1. WORDS
By now you have probably noticed a tendency of mine to lean rather heavily on words and theories in my dealings with the world. How else to account for my inability to pick a spot for a building without recourse to a half-dozen books and three different theories of site selection? And yet it was partly in order to get away from words that I was attracted to the idea of building something with my own hands in the first place.
“Information overload” is something we hear a lot about these days, and there does seem to be a growing sense that technology, the media, and the sheer quantity of information in circulation have somehow gotten between us and reality—what used to be called, without a lot of quotation marks or qualifiers, nature. This may not be a new phenomenon—it was more than a century ago, after all, that Thoreau went to Walden to recover the “hard bottom…we can call reality” from the “mud and slush of opinion” that obscured it—but the situation does seem to have gotten worse. Not only is the mud and slush of opinion a lot thicker now that it’s being piled on by so many different media, but our most famous philosophers (think of Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty) are telling us that, underneath it all, there may not be any reality to recover—that it’s mud and slush all the way down.
I suffer from an acute case of the contemporary malady, one that probably goes back to a time before people had coined terms like “information overload” and “media saturation” or thought to attach the word “virtual” to “reality.” I remember as a teenager reading that Marshall McLuhan had likened opening the Sunday paper to settling into a warm bath. The metaphor delivered a tiny jolt of recognition, because I too found reading—reading almost anything—to be a vaguely sensual, slightly indulgent pleasure, and one that had very little to do with the acquisition of information. Rather than a means to an end, the deep piles of words on the page comprised for me a kind of soothing environment, a plush cushion into which sometimes I could barely wait to sink my head. More often than not, I could remember almost nothing the moment I lifted myself out of the newspaper or magazine or paperback in which I’d been immersed. Not that I usually bothered to try. Mostly I just let the print wash over me, as if it were indeed warm water, destined to swirl down the drain of my forgetfulness.
So it’s probably not surprising that I should have grown up to be a magazine editor and a writer, someone who might reasonably be described as a professional producer of bathwater for others. But even after long days spent editing copy or writing, I never go anywhere without packing something to read. I’m pained to be caught on the subway without a book or a periodical, and if by accident I should find myself in so naked a state, I’ll commence reading over my seatmate’s shoulder—newspapers, potboilers, bibles swaddled in plastic slipcovers—or I’ll study the back pages of the tabloids arrayed in front of me, a less-than-perfect medium that nevertheless has been the source of most of what I know about sports. I’ll read just about anything, in fact, before I’d even think to glance at the face of the person seated across the car or otherwise engage the parade of humanity before me.
I’m afraid it doesn’t stop there. It’s all I can do to resist the urge to steal a few paragraphs while I’m in the car, pumping gas, or walking down the street (three challenges I’ve met), and even when I’m in social or intimate situations where reading is unquestionably a poor idea. More than once, Judith has caught me as my eyes reached for a line of print right in the middle of a big heart-to-heart.
You can see why I might start to think this was a problem. I began to suspect that the gorgeous columns of words had indeed become a kind of cushion between me and the unwritten world, even a crutch. And then, a few years ago, the tiny voice whispering that I might be missing something spending so much of my time in the tub was amplified by a sentence I read (on the subway, as it happened) in a book by Hannah Arendt, a sentence that kept coming back to me as a kind of rebuke. “Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours,” the philosopher wrote, “than the almost infinite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells, something that is hardly ever mentioned by the thinkers and philosophers.” At first, this sentence struck me as being poignant, even profound. But then, with this piercing sense of deflation, I realized that anybody who regarded this observation as anything but obvious—as anything but pathetically obvious—had a serious problem.
And that included me. To make matters worse, I didn’t have the excuse of being a thinker or a philosopher to fall back on. I was just a magazine editor, a mid-level producer and consumer of bathwater who spent most of his working days neck-deep not only in “the mud and slush of opinion” but in information and statistics, images and arguments, even in opinions about opinion—meta—mud and slush, you could say. So perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later the prospect of doing something more directly involved with the “views, sounds, and smells” of this world would become attractive to me, if not a matter of some therapeutic urgency. Plato, who was of course famously distrustful of all worldly appearances, wrote that in order to open the eyes of the mind we first had to close the eyes of the body. I wanted to go some distance the other way, hoping by a spell of unfamiliar and worldly work to open the eyes of the body, if only by a squinty crack.
Anyone who works with words and symbols every day will know what I’m talking about—it is the same impulse that fills the streams with anglers every April, the nurseries with gardeners, and the hardware stores with do-it-yourself carpenters. Though it turns out the matter is never quite that simple. Because no sooner have you declared your allegiance to some corner of the physical world than you discover a long, alluring shelfful of relevant books and periodicals, word upon word of irresistible how-to that it is suddenly imperative to consult. I confess that part of the appeal for me of first gardening and then carpentry were the vast new uncharted realms of print—the countless books and periodicals and mail-order catalogs—these pastimes opened up for my delectation. It is not easy, getting past words.
Yet that is what I felt a growing desire to do, and what attracted me to making a building in particular. For building seemed to me to be one of the most tangible, and grounded, and factual things that human beings do—the closest we ever come to making something on the order of nature, something with the sheer, incontrovertible presence of a tree or a rock. Instead of turning away from “worldly appearances,” I would see if I couldn’t make one of them myself. The work of building seemed to hold out the promise of at least a partial cure for my addiction to print, for this sense of living at too great a remove from the things of this world and the life of the senses. As it turned out I wasn’t entirely wrong about this, though I was more than a little naïve.
The process of designing my building began with more words, however. The best way I could think of to convey my dream for the place to Charlie was in writing. So a few weeks after I had settled on the site, I wrote him a long letter outlining what I thought my needs were and describing as best I could the building taking shape in my head. The words in this letter, along with all the other words we exchanged in the weeks to come, comprised an informal version of what architects call the program: the list of requirements and wishes that motivates any architectural undertaking. In the simplest terms, the task before Charlie was to design a form—a building—that would mediate between the desires set forth in my words on the one hand, and the facts of the site on the other.
My experience of the site, sitting out there on my chair, approaching the place time and again and considering its prospects, had deepened my sense of the building I wanted. It had begun as a simple, two-dimensional picture, something to improve a view, but by now the image of the building in my mind’s eye had acquired an interior and its own point of view, and it was this that I tried to describe in my letter. There was now a long desk at one end of a rectangular room that faced in the direction of the house, taking in the pond between the trees, the garden, and the path back to the porch. Above the desk I pictured a big window. Visible from the house, this wall would constitute the building’s most public face, though I pictured the door going on the opposite wall, where it wouldn’t interfere with the desk; putting it on the back wall would also force you to walk around the big rock before entering the building, which seemed like a good way to approach it.
