Architecture This article is more than 8 years oldReview'It's a gift!' Inside America's miraculous new centre for arts and faith
This article is more than 8 years oldJapanese architects Sanaa get spiritual with the sublime $83m Grace Farms centre for arts, faith and justice in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is backed by a hedge fund manager. Just don’t call it a church
In the bucolic idyll of New Canaan, Connecticut, a silvery serpentine rooftop slithers down the hillside. Charting a course of shallow switchbacks, gently flaring up and down as it swooshes down the slope, it looks like the path of a snowboarder, frozen in motion and raised up on slender white slalom poles.
Groups of people drift beneath this wafer-thin canopy, dissolving into glass pods that nestle below the roof like dew drops under a leaf.
Such a delicate vision could only be the work of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, aka Sanaa – the Japanese architects who have devoted their career to conjuring structures so thin they might evaporate at any minute. They have blown concrete into improbable balloons, stretched glass into ribbons and made steel levitate on toothpick columns, creating buildings that seem to come from another, lighter realm. And now in Grace Farms, an $83m centre for faith and the arts, it seems they may have finally found a client and brief that meets their ethereal match.
“It is a place for people to just come and ‘be’,” says Sharon Prince, president of the Grace Farms Foundation, when I try to pin her down on what exactly this new facility is for, after a four-hour site tour. “It’s a gift,” she adds. “A place for people to experience nature, foster community, pursue justice and explore faith – with artistic expression as a common thread”.
The ambitious project has been eight years in the making, since Prince and her husband Bob, co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge fund, came together with others to acquire the site back in 2007. They had originally planned to build a 1,200-person sanctuary here for the Grace Community Church, which they founded with three other families in 2001, but local opposition forced them to scale the plans back. After years of litigation and community consultation, the project developed a broader vision, providing facilities for sports, performances and education, with a library, cafe and gym set beneath the wiggly roof in beautiful 80-acre grounds, open for free to all.
“It is not a church,” Prince stresses, keen to emphasise that this is not the HQ of some strange religious cult for the well-heeled bankers of Fairfield County, one of the wealthiest communities in the US. “It is a place to make good things happen, for people to come and make a difference.”
The sanctuary remains, in more scaled-down form, in a 700-seat auditorium at the top of the slope, where the snaking roof spreads out in an expansive bulge. It is a miraculous space, where long wooden beams dive in low arcs across the ceiling above a sloping concrete floor, free from any liturgical clutter (a simple cross will be brought in for the Sunday service), and it was no small miracle to achieve.
In-keeping with Sanaa’s perfectionism, the 30m-long glue-laminated beams each had to come in one seamless piece – the problem being that the roads across the Rockies (between here and the west coast of Canada where the timber is manufactured) were not straight enough to carry them. They had to be driven right around the continent, via New Mexico, instead. The glass walls – the largest curved insulated units in the world – underwent a similarly ambitious safari: the glass was made in Britain, curved in Spain and assembled in Germany, then joined together on site with caulking that’s just 7mm thick.
When Sanaa’s projects leave the rarified realms of Japanese construction, they can fall down on detail, the architects’ exacting standards sometimes bodged in translation. But Grace Farms is remarkably faithful to the minimalist dream: its steel columns are just 13cm thick and the roof profile is as thin as the harsh Connecticut winter allows. Reality only intervenes in the occasional clumsy handrail, belatedly fitted after the building control inspector deemed one shallow-pitched staircase a touch too adventurous. No doubt Sanaa would have preferred the whole thing to look as thin as their paper models, but project architect Shohei Yoshida is diplomatically satisfied: “I like the rustic American construction,” he says with a smile.
Walking along the meandering length of the building, which stretches for over 400m, you catch views between the undulating layers of the zig-zag roof, which was continually tweaked by fractions of an inch during the design process to perfect the sight-lines. From the “commons” dining area, sitting at one of the long oak tables made from trees felled on site, you can look up at people reading in the library window, down to a game of basketball in the sunken gymnasium below, and across to where the resident tea master is preparing matcha in the welcome pavilion. It is a true promenade architecturale, as Le Corbusier put it, the different parts of the building disaggregated and dispersed along a route, which forces you to slow your pace.
“We hope people will come here and slow down,” says Kenyon Adams, who heads up the arts programme and has already invited a number of artists and performers to come and experience the tranquility. “It’s amazing to watch their reaction,” he says. “They change their pace and become a version of themselves they’ve been trying to access for so long.”
He describes the facility as a “third space, outside the cut and thrust of the art world”, with a mission to explore the connections between art and faith, “which have long broken down in the west”.
Permanent installations include a large photograph by Thomas Demand of Sanaa’s paper models (more of which are now on show in London), along with a group of woollen honeycomb prayer mats by Olafur Eliasson. Susan Philpsz has installed a sound piece around the lake, while Teresita Fernández has fitted 10,000 shimmering glass cubes to a wall. The performance programme for the opening weekend includes work by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, New Chamber Ballet and Broadway Inspirational Voices, while Prince proudly tells me that choreographer Bill T Jones advised on their sprung-floored rehearsal space, housed in a refurbished farm building on the site, where therapy sessions by Arts for Healing will also take place. Various other charitable groups are involved in the programme, including Full Court Peace, who will have use of the spectacular sunken gym hall for their basketball games – and there will even be therapeutic donkeys in one of the paddocks.
The ambition goes on. Heading up the centre’s “justice initiatives” is Krishna Patel, a US federal attorney for the last 15 years, who will be bringing her battle against child trafficking here, conducting big data analysis with funding from the Grace Farms Foundation. Mirsolav Volf, professor of theology at Yale, will be teaching his “Life Worth Living” class here, while the basement “media lab” will be run by a film-maker with Sundance credentials. The site is even being protected by the former head of Connecticut homeland security.
“We can marshall resources and people in ways that may not have been connected before,” says Prince, as she reels off more high-powered names involved in the endeavour. “They’re all drawn here by their passion and commitment to the mission – an open pursuit of truth.”
Grace Farms is the rare kind of client that has also allowed Sanaa to indulge in the pursuit of its own special truth – pushing their free-flowing rooftop as far as it will go. It is a line of inquiry first begun by Oscar Niemeyer in 1943, with his spermatozoid pavilion in Belo Horizonte, the Casa do Baile, a project that has long been a touchstone for Sanaa. Here in New Canaan, where Philip Johnson’s hallowed Glass House stands nearby (joint tours are planned), along with a clutch of other modernist villas built by his Harvard contemporaries, Sanaa has taken it one step further. In this arcadian setting, with a dreamlike brief, they have reached something close to sublime. Just remember not to call it a church.
This article was amended on 13 October 2015. An earlier version stated that Prince and her husband acquired the site in 2007. This has been corrected.
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