Crystals in the land: this addition to a private girls' school on a lush rural site is organized around a series of glass lightwells that form a crystalline landscape.

'Site, light, environment, and wonder', is how Roger Duffy summarizes his design of the new Upper School for Greenwich Academy, a private girls' school on a bucolic estate in suburban Connecticut. The complex of 20 classrooms, five science laboratories, study areas and library grows out of a grassy hillside that extends back from a neo-colonial mansion, which was formerly a Rockefeller home and now houses administrative offices. Four lanterns and glass curtain walls around three sides of the complex pull in natural light and open the interiors up to the sky, landscape, and the rest of the campus. The wonder emerges from a light work by James Turrell, which turns the lanterns into glowing coloured beacons as darkness falls.

Another cause for wonder is the triumph of pure geometry and transparency in a school whose identity is established by a columned facade and whose students mostly come from affluent, retro homes that aptly express the backwards-looking taste of most Americans today. Never has great wealth bought so little good residential architecture, and privately funded institutions often mirror their donors' aesthetic prejudices. The invitation to Skidmore Owings & Merrill came by chance--the chairman of the Academy's board knew SOM principal David Childs--and the firm was initially asked to remodel a Brutalist concrete building. When they suggested it be torn down, the client probably expected it to be replaced by a twin of the mansion, sitting on the bluff. Luckily, the school's chairman and principals embraced the architects' vision, and sceptics were won over by the logic of their reasoning.

Duffy, who established SOM's Educational Lab as an idealistic operation within that corporate giant, persuaded the client that the new complex should be planned in three dimensions from the inside out and exploit the sloping site. Diagrams evolved into the design for a 4500sqm building that steps down from an entrance-level pavilion to two floors that are lit from the perimeter and lanterns over inner courtyards. At the base, it opens onto playing fields and an idyllic pond, and connects to a free-standing glass pavilion that houses the library. Areas for maths and science, art, humanities, and a media centre have separate identities but are interrelated. By building into rather than on the hill, Duffy and senior designers Scott Kirkham and Walter Smith created a lawn, which insulates the spaces beneath, filters storm water run-off, and provides a useful adjunct to the mansion. Rather than add another edifice to the eclectic campus they've created an invisible presence; connective tissue that subtly weaves the disparate parts together.

The presence of nature is strengthened by the employment of glue-laminated fir posts and beams, plainly bracketed together to create a succession of not-so-primitive huts. The wood imparts warmth and evokes the trees beyond, giving the steel-framed structure a fresh, tactile quality. Two lantern roofs are torqued, and that sense of movement is carried through in the shifts of level, and the play of sunlight and reflections. The art work gives it another dimension, bringing the glass to life at night.

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It's rare for art to be so well integrated with architecture, especially when--as here--the artist is brought in after the design has been fully developed. 'I'm fascinated by the work of artists like Turrell and Robert Irwin, who play on our perceptions of space and make people part of their work', says Duffy, 'and I want to bring some of that to our buildings.' Turrell designed a red, blue, and yellow LED system for the transparent chambers, and etched the glass with tiny dots to contain and refract the light. In a 16-minute cycle, the colours merge and leap from one space to another, symbolizing the flow of energy and knowledge among different academic disciplines.

SOM's Education Lab, who recently completed an innovative public authority school in Fairfield, Connecticut, is constructing an ambitious addition to Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts, and hopes to create a performing arts high school for Camden, New Jersey, which has been described as the most dangerous city in America. In each of these projects, artists of all kinds have been involved in shaping the design, and SOM has been invited to do the technical documents for Roden Crater, Turrell's long-running project to create an environmental art work within the crater of an extinct volcano in the high desert of Arizona (AR February 2003). These projects are breathing new creativity into an office that has relied too long on the reflected glory of Gordon Bunshaft's sleek masterpieces.

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