Sitting there at my imaginary desk, mentally swiveling around in my chair, I considered what else I wanted in the room. Plenty of bookshelves. A stove of some kind. A place for Judith to sit. Also high on the list was a daybed—a cozy spot to read or snooze. But how do you make a cozy spot in a one-room hut? I pictured the daybed carved into a thick wall, a niche enveloped by bookshelves or cabinets. My image here probably came from Monticello, which I’d recently visited. Jefferson sandwiched his bed in between two rooms, so that it forms a deep, snug pocket in the wall, which he could enter from either side. I had only one room to work with here—this had to be a simple building, I stressed to Charlie, if I was going to build it myself. (The word “simplicity” appears several times in the letter, usually underlined.) But what if we made one of the walls abnormally thick? The depth of a bookcase, say. This would give us a space the daybed could be fitted into, creating at least a partial sense of enclosure. A thick wall or two would also provide plenty of spaces to hold my books and other things. Part of my image of this place was that it would be meticulously organized, with everything I required built in or easily stowed—“boatlike,” is how I put it in the letter to Charlie. There was no question that my streamlined new workspace was conceived under the sign of Getting Organized.
“I picture a space no bigger than it has to be,” I wrote in the letter, “single in purpose and shipshape, with a specific, dedicated place for everything. We should think of the interior less as a room, in fact, than as a piece of furniture, or maybe a cockpit.” I emphasized that the wall unit needn’t be fancy—that it might even be part of the building’s frame, use its plywood sheathing for its back. Thick walls would also serve to warm up the room, it seemed to me, by creating an intermediate space, a kind of buffer, between the inside and the outside of the building. This might make the place feel somewhat less exposed than you would expect a hut set out in the woods to feel, give it a stronger sense of refuge.
Yet there was something a little odd about this wish for thick walls, because at the same time I entertained what seemed like a completely contradictory image of the building as a place radically open to the landscape—as a room that, by virtue of its size and site, could be on far more intimate terms with nature than the house was. I asked Charlie for lots of operable windows—at least one on each wall—and even a small porch or deck where I might sit outside and read when it got too warm indoors. I guess I had very different winter and summer images of the place. Charlie would have to sort this out.
Outside, I pictured wood shingles instead of the crisp clapboards that clad the house; shingles seemed better suited to the wooded site and suggested a softer, shaggier, and generally more inviting building. And in spite of some of the fairly complicated elements I’d asked for inside, my letter emphasized that the look of the building from the outside should be plain and unselfconscious, “more chicken coop than atelier.” Then, in what would prove to be an unanswered prayer, I suggested a very rough budget and invoked the principle of simplicity one last time (“remember: something an idiot can build”) before dropping the letter in the mail.
I had no idea what Charlie would make of it. On one level, the letter seemed to describe a plausible-sounding place; a novelist could probably construct a coherent fictional room out of the words in my letter. But a carpenter? I wasn’t so sure. The letter contained several fairly precise images of the building, yet they were all unconnected, just bits and pieces: Here was a corner with a tiny woodstove and a stuffed chair pulled up to it; over there, on one side of the desk, a small window completely filled with the face of the big rock. Then here—somewhere—was this thick wall of bookcases that was going to organize my life, like a second brain. And over there was the daybed, from which I wanted to look out on the meadow and yet at the same time feel perfectly snug. I might be able to write a logical transition from one image to the next, but could anybody begin to draw it?
Just for the hell of it, I decided to try. I drew a rectangle and started filling it up with all the different elements I’d mentioned: the desk, the daybed, the stove, the thick wall, the door, the various windows, and, hanging somewhere off of the rectangle, the porch. Very soon I ran out of walls and corners, and had begun to add on more rectangles, even to contemplate a second story. I had drawn what amounted to a pile-up of architectural notions loosely contained by a couple of rectangles; I couldn’t even begin to picture what the exterior of such a structure would look like. Like my letter, my drawing was little more than a collage made up of wishes and remembered places, pictures I’d seen and things I’d read. The letter at least had a bit of syntax to keep it from flying apart.
How would an architect go about turning these words into a building? The question began to intrigue me, so when I phoned Charlie to alert him to the letter, I asked if he would be willing to let me somehow observe the process—talk to him about it along the way, and maybe even drive up to Boston to watch him draw. At first Charlie sounded game. But a few moments later, after I’d tried to engage him in a discussion of some theoretical issue in architecture I’d been reading about, he seemed to pull back. Charlie cautioned that watching him design my building wasn’t necessarily going to give me a fair picture of contemporary architecture, if that’s what I was looking for. “Just as long as you realize that what I do doesn’t have too much to do with all that stuff.”
I hadn’t realized that, actually. Charlie had studied under a number of eminent contemporary architects—Charles Moore, at UCLA, where he went to architecture school in the late seventies; and Peter Eisenman, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design in New York—and his father, a former head of the architecture department at MIT, was himself fairly well known for several arresting modernist buildings in and around Boston. So Charlie wasn’t exactly an architectural naïf.
I heard nothing from Charlie for a couple of weeks, and had begun to wonder what was going on when two equally perplexing items arrived in the mail. The first was a computerized notice from the magazine Progressive Architecture informing me that Charles R. Myer had taken out a gift subscription in my name. The second was a hand-bound booklet of photocopied photographs and drawings that Charlie had put together, with thick cardboard covers and a spiral binding. No note accompanied the booklet, and its pages were completely wordless. So here was Charlie’s answer to my letter.
I flipped through it with a deepening sense of bafflement that eventually ripened into frustration. The first couple of pages weren’t too bad. Here on the first spread was a collage of tiny houses, which made me think the book was probably a collection of references for the design of my studio. One of them, a tall and narrow shack set out under a bare tree in the snow, I recognized from Tiny Houses, and it had something of the feeling I associated with my hut and its site. The one next to it seemed way off the mark, though, a stone building with a beefy chimney and the sort of steeply pitched alpine roof I associate with some of the sounder houses in the Brothers Grimm. The second page was a site plan of our property, showing the pond and the rock in relation to the house and the axis of the garden.
But by the time I got to the third page I had started to feel lost. Here was a blueprint of the plan for a huge and bizarre-looking house consisting of three parallel axes crossed perpendicularly by a fourth. Peculiar as that drawing was, it was at least recognizable as architecture, which could not be said about what followed. On the next few pages were photocopies of a minutely detailed instruction manual for the assembly of some elaborate machine—the kind of headache-producing fig. 1 / fig. 2 diagrams that might come with a particularly intricate model airplane. Then came a page depicting several hand tools. So this section was something about an assembly kit. Maybe Charlie was trying to warn me against attempting to build the house myself?
On the next few pages were a series of drawings having to do with the Golden Section, the famous mystical proportion I’d managed in a long education to avoid learning anything about. The first drawing—of a rectangle placed inside a circle so that its long side lined up along the circle’s diameter—purported to illustrate the geometry of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series, a sequence of numbers that evidently has something to do with it. The drawings that followed demonstrated how the same 1:1.618 ratio pops up all over the place in architecture and nature: in the elevation of the Parthenon and the wings of a butterfly; in the façade of Notre-Dame and the spiral of a seashell. Frankly I’ve never been sure whether to file the marvels of the Golden Section under Profound Truths of the Universe or Pot-Smokers’ Koans. Now at least I knew where Charlie stood on the question. But what did it have to do with my building?
