. At Grace Farms, looking in and through pavilions tends to collapse several layers of space, which has the effect of confusing inside with outside, carpet with immaculate-looking grass, columns with tree trunks and so on. By day, its glass enclosures seem to disappear, but people and their activities are held in place, framed by the concrete floor and the wooden ceiling. By night, reflections off the glass walls double up the space, intensifying the sense of exposure given that even the trees lit up outside seem to be watching.
Nevertheless, when I ask Sejima if the demands of an extremely transparent building might make its inhabitants change their activities and habits, she demurs: “Yes, people can see what goes on inside the building, but we didn’t see that as a problem. The strong sunlight penetrating due to the transparency of the building was more problematic, which we tried to solve by creating the overhang.” I take this as a pragmatic avoidance of some of modernism’s more difficult questions.
The transparency effect is especially important in New Canaan, where living life in the public realm is difficult to accomplish. The centre of the town, like many exclusive suburban centres, might as well be a mall; it’s possible to be visible while shopping and dining, but that’s about it. Grace Farms houses a range of public activities that have been largely sidelined elsewhere – study, performance, sport, meditation, spending time outdoors. Only time will tell what comes of this. Thinking optimistically, Grace Farms might foster an expanded public realm in New Canaan. On the other hand, it may only be used for tightly delimited leisure activities by a select group of people who already have plenty of options. When the architecture critic Alexandra Lange used an essay on Dezeen to call for people to “test the limits of this proffered public-ness” by actually going to Grace Farms and using it, she was onto something. Certainly, the foundation seems to back Lange’s call. In our conversation, Prince emphasises repeatedly that they “want many different communities in the same space”, but no amount of participation would create a real sense of publicness if openness weren’t already so deeply a part of the architecture. It’s important that the building is transparent: the public realm requires seeing others and being seen.
The extreme visual and organisational openness of Grace Farms can create problems, however. “One day we might have sweaty teenagers in one part and people from the Department of Homeland Security in another,” says Thatcher. “There’s nothing to stop them from running into each other.” The building’s five main volumes – auditorium, library, offices, tea room, and basketball court – are not things that normally go together. Putting them under one roof results in a rare fantasy of programmatic hybridisation: meditatively drinking tea while playing basketball; watching a dance performance while rolling in the grass; discussing law enforcement while contemplating art. It’s not quite “eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the 9th floor”, as Rem Koolhaas famously fantasised about the Downtown Athletic Club (“a machine for metropolitan bachelors”) in his book Delirious New York, but that’s the idea.
In a testament to the power of architecture, Sanaa’s building has even had an effect on the Homeland Security types. Krishna Patel, director of the Foundation’s justice initiatives, was initially sceptical. “How can you believe that a physical space can have an effect?” she says. “Wouldn’t it be better to use the money for the actual cause?” The architecture was tested a month after the opening when people working on ending child trafficking in Connecticut were invited to a two-day workshop. “The idea was to bring in the right groups to cut across the boundaries and turf wars that constrain law enforcement,” says Patel. “I was shocked at the results.”
Patel and her colleagues are used to working in courtrooms – opaque spaces with dark-wood walls and gold ceilings (“They feel like important places, but it can be oppressive”). She says that when trying to bring together NGOs and multiple levels of government, “there is no neutral place to convene, so meetings end up taking place in hotel conference rooms. It may seem silly, but it’s a major obstacle.” In contrast, the auditorium at Grace Farms is the epitome of openness. Its amoeba-shaped glass walls expand to accommodate a welcome desk, but other than that it’s nothing but a gently sloping floor filled with chairs and a half-metre stage at the bottom. A wood ceiling with 28m-long wooden beams and cables floats overhead. The view continues over the stage and down the hillside to meadows and a forest beyond. Patel insists that the space had a restorative effect on the workshop: “It created a new momentum.”
Beyond this, transparency-thinking infuses the justice initiatives at all levels. For Patel, one method of stopping child trafficking is to scrape information from the dark web and use machine learning to find those responsible. The basic idea, she says, is to expose what many consider a private realm (the internet) to scrutiny. Visibility might even be pushed beyond some people’s comfort level: “At its extreme best, this is about creating predicative models of people’s behaviour.” Perhaps transparency can reach all the way into people’s souls.
The same thinking is evident in Grace Farm’s art programme. In finding a way to help artists “work against the inertia of the art industry,” Kenyon Adams, the foundation’s arts director, extols the virtues of a retreat to nature, helped by Sanaa’s minimalism: “They’ve created an instrument to help you discover what you didn’t know you needed.”
When I ask him how this happens, he points to a particularly beautiful curve in the roof outside, framed against the sky by another part of the roof above and the hillside below. “It’s about putting people in the right place and in the right state of mind to notice these little things. You can’t force surprise, but that’s where you run into grace.” The first step in the process is creating a state of vulnerability, which happens quite literally on the auditorium’s stage. “It’s very exposed up there – you can’t bring all your tricks,” Adams says.
As a compensation for this general overexposure, the people of Grace Farms are keenly attuned to opacity. A few of the building’s volumes (the offices, bathrooms, and food preparation area) are surrounded by white walls. Other spaces are hidden underground. The mixture of transparency and opacity in the main building is Sanaa’s doing, of course, but the rooms in the existing barn structures can be attributed to the foundation. They see these rooms as “opaque spaces” with their own qualities – “places for healing,” as Thatcher puts it. On the night I visit, a discussion with refugees is taking place in one of these rooms.
