Joanne Mason Photography

Grace Farms is a cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, Connecticut, designed to bring together people across sectors to explore nature, arts, justice, community, and faith. Grace Farms is dedicated to humanitarian work to end modern slavery and foster more grace and peace in our local and global communities. 

Situated on 80 acres of natural landscapes, Grace Farms features unusual and distinctive architecture designed both to stimulate the human spirit and to blend in with the natural landscape. The main buildings are arranged in a continuous flowing design along a sloping hillside. The complex was designed by Pritzker award-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. The architects developed a vision of the complex as a seamless whole, where the physical presence retreats and forms a sensuous background for people, objects, activities, and landscapes.

Shortly after Grace Farms was completed, I was among a group of photographers invited to spend a morning photographing at Grace Farms. I visited Grace Farms again several years later on a warm spring day but was not allowed to photograph. These were some of my images from that first photoshoot at Grace Farms.

(From the architects’ website) “[The architects’] goal was to make the architecture of the main building (the “River building”) become part of the landscape without drawing attention to itself, demonstrating a high degree of sensitivity to the landscape and its topography. Structurally, the building of glass, concrete, steel, and wood is in essence a single long roof, which seems to float above the surface of the ground as it twists and turns across the landscape.”

I found the extensive use of curved glass to be one of the most significant design elements. Often, you would see in a space at the same time you would see through it, often with pleasant curves, reflections, and other distortions.