Li Xiangning

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...