Yet with all the talk about transparency, one criticism seems inevitable: it’s unclear how Grace Farms sustains itself. Thatcher mentions that they sell bags of coffee beans in the café to “help keep the lights on”, but do they also rely on grants to support workshops? Do they plan to rent out space to local partners? How much of their day-to-day budget is met by donations? Because everything surrounding the project is framed in terms of calm optimism, nobody seems at liberty to talk about the uncomfortable subject of money.
But then tensions of transparency run deep in New Canaan. The first wave of architects to settle in the area were students and colleagues of Walter Gropius at Harvard University, most famously Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson. They were derided as proponents of so-called Harvard box design: aesthetically simple, “cheap,” and functionalist, but – surprise, surprise – actually rather expensive and as dysfunctional as anything else. In the longer term, the wealth of international style modernist architecture has made New Canaan a site of pilgrimage. Throughout his long life, Philip Johnson hosted a prodigious cast of characters at his Glass House (which he built shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1943). Like Grace Farms, the Glass House is a sort of vitrine: it seems to have been built to frame the photos of Johnson cavorting with, say, Andy Warhol and Robert A.M. Stern (the dean of Yale’s school of architecture for nearly two decades).
For all that, the only sign of Johnson’s house from the road outside is an old stone wall that is a little taller than the others. Johnson’s formula (which is very different from Sanaa’s) seems to be that extreme transparency requires extreme privacy, with the public gaze always mediated by the camera, or, nowadays, the tour guide. The predominant sense is that the Glass House is an arrangement to be seen, not touched. Except – and here’s the twist – familiarity and enjoyment are essential to the spirit of the place. During my visit, no one seems to be stopping some kids from climbing on Johnson’s Lincoln Kirstein Tower and the Glass House Foundation even plans to host freestyle picnics to let visitors wander the grounds as they please. The Glass House, like Grace Farms, is becoming an odd sort of cultural centre. “We want to help people remember that they are living in the middle of this stuff,” says communications director Christa Carr, my tour guide for the day.
Do the Glass House and Grace Farms work through vision, order and stasis, or familiarity, play and change? This is a question without an answer and something that has to be negotiated through experimentation. Yet, one thing that sets Grace Farms apart from the more eclectic Johnson complex is the uniformity of its glass design. “It’s like a UFO landed,” Carr opines, adding that the totalitarianism of Sanaa’s design reportedly made one critic feel claustrophobic: “After a few minutes, she had to get out.”
Small shifts in scale can completely change the outcome of a utopian experiment. Seen in isolation, Grace Farms is an example of total design, but compared to earlier utopian communities, it has very little power over those who visit or work there. In the past, it was possible to be stuck in utopia. Imagine moving to New Haven, Connecticut, when it was founded as one of America’s first utopian communities in 1638. Or think about a more extreme case, the Oneida Community, a utopian experiment started in upstate New York in 1848 that infamously instituted a practice of communal marriage. It seems likely that there is a connection between the reality of being stuck in a single large building through the long winters and the sense (illusory or not) of being trapped in utopia. But once everyone has the freedom to come and go as they please, the fiction of utopia becomes hard to sustain. It is no coincidence that the great wave of utopian experiments in the 19th century ended with the rise of rail transportation. And that is the problem with contemporary utopias: keeping people in. It’s not hard to restrict access, but it’s much more difficult to keep visitors from leaving: people can always hop in a car and go, or else glance down at their phones and be somewhere else, virtually.
This is why Grace Farms is so remarkable. Disconnecting, retreating, being anonymous, being invisible – this is where the utopian impulse seems to be directed these days. Although it is counterintuitive that this would take place in a transparent building, it makes sense when you realise that it is only by refocusing attention on ourselves and the minutiae of our actions that our connections to what surrounds us become apparent. It’s a new-age idea, but once the rhetoric is pared back – as it is so insistently at Grace Farms – it’s possible to see it as an architectural effect. The important thing, for those who choose to, is simply to live in a space and follow its dictates. And to do so with others. This is Sanaa’s brilliance: to make a public spectacle out of a personal lifestyle choice. Grace Farms offers the platform to make a particular utopian sensibility communal.
The architectural historian Antoine Picon suggested in his essay ‘Learning from Utopia’ that utopia is idealism plus architecture, but when I pose this formula to Prince, it falls flat. She comes back with a statement about how the design of Grace Farms was “purpose driven” and “goal orientated.” This is certainly the minimalist stance as well: do as little as possible to produce the desired effect, and stop there. “When you ask Sanaa for a bench,” muses Thatcher, “you get a plank of wood with little steel legs.” That’s it. And it works both functionally and aesthetically, but maybe socially, culturally and politically also. Like grace, maybe socio-cultural experimentation sneaks up through other means. Utopia can’t be approached directly. Rather, it’s a by-product of living with design.
1 It is not iconic in the same way as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the church function is definitely secondary, unlike the Crystal Cathedral in LA by Philip Johnson and John Burgee
2 Although the Grace Farms Foundation donates time and space to Grace Church, they are nonetheless separate entities
3 The artist Mierle Ukeles introduced maintenance art in her 1969 work Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!. It sets out a vision of care and basic maintenance as a creative strategy.
4 Paratus Group has managed such major projects as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Frank Gehry) and the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art (Sanaa). It also works with architects like Herzog and de Meuron and Renzo Piano.
5 The meaningfulness of everything in Sanaa’s design is, coincidentally, reminiscent of the highly-loaded symbolism of Christian ritual practices.
6 A farcical return of the paperless office of the 1990s?
Words Matthew Allen Photographs Dean Kaufman
This article was originally published in Disegno #10. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.