Greenwich Academy Upper School
looks back at the design of a new campus building for Connecticut’s oldest preparatory school for girls that SOM completed in 2002. It reviews the school board’s original aspirations for the students and faculty, and presents SOM’s interpretation of these goals and the design process it embarked on to realize them. Editor Nicholas Adams explains the inspiration and thought behind the timber-and-glass design and provides insight into SOM’s special collaboration on the project with the artist James Turrell.
This limited-edition publication is the first in a series of single-building monographs produced by SOM that seeks to highlight projects in the firm that are internally deemed exemplary and uphold the firm’s visual design ethos. One function of the series is to revisit these projects to see how the end-users view the building years after completion, and in turn, learn from these responses. Through dozens of interviews, we learn what the building is like to inhabit—in this case, to learn and teach in—and how the building functions day to day on a practical level.
New photography of the Greenwich Academy Upper School was commissioned, and shows the school as it is today with the landscape fully grown and the users’ paths through the school determined and worn. The students’ gleeful impressions of attending a school that offers expansive views of the surrounding landscape are a testament to the successful partnership between SOM and the Greenwich Academy faculty and board of trustees.