The next several pages seemed to offer a return to Planet Earth, with a series of photographs of buildings and architectural details drawn from a bewilderingly wide range of places, styles, and periods. There was a broken-down tobacco barn with airy matchstick walls; a Voysey mansion with immense chimneys and delicate fenestration; a miniature bungalow that had sprouted a small, glazed room directly above its front porch; an Old World townhouse with a whimsical façade that resembled a cat; a lattice wall grown over with a riot of vines; a massive stone house with extremely deepseated windows; a pair of wicker rockers sitting in a room that had a thatched roof but no walls (this was one of a series of progressively odder roofs and ceilings, including one that looked like the hull of an overturned boat); a window seat cut into a deep bookcase in a sleek postmodern living room that was trimmed with oversized columns, capitals, and a pediment; and then a complicated little room, outfitted with a built-in bed and a desk and a wing chair, that reminded me of a sleeping compartment on a train.
Each image was more beautiful and strange than the last; many of them strongly evoked particular senses of place or light or texture. But what did they mean? I don’t know if this had been Charlie’s intention, but his book left me feeling as though I’d been stranded in a place where I didn’t speak the language. Though in some of the pictures I could discern the ghostly traces of things I’d talked about in my letter (thick and thin walls, daybeds, casement windows), with most of them I failed to see the point. I thirsted for captions, just a word or two to help me see what in the world a stone mansion in England had to do with my one-room shack in the Connecticut woods. I closed the book feeling more than a little annoyed, in fact, a feeling that only intensified after I took a moment to study the cover design, which I’d somehow managed to overlook before. But Charlie had made an abstract design out of some thin slivers of balsa wood that he’d pasted to the cardboard cover. It consisted of two parallel bars, about an inch thick and set an inch apart, joined together by a dozen perpendicular match-sticks, like so:
I had no idea what this was supposed to mean (if anything). Like everything else about the book, it seemed insiderish, coy. All I could think about was whether or not all the time Charlie’d spent putting this thing together was going to show up on my bill.
I called Charlie, hoping to find out what I was supposed to make of the booklet and to thank him for the subscription to Progressive Architecture. I confessed my bewilderment (the irritation I kept to myself) and asked him exactly how the book fit into the process. Charlie cheerfully explained that he’d collected these images after reading my letter, that this was something he often did at the beginning of a job. “Next time we meet, we’ll go through it together. That’ll give me a better sense of what’s important to you, what sort of feeling you want here. I find it’s usually better to hear somebody’s gut reaction to a specific picture than for either of us to try to describe some sort of effect, which can get pretty abstract, and lead to misunderstandings.” Charlie distrusted words, I realized; the booklet was his pointed response to my wordy and, probably to him, overly abstract letter.
I told him that I’d actually found his book kind of abstract, and couldn’t always see the relevance of a particular picture to the project at hand. For instance, what was the story with that mansion?
“Isn’t that guy great? I love how that bay window curves outward without ever extending beyond the wall—it’s tucked in there almost like this eyeball with a big heavy brow over it.”
“So?”
“Well, the curve of the window gives you a sense of just how thick the wall around it must be, and I thought maybe we want to tuck the daybed into a bay like that. It might be really neat.”
And what about those fig. 1 / fig. 2 assembly instructions?
“Just a little joke. But it’s also a reminder to me to keep the construction fairly simple here, and that I might want to draw this project in some different way. Because a conventional plan and elevation isn’t going to tell you how all the parts fit together, or what order you need to do things in. These are things you can usually count on the contractor to figure out. But you may need something more like one of these diagrams—an instruction manual.”
We arranged a time for me to come to Boston, and I thanked him for the magazine subscription. “I should warn you,” Charlie said, “PA can get pretty wild. But you’ve got to read it if you want to know what’s going on in architecture right now.” I asked Charlie if he was a subscriber. He said he used to read it religiously but hadn’t in the last couple of years. “It’s a lot of fun, but I don’t have time for that stuff these days. You’ll see. It’s not the real world.”
The first issue of Progressive Architecture to arrive happened to be its annual awards edition, its thirty-ninth, which singled out a dozen or so new projects—houses, museums, office buildings, artists’ lofts—for praise.* The magazine was oversized and lavishly produced, with lots of full-color photographs on heavily coated stock. It had the look and heft and even some of the glamour of a fashion magazine. Except that all the models here were buildings—there were virtually no people in sight.
I saw right away what Charlie had meant when he said, “It’s not the real world.” Almost all of the award-winners were not real buildings—they were drawings and models of buildings that, in many cases, would never get built. This seemed peculiar. Wasn’t reviewing a set of architectural drawings a little like trying to review a play without going to see it? How could you tell whether or not the building really worked before it was built? Of course I never asked this question of Charlie or anybody else; I figured it was probably naïve, and liable to mark me as unsophisticated. (Though I was amused to see a few years later that Progressive Architecture had instituted a new department called the “post-occupancy critique,” in which a reporter actually visited a building in use to see how well it worked and what the people who worked or lived there actually thought about it. This was regarded in architecture-criticism circles as a radical innovation.)
Most of the prize-winning buildings, or designs, struck me as willfully idiosyncratic and, at least before I read the lengthy captions, totally perplexing. Here was a trio of silver plywood structures on a beach, each resembling a different fish washed up on shore: a carp, a ray, and a sea slug. Called Beached Houses, they were intended as artists’ housing in Jamaica. A prospective Tokyo office building designed by Peter Eisenman looked like a conventional glass-walled tower that had somehow been folded over and over again until it resembled an origami construction—a dizzying collage of multiplying facets and peculiar angles. The California architect Frank Gehry had two winners, both of them actually destined to get built. Another California architect had designed a house and gallery for an art collector in Santa Fe that consisted of two groupings of cubes within cubes within cubes; it looked like the sort of building you might get if you asked M. C. Escher to design your house. But probably the very weirdest house to win a prize wasn’t even one you could look at in a model or drawing. That’s because the architect proposed to improvise its design, so there could be no plan or elevation in advance. Periodically he planned to visit the site, look at whatever the builder had done that day and, taking his inspiration from that, make some new drawings for the next stage of construction. I guessed this was a joke on Goethe’s famous aphorism likening architecture to frozen music. Here was frozen jazz.
I got the feeling there were a lot of jokes being made, and the best ones were probably sailing over my head, since they were aimed primarily at other architects and architecture critics. I seriously doubt Peter Eisenman chuckled about origami when he presented his office building scheme to his Japanese patrons. Or that the designer of the carp, ray, and sea slug in Jamaica mentioned to his client that the decision to base these artists’ houses on fishes was meant as a postmodernist statement about the arbitrariness of the relationship between form and content in architecture. (Fish is to artist as form is to content?) I certainly wouldn’t have known this about the project unless I’d been told.
And told we were, over and over again—in the captions, in the quotations from the architects’ statements of purpose, and in the jurors’ comments, which were informative and often highly entertaining. A good thing, too, because without the words, these buildings were incomprehensible indeed—sort of like Charlie’s booklet, but without any of the sensual rewards.
