Ivan Hageman wasn’t sold on the design. He feared anything modern. He didn’t like the method the architect was pushing—design-build, in which a single firm stewards everything from the first conceptual drawing to the last layer of paint. It seemed foreign and vaguely suspect. And above all, he thought that the architect, Peter Gluck, was a bit of a jerk. “Peter was somewhat loutish, somewhat rude, somewhat devil-may-care: ‘Either you’re going to go with me or not,’” Hageman says in his second-floor office, which overlooks, like a happy panopticon, the street outside the private school he helms. Recalling their first meeting, in 2004, with the school’s board of trustees, he says, “At the end of the meeting … the chair of the board said, ‘I agree with you, Ivan. He does seem kind of difficult. He reminds me of someone you’ve worked closely with over the years.’ I said, ‘Who?’ She said, ‘You.’”