Lewis Mumford once wrote that sometime in the nineteenth century it became necessary to know how to read before one could truly see a building. Architecture had become referential, so a person needed a key in order to fully understand it. A Greek Revival house, for example, embodied a message about republican virtue that it helped to have at least some small knowledge of the classics to appreciate. To judge by the oceans of words that accompany prize-winning buildings today, the situation has evidently gotten much more complicated since Mumford’s time. Nowadays you also have to be up on contemporary philosophy and literary theory in order to understand buildings. This seemed a great stroke of luck for me, since, as a former English major, I knew slightly more about these subjects than I did about building.
Take Peter Eisenman’s Tokyo office tower. What had baffled me as a building, or model, began to make a certain amount of sense once I’d read the accompanying text. Eisenman’s deconstructivist design is meant as “a kind of cultural critique of architectural stability and monumentality at a time when modern life itself is becoming increasingly contingent, tentative, and complex.” Evidently the wrenching dislocations and foldings of space in this building will help office workers in Tokyo experience the dislocations and contingencies of contemporary life on a daily basis.*
About a lot of novel and even avant-garde architecture it’s always been possible to say, Perhaps we just can’t appreciate its beauty quite yet; maybe we’ll have to catch up to it first. The label “Gothic,” after all, was coined as a term of opprobrium for that style when it was new. It struck people as barbarous and ugly, so they named it for the detested Goths. But this new architecture is different. Making people uncomfortable is not merely the byproduct of this style but its very purpose. It sets out to “deconstruct” the familiar categories we employ to organize our world: inside and outside, private and public, function and ornament, etc. Some of it does seem interesting as art, or maybe I should say, as text. But it seems to me it’s one thing to disturb people in a museum or private home where anyone can choose not to venture, and quite another to set out to disorient office workers or conventioneers or passersby who have no choice in the matter. And who also haven’t been given the chance to read the explanatory texts—the words upon words upon which so many of these structures have been built.
Likening this kind of architecture to a literary enterprise is not original with me. Eisenman himself claims that buildings are no more real than stories are, and in fact has urged his fellow architects to regard what they do as a form of “writing” rather than design. The old concept of design—as a process of creating forms that help negotiate between people and the real world—might have made sense when people still had some idea what “real” was, but now, “with reality in all its forms having been pre-empted by our mediated environment,” architecture is free to reconceive itself as a literary art—personal, idiosyncratic, arbitrary.
For me, the irony of this situation was inescapable, a bad joke. I’d come to building looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really just another form of writing. This was definitely a setback.
At first I assumed that this literary conception of architecture was a notion limited to deconstructivist architects and the editors of Progressive Architecture. But the more I read about contemporary architecture, the more widespread and uncritically accepted this idea seemed to be. Nobody seemed to have any trouble with the notion that language, of all things, is a suitable metaphor for architecture—that buildings “mean” in much the same way that words and sentences do, so that the proper way to experience a building is to “read” it. Postmodernism, the movement that preceded deconstruction in the parade of postwar architectural styles I found chronicled in the back issues of PA, promoted a completely different-looking kind of building, yet here too the underlying approach was essentially literary, and there was a lot of required reading. In this case, however, the syllabus was not deconstruction but semiotics—which happens to be the predecessor of deconstruction in the parade of postwar continental philosophies.
A quarter century before Peter Eisenman imported deconstruction to American architecture from Paris, Robert Venturi had imported semiotics, also from Paris. In Learning from Las Vegas, the immensely influential manifesto the Philadelphia architect and theorist published in 1972, he argued that architecture was not really so much about the articulation of space, as the modernists had believed, but about communication by means of signs, or symbols. Buildings constituted a form of media; they were cultural texts to be read. Venturi urged architects to recognize that what they were really doing was making “decorated sheds,” and that it was the decorations, or symbols, that mattered most. The offspring of this theory was a slew of often very witty buildings self-consciously decorated with exaggerated (for ironic emphasis) columns, keystones, pediments, and, in Venturi’s case especially, actual signs with words on them.
Working my way through recent architectural theory, I felt like I was back on familiar turf. In fact, Charlie’s wordless little booklet about my hut was a lot more daunting than most of the buildings celebrated in the pages of Progressive Architecture, if only because the buildings in the magazine were based on texts with which I was at least glancingly familiar. But even if you didn’t know the printed sources, with the help of the captions and manifestos you could read your way through them without too much trouble. They might be brick-and-mortar buildings, but they were also rivulets in the same information-age waters I’d always felt comfortable paddling around in.
And yet it hadn’t been familiar waters I’d come to architecture looking for. I’d come because I wanted out of the tub. I’d come looking for something meatier than discourse, something nearer to the “views, sounds, and smells” of the material world that Hannah Arendt had celebrated. Buildings, I’d always assumed, had an especially strong claim on reality. Weren’t they supposed to be one of those things in the world that gets pointed to, and not just another of the things that point? Yet it is precisely this quality that contemporary architecture seemed eager to deny.
I knew Charlie well enough to have a fair idea where he stood on these questions. He’d given me the subscription to Progressive Architecture as a way to define himself to me by counterexample: This is everything I am not. But he wasn’t going to get into any arguments about it, because even to argue was to let himself be drawn onto the ground of words and theories, where he evidently had no wish to go. Of course this was my ground too, and Charlie’s hesitance about me watching him work may have reflected a reasonable worry that I was going to somehow maneuver him out onto it. Only now did I understand that the exasperating wordlessness of his booklet, coming at the same time as the gift subscription to PA, had been meant as a gentle challenge. Charlie was asking me to choose, between the words and…what, exactly?
2. DRAWING
I drove up to Cambridge on a morning early in May to meet with Charlie about my building and, I hoped, to watch him begin to draw it. We met in his office, half a floor of a clapboard townhouse in Harvard Square, above a copy shop. His practice consisted of himself and a couple of freelance draftsmen, recent graduates of MIT’s architecture school who came in, or not, depending on how much work was in-house. The undivided workspace was informal but orderly, a horseshoe of drafting tables set out beneath bookshelves stacked with cardboard models and large-format books. The designers I met looked like graduate students (blue jeans, sweaters, and sneakers), except for the stylish $300 eyeglasses.
At the time of my visit, the architecture profession was mired in a recession that had hit Boston-area architects particularly hard. The city’s real estate market had collapsed, nobody was building, and with two local architecture schools continuing to graduate dozens of new architects each year, there simply were not enough commissions to go around. Charlie seemed to be getting by, however, with commissions for a couple of houses, a handful of residential renovation jobs, and the conversion of a building for an elementary school in Cambridge.
I had brought Charlie’s book of images with me, and we started by working our way through it, sipping containers of coffee from the croissant shop downstairs. As Charlie talked over the pictures, often with a catching enthusiasm, they immediately became less opaque. For one thing, I realized I had overcomplicated their import. I’d be puzzling over what a sprawling New England farmhouse could possibly have to do with my little shack when all he had wanted me to notice was the vine-tangled trellis over the porch, which he thought we might want to try on the window facing the ornery neighbor.
“That’s a great solution for a place where you want light but the view really stinks. The vines filter the sunlight nicely, too, since the leaves are always moving.” Charlie could be fervent talking about a window, describing the tone of the light it admitted to a room, or how flinging it open was apt to make you feel about life. He seemed so much more articulate in person than on the phone, and as I watched him talk about these images, hands and brows and even shoulders in almost constant motion, I realized that Charlie’s is a kind of full-body eloquence.
Only a few of the images were meant to be taken as literally as the vine-covered window. The reason he’d included the European townhouse that resembled a cat, for example, was because he felt my building should have an anthropomorphic façade. “It makes sense for our guy to have a strong face, since this is going to be a one-man house.” Okay, but a cat? “Hey. Don’t be so literal,” Charlie grinned. “This is just a reminder to me, something to think about when I’m drawing the elevation.” He explained that many of the images in the book had a similar purpose: They were cues to help him focus on issues he might otherwise lose track of in the design process—ways of thinking about windows, doors, ceilings, and roofs, the various ways a building can meet the ground.
“Like this door here—” He pointed to a picture of a formal Edwardian townhouse entrance. “Now this is obviously completely wrong for our building, but it’s such a fantastic example of doorness. It’s a reminder I need to deal with the whole issue of just what kind of experience the entrance to our building is going to be—should it be a public or a private kind of thing? Do we want to be inviting people up here with some kind of ceremonial front door like this one here, or do we want to maybe put them off a bit with something more backdoorish?” We talked about that for a while, and agreed the door should definitely be around back, where you wouldn’t see it until you’d stepped around the big rock. Then Charlie suggested we try to place the door on one of the thick walls: “That way, the entrance to the building becomes a real passage. As you walk in you’ll feel the great mass of that wall of books surrounding you.” He hunched his shoulders close, as if he were squeezing through the stacks in a library.
Paging through the book with Charlie, I began to see that the real subject of these pictures was not architectural ideas or styles so much as architectural experiences. Each picture evoked what a particular kind of place or space felt like, they were poetic that way, and it was the sensual nature of each experience, more than any purely visual or aesthetic details, that Charlie meant to call my attention to.
Turning to the picture of the Caribbean porch with the thatched roof and nonexistent walls, he talked about the sharp juxtaposition of the low, sheltering roof line and the wide open spaces underneath it. “Isn’t this fantastic? It reminds me of putting the top down on a convertible, that explosion of light and space you get the moment the roof flies up, only here it’s the walls that vanish. Makes me think of Frank Lloyd Wright, too, the way his strong roofs meet those light, dematerialized walls so that the space seems to race outward, right through them. We could do something like that.” I realized that the reason vernacular shacks and barns could cohabit so happily in Charlie’s booklet with examples of sophisticated architecture is that, for him, when they work, both draw on the same elemental feelings about space.
I asked Charlie about this. “People do seem to have some very basic responses to places and kinds of spaces,” he said, picking his words with care as he stepped gingerly out onto the ice of architectural theory. “I do happen to believe that there’s a basic vocabulary of ‘buildingness’ that we all share. This is what I try to work with—they’re my tubes of paint. And that’s really all this little booklet is about: singling out a handful of strong spatial experiences that might belong in your building.” Charlie used the word “vocabulary” to describe these architectural elements, but it seemed to me they could scarcely be less literary. He wasn’t talking about our interpretation of architectural conventions so much as our unconscious experiences of space—the sort of immediate, poetic responses to place that Bachelard chronicled in The Poetics of Space, a book that turned out to be close to Charlie’s heart.
I asked him if anyone else had written about this face of architecture, which seemed such a long way from the world I’d been reading about in PA. He mentioned Christopher Alexander, a somewhat unorthodox Bay Area architect who has tried systematically to analyze and catalog all the forms in architecture’s vocabulary, almost as if they were parts of nature and he were an obsessed naturalist.
Alexander calls these forms “patterns,” and his best-known book, A Pattern Language*, published in 1977, is essentially a compilation of 253 of them in a phone-book-thick volume that reads like a vast field guide or encyclopedia. Each pattern is numbered and named (“159: Light on Two Sides of Every Room”), defined in a sentence (“People will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit from one side unused and empty”), and illustrated with a photograph or drawing. Charlie hadn’t exactly read A Pattern Language, he admitted, but he’d browsed around in it enough to decide that the definitions and illustrations were apt and even useful, and he suggested I have a look.
My first impression of A Pattern Language was that it reminded me of Charlie’s booklet a bit, except that there were long, interesting captions to accompany the photographs, as well as an overarching theory. Like the pictures in Charlie’s book, Alexander’s were strongly evocative of the experience of place: One showed a casement window flung open to embrace an early-morning street scene that reminded me of Paris readying to greet the workday; another, a trellis of bean vines that filigreed the sunlight coming through the window of a shack. There were big pine-plank tables in farmhouse kitchens you wanted to pull a chair up to, and front porches that seemed to say, here’s a sweet place to watch the world go by.
The images were well chosen and immediately appealing, yet the text made clear that there was something more here than a collection of nice places. We were told, in fact, that the “patterns” depicted in these images revealed profound truths about the world and human nature. Indeed, Alexander states that the discovery of any one of these patterns—of something like “light on two sides of every room” or “entrance transition”—is “as hard as anything in theoretical physics.” In a strange and wonderful way, A Pattern Language manages to combine a rich poetry of everyday life with the monomania of someone who believes he has found a key to the universe. I suspect Charlie had soaked up the former and skipped over the latter.
With my own well-established weakness for theories, I wasn’t about to do anything of the kind. I dug in. Alexander contends (in both A Pattern Language and a more theoretical companion volume called The Timeless Way of Building) that the most successful built forms share certain essential attributes with forms in nature—with things like trees and waves and animals. Both natural and man-made forms serve to reconcile conflicting forces (a tree’s need to stand up with the fact of gravity, say, or a person’s conflicting urges for privacy and social contact); the forms that do this best are the ones that endure. You might say that Alexander is an architectural Charles Darwin, since he believes that good form represents a successful adaptation to a given environment.
Consider the living room of a house, Alexander writes. Here the conflicting forces are not physical but psychological: the desire of family members for a sense of belonging and the simultaneous need of individuals for a measure of privacy and time apart. The pattern that will resolve this basic conflict (which Alexander says lies at the heart not only of family life but of social life in general) he calls “Alcoves”: “To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in one’s and two’s in the same space.” This is accomplished by creating “small places at the edge of any common room…. These alcoves should be large enough for two people to sit, chat, or play, and sometimes large enough to contain a desk or a table.” The pattern of an alcove off of a communal space (which also shows up in libraries, restaurants, and public squares) is as natural and right and self-sustaining as the pattern of ripples in a patch of windblown sand.
It follows that architectural beauty is not a subjective or a trivial matter for Alexander. “Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them,” he declares in the pattern “Window Place,” which follows “Alcoves” in A Pattern Language. A room lacking this pattern—even if it has a window and comfortable chair somewhere in it—will “keep you in a state of perpetual unresolved conflict and tension.” That’s because when you enter the room you will feel torn between the desire to sit down and be comfortable and the desire to move toward the light. Only a window place that combines the comfortable spot to sit with the source of sunlight can resolve this tension. For Alexander, our sense that rooms containing such places are beautiful is much more than “an aesthetic whim”; rather, a window place, like an alcove off a common room, represents an objectively successful adaptation to a given social and physical context.
Whether or not you are willing to travel quite this far with Alexander, his book fairly brims with patterns that seem sensible and ring with a certain poetic or psychological truth. I’d never thought about it before, but having windows on two sides of a room does seem to make the difference between a lifeless and an appealing room. The reason this is so, Alexander hypothesizes, is that a dual light source allows us to see things more intricately, especially the finer details of facial expression and gesture. Similarly, there is something vital about the experience of arrival captured in the pattern “Entrance Transition,” which calls for a transitional space at the entrance to a building—a covered porch, or a curving path brushing by a lilac, or some other slight change of view or texture underfoot before one reaches the door. Alexander suggests that people need this sort of transitional space and time in order to shed their “street behaviors” and settle “into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house.” Sometimes Alexander sounds less like an architect than a novelist. I say that not only because he is a good student of human nature, but because he brings a sense of narrative—of time—to the design of space.
I realized that Charlie and I were sensing the need for just such an “entrance transition” when we decided to locate the door in back. Stepping around the big rock and turning into the site would create the very interlude Alexander is talking about, offering a change in perspective and a moment to prepare before coming inside. It was startling to see just how many of the things I asked for in my letter, and how many of the images in Charlie’s book, show up in A Pattern Language. “Thick walls,” for example, turns out to be an important pattern: “Most of the identity of a dwelling lies in or near its surfaces—in the 3 or 4 feet near the walls.” These should be thick enough to accommodate shelves, cabinets, displays, lamps, built-in furniture—all those nooks and niches that allow people to leave their mark on a place. “Each house will have a memory,” Alexander writes, and the personalities of its inhabitants are “written in the thickness of the walls.” So maybe I hadn’t been that far off, imagining the walls of my hut as an auxiliary brain.
After we had spent a couple of hours going through the book of images, using them to narrow my choices and refine our idea of the building, Charlie took out a roll of parchment-colored tracing paper, drew a length of it across his drafting table, and began to draw. He worked in ink to start, sketching rapidly in rough, scribbly lines, discarding a drawing and tearing off a new length of paper any time he didn’t like what he was seeing. If there was anything in a sketch worth saving, he’d start the new drawing by loosely tracing over that part of the rejected one; in this way a process of trial and error unfolded swiftly and smoothly, the good ideas getting carried forward from one generation of drawing to the next, the bad ones falling by the wayside.
At first, Charlie worked exclusively in plan, ignoring for the time being what the building might look like from the outside. He started with my desk, which we’d decided should carry all the way across the front of the building, where it could overlook the pond and the house. To determine its dimensions, Charlie inventoried the things I liked to keep on my desk and then asked me to extend my arms out to the sides. To that wingspan (six feet) he added the depth of a bookshelf on each end (two feet): this gave us the width of the building. Charlie now turned to the Golden Section to obtain its length, multiplying eight feet by the factor 1.618, which comes to 12.9. He sketched a rectangle eight feet by thirteen, roughed in the big rock to its right, and declared, “There it is: your ur-house.”
We had talked about the Golden Section earlier, when we’d come to that section in the book of images. Charlie told me he often resorted to the ratio when he had to make a decision about the proportions of a space. He’d devoted a couple of pages to it in the booklet because he thought the Golden Section seemed particularly fitting for this building, since it was to house someone who liked to write about nature. When I offered a puzzled look, he explained that, among other things, the Golden Section is a bridge joining the worlds of architecture and nature. “The same proportioning system that works in buildings also shows up in trees, leaves, in the spirals of seashells and sunflowers, and in the human body.” He hoisted his eyebrows, lowered his voice: “It’s everywhere.”
But wasn’t this an awfully mystical way to determine the proportions of my building?
“Hey. It works. More often than not, rooms with Golden Section proportions feel right.” Charlie stressed that he’s not a slave to the system; should he find he needs a couple more feet in the length of the building, for example, he’ll dispense with it. “But all other things being equal, I’ll use it, because I’m convinced there’s something there.”
I was surprised that such an occult proportioning system hadn’t gone out with the Enlightenment, or modernism, but Charlie rattled off a long list of modern architects who’d sworn by it, including two as different as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Even to contemporary designers not at all given to mysticism or numerology, the Golden Section seems to retain some value as a pattern, or type—something to fall back on when faced with a decision about proportions, providing a bit of shelter, perhaps, from what Kevin Lynch, the writer and city planner, once called “the anxieties of the open search.”
For the next hour, Charlie worked variations on this basic rectangle, now moving the daybed from the east wall to a bay on the south wall, now switching places between the daybed and the stove. At one point he experimented with the idea of turning the front of the building into a screened-in porch, while moving the desk to the north wall. But that meant it would look right out on the giant boulder, and when I mentioned that this seemed like a good recipe for writer’s block, he quickly dropped that idea.
Sheet after sheet, Charlie moved around the elements we’d settled on—desk, daybed, porch, stove, bookshelves, chair—like pieces on a chessboard, talking the whole time as if we were inside the game and the pieces were animate. “This guy here,” he’d say, pointing to the chair, “really wants to be over there by the stove, but if we move him, like so, then the daybed can’t go on the same wall because code says you need at least three feet of clearance to a combustible on either side of your stove.” He started to draw it anyway. “Unless, that is, you decide not to bother with a building permit—” he looked at me hopefully; this wouldn’t be the last time Charlie tried to keep on going after one of his ideas ran up against some practical consideration. I told him to stick to code. “Okay, okay, so…”—he tears off another length of tracing paper—“let’s move the bay window for the daybed to the south wall, where it’s really going to want that shady trellis”—he scribbled a dense tangle of lines over the window—“and then put the door on the east end, the stove back over here…This just might work.”
As he tested each new arrangement of elements in plan, Charlie would narrate a procession through the imaginary space taking shape at the end of his felt-tip. “Now I approach the building this way, turning right up here past the rock, which is hiding the big view from me, that’s perfect, and then I step into the building, passing through our thick wall here…Good.” Thinking, narrating, and drawing seemed to proceed almost in lockstep, the process now pushing, now following, the prow of black ink over the sheet of paper. His line danced across the page with a quality that managed to look both sure-footed and provisional at the same time, doubling back on itself to correct an angle or try out a new dimension, then flying off to scribble a shelf full of books while its author contemplated his next move. Swift, buoyant, heedless for now about being neat or right, it was a line that seemed to say, “Okay, so how about this?” Charlie’s words hustled to keep pace with its improvisations.
“So now I’ve arrived,” he continued, his pen swinging a door open to the left. “And right there in front of me is the daybed with the bay window behind it, looking out through our clematis vine, all that filtered south light. Good, good, good. Then I turn to my right, and boom, there’s the big view down to the pond—that’s very strong, the surprise as I turn into that view. So let’s make the most of it, carry that window wall to wall like this, run it the entire length of the desk. Nice. Uh-oh”—he flashes a panicked look, eyebrows rocketing—“I don’t see the porch! Where am I going to put that guy? And it looks like that stove and chair are going to be in my way as I move toward the desk. It’s starting to get a little crowded in here.” He tore off another length of tracing paper.
Now Charlie seemed stuck, and while he sat there rubbing his chin, a half-dozen rejected schemes spread out in front of him, I opened the booklet to the photograph of the miniature bungalow with the glassed-in room squatting over its front porch. Maybe we could go up, like this, I suggested. Charlie told me a little about the house in the picture, evidently a favorite. It was in a campground on Cape Cod called Nonquit, a summer community his grandparents had been members of, where Charlie had spent time as a child. He spoke affectionately of the place, and especially of the strong, eccentric architecture there, which he still sometimes returned to admire and, occasionally, borrow from. Every house was different, Charlie said, idiosyncratic but without straining to be. They’d been built at the turn of the century by Beaux Arts—trained architects working in vernacular American idioms—stick, shingle style, bungalow. What he admired most about these buildings was their simultaneous inventiveness and unpretentiousness, qualities not easily combined.
“The houses have a certain propriety I’ve always associated with my grandparents.” These were the Quakers on his mother’s side. “They’re very sophisticated buildings—a dozen different ideas in each—yet they’d much rather be thought of as plain than risk seeming the least bit affected. But there are layers upon layers here if you look. You’re welcome to uncover as much, or as little, as you want.” Charlie seemed to prize this notion of propriety in people and buildings equally.
Now he seized on the idea of a small second story, and set off in a whole new direction, drawing a square, about five foot on a side, in the middle of our rectangle—a tower, essentially, that would rise above the main room and accommodate either the daybed or the desk. I told Charlie about my tree house, which the tower he was drawing reminded me of. We were suddenly on much trickier ground, having now to factor in a half-dozen new and relatively inflexible elements, like the clearance beneath the second story (“How tall are you? Let’s see if we can get away with seven feet under here”) and some means of access to it that wouldn’t eat up too much space downstairs. A staircase would take up nearly as much square footage as we were adding, so we played with the idea of using a library ladder on a track, which would slide right into the thick wall and out of the way.
The rest of the morning was taken up elaborating the tower scheme. After we had settled on what seemed to be a workable arrangement in plan—my desk lining the glazed walls of the tower, the front of the house below becoming a porch, with the stove and sitting area directly beneath the tower, and the daybed still occupying a bay window curving out from the south wall downstairs—Charlie declared that the moment of truth had arrived. It was time to see what this thing was going to look like in elevation.
Still working in ink, Charlie sketched what looked like a miniature bungalow with a boxy tower rising up through the middle of its roof to form a second, parallel gable above it, like so:
“Well, he’s definitely his own guy,” Charlie said, drumming his Uniball fine-point on the edge of his drafting table as he appraised the elevation. It did seem vaguely anthropomorphic, with the makings of a strong face. But I wondered if maybe it wasn’t too public a face—the kind you’d expect to meet in a village, or in a campground like Nonquit, but perhaps not alone in the woods.
Charlie said it was too soon to tell. “At a certain point, you have to start getting real about a scheme—start drawing it in elevation with actual dimensions and roof pitches. That’s when an idea that might seem to work in a rough drawing can take on a whole new personality—or fall apart.” Now Charlie switched to pencil, drawing to scale a very precise set of parallel roof lines, one directly above the other. First he tried the same fairly shallow thirty-degree roof pitch our house had, thinking that this might set up a dialogue between the two buildings. But it soon became clear that this pitch would not give me enough headroom upstairs without making the tower so tall as to overwhelm the rest of the building. Charlie chuckled at the monstrosity he’d drawn.
He tried a few other roof pitches, subtracted a few inches from the clearance beneath the second story (“Just for an experiment let’s try six-six, make it nice and cozy under there”), and lengthened the eaves below in order to beef up the lower section relative to the tower. Drafting now was a matter of feeding new angles and measurements into the scheme and then seeing what kind of elevation the geometry came back with; it seemed as though a certain amount of control had passed from Charlie to the drawing process itself, which was liable to produce wholly unexpected results depending on the variables he fed into it. At a pitch of forty-five degrees, for example, the interior of the tower suddenly began to work. “You know, this could be kind of fantastic in here,” Charlie said, brightening as he drew in plan a three-sided desk commanding a 270-degree view. “Sort of like being up on the bridge of a ship—or in your tree house.” But when he turned to the elevation it seemed to have undergone a complete change of personality. No longer a funky campground bungalow, the building had gone back in time half a century and acquired a somewhat Gothic-Victorian aspect, with its steeply pitched roof and slender, upward-thrusting tower. A woodland setting now seemed to suit this house, it was true, but unfortunately it was the woods of the Brothers Grimm: The elevation now suggested a gingerbread cottage. It had gotten cute. Charlie scowled at the drawing. “It’s a hobbit house!”
But the tower scheme had its own momentum now, so Charlie kept at it, playing with the elevation while trying to keep the plan more or less intact, deploying a whole bag of tricks to rid the building of its fairy-tale associations and balance the relative weight of top and bottom. He abbreviated the eaves, beefed up the timbers below while lightening them above, overthrew the symmetry of the façade, and drew in a series of unexpectedly big windows, all of which served to undercut the house’s “hobbitiness.” By the time we decided to break for lunch, the elevation had lost any trace of cuteness, which Charlie clearly felt was the peril in designing such a miniature building. “This is starting to look like something,” Charlie declared at last, by which of course he meant exactly the opposite: The building no longer looked like anything you could readily give a name to—neither bungalow nor gingerbread cottage. The building was once again its own guy. Whether it was my guy neither of us felt quite sure. So we decided to put the drawing away for a while, see how it looked to us in a few days.
By now, Charlie and I had traveled pretty far down this particular road, having invested so much work in the tower scheme. But as I drove home to Connecticut later that afternoon, I began to have doubts about it. Mainly I wondered if the building wasn’t getting too big and complicated. My shack in the woods had turned into a two-story house, and I wasn’t sure if it was something I could afford, much less build myself; it certainly didn’t look inexpensive or idiot-proof. When I got home that evening, I walked out to the site, and recalled Charlie’s remark about propriety as I tried to imagine the building in place. Out here on this wooded, rocky hillside, in the middle of this fallen-down farm, it seemed clear that the building he’d drawn would call too much attention to itself. In this particular context, it lacked propriety. Charlie had devised a scheme that would give me everything I’d asked for, it was true, but perhaps that was the problem. Somehow, the building seemed to be getting away from us.
Charlie phoned me first. “I’m starting all over,” he announced, much to my relief. “There’s no reason we can’t get the things you want here—a couple of distinct spaces, a desk, a daybed, a stove, and some kind of porch—without going to two stories.” Drawing the tower scheme had been a valuable exercise, Charlie said. It had helped him to think through all the programmatic elements by getting them down on paper. But now he wanted to go back to the basic eight-by-thirteen rectangle, see if he couldn’t figure out some way to condense all the elements and patterns I wanted into that frame.
“We need to tame this thing—impose some tighter rules. That usually produces better architecture anyway. I can’t lose sight of the basic simplicity of our program here: it’s a hut in the woods, a place for you to work. It is not a second house.”
He started talking about a four-by-eight-foot playhouse he was building for his boys in Tamworth, New Hampshire, where he spent weekends in a converted chicken coop that had been in his family for three generations. The playhouse, which was in the woods up behind the house, consisted of four gigantic timber corner posts set on boulders and crowned with a gable roof framed out of undressed birch logs.
“We could do something like that here: a primitive hut, basically, with a post-and-beam frame. That way, the walls don’t bear any load, which gives us a lot of freedom. We could do some walls thick, others thin. I could even work out some sort of removable wall system, or perhaps windows that disappear into the walls, or up into the ceiling, so that in the summer the whole building turns into a porch.”
Charlie seemed full of ideas now, some of them—like the disappearing windows—sounding fairly complex, and others so primitive as to be worrisome. For example, he wasn’t sure that my building needed a foundation. We could just sink pressure-treated corner posts into the ground, or maybe seat the whole building on four boulders, like his boys’ playhouse. Wouldn’t the frost heave the boulders every winter? That’s no big deal, he said; you rent a house jack and jack the building up in the spring. Charlie was bringing a very different approach to the project now, trying radically to simplify it, to get it back to first principles after the complications of the tower scheme. Which was fine with me, though I told him that I definitely did not want a building that had to be jacked up every April.
From our conversations, I knew that the primitive hut was a powerful image for Charlie, as indeed it has been for many architects at least since the time of Vitruvius. Almost all of the classic architecture treatises I’d read—by Vitruvius, Alberti, Laugier and, more recently, Le Corbusier and Wright—start out with a vivid account of the building of the First Shelter, which serves these author-architects as a myth of architecture’s origins in the state of nature; it also provides a theoretical link between the work of building and the art of architecture. Depending on the author, the primal shelter might be a tent or cave or a wooden post-and-beam hut with a gable roof. More often than not, the architect proceeds to draw a direct line of historical descent from his version of the primitive hut to the style of architecture he happens to practice, thereby implying that this kind of building alone carries nature’s seal of approval. If an architect favors neoclassical architecture over Gothic, for example, chances are his primitive hut will bear a close resemblance to a Greek temple built out of tree trunks.
Literature has its primitive huts too—think of Robinson Crusoe’s or Thoreau’s: simple dwellings for not-so-simple characters who find in such a building a good vantage point from which to cast a gimlet eye upon society. The sophisticate’s primitive hut becomes a tool with which to explore civilized man’s relation to nature and criticize whatever in the contemporary scene strikes the author as artificial or decadent. The idea, in literature and architecture alike, seems to be that a decadent society or style of building can be renewed and refreshed by closer contact with nature, by a return to the first principles and truthfulness embodied in the primitive hut.
For Charlie, the appeal of the hut seemed a good deal less ideological than all that. To him, the image bespoke plain, honest structure; an architecture made out of the materials at hand; a simple habitation carved out of the wilderness; and an untroubled relationship to nature. He had told me about reading the eighteenth-century philosophe Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essay on Architecture in architecture school and coming across the etching of a primitive hut on its frontispiece: Charles Eisen’s “Allegory of Architecture Returning to its Natural Model,” which depicts four trees in a rectangle, their branches knitted together to form a leafy, sheltering gable above. “It’s a completely romantic idea,” Charlie said. “But it’s kind of wonderful, too, the image of these four trees giving themselves up to us as the four corners of a shelter—this dream of a perfect marriage between man and nature.”
A few weeks later, I received a somewhat cryptic fax from Charlie:
When I reached him late that afternoon, he sounded excited. “So what do you think?” I confessed I didn’t really understand the drawing.
“Oh. Well, what you’ve got there is the detail for the southwest corner of your building. I’ve been working on it for a week, and this morning it finally came together.”
The corner detail?
“No, the whole scheme.”
I asked when I could see the rest of it.
“This detail’s all I’ve drawn so far. But that’s our parti, right there—the solution to the problem, in a nutshell. The rest should be fairly easy.”
I still didn’t get it.
“See, the problem I’ve been having with this hut all along is with the thickness of the corner posts.” Charlie was deep inside the new scheme now, and his explanation came in a rush. “Basically, the idea is to do thick walls on the long sides, thin ones front and back. What this does is give the building a strong directionality—it becomes almost a kind of chute, funneling all that space coming down through our site toward the pond.”
He proceeded to explain how the thickness of the posts set up the thickness of our interior walls, which meant the posts would have to be a foot square at a minimum if the walls were going to work as bookshelves. But in fact they had to be a couple of inches thicker than that, since he wanted them to “come proud” of the walls—stand out from the building’s skin, in order to retain their “postness.”
“So already we’re up to fifteen, sixteen inches square, which is one fat post. I tried drawing it—way too chunky. You’d need a crane to haul it out there.
“But what if instead I go to a pair of posts, six by six, say, with three or four inches of wall between them? That gives me my fifteen inches easily, but without any of that chunkiness.” A single fat corner post would also have suggested that all four of our walls were equally thick, he explained, while a pair of posts at each corner in front would imply that only the long walls directly behind them are thick; by comparison the short walls between the double posts at either end will seem thin, an impression he planned to underscore by filling them with glass.
“There was one more piece of the puzzle, though, which didn’t hit me till this morning. Instead of two square posts, what if I go to six-by-tens and run them lengthwise? This way our corner could articulate the directionality of the building at the same time it sets up the whole idea of thick versus thin walls—enclosure one way, openness the other. That’s what I mean about the whole parti being right here in a nutshell.”
Charlie might have been able to tease an entire building out of his corner detail, but I couldn’t see it, not yet. I might as well have been trying to picture a face by looking at a handful of genes in a microscope. I did notice, however, that Charlie’s corner post sat on a rock, and I asked him about that; I wasn’t going to need a house jack, was I? He assured me there was a conventional footing underneath the rock. The rock was his way of hiding the ungainly concrete pier we’d need to support the double posts. Stone footings also seemed right for the site. “What else could a big wooden post standing next to a boulder wear on its feet?”
Charlie said he still had a few big issues to resolve, and the elevations to draw. “It’s a tight fit in there, and I haven’t figured out how I’m going to resolve the tops of the double posts, or how I’m going to make our thin walls disappear. But the hard part’s done. I should have something for you to look at in a week.”
3. THE DESIGN
Charlie drove down to present his design over the Fourth of July weekend. Sunday morning, out on the porch, he unfurled a single large blueprint that he had prepared with the help of Don Knerr, a young associate in his office. The drawing showed the big rock with the floor plan of the hut next to it and, orbiting around that, the four elevations and two cross-section views. They’d also sketched in some trees for atmosphere, and a curl of smoke rising from the stovepipe. I noticed the building was called a “Writing House” on the blueprint, an accurate enough but somewhat grand-sounding name it would take me awhile to make my own.
My first impression was of how simple this building looked, considering all the thought and work that had gone into it. Here in plan was a basic rectangular box, and in elevation a square crowned by an isosceles right triangle: a house as a child might have drawn it. But as Charlie began to walk me through the drawings, narrating a trip through spaces that seemed as vivid to him as the porch we were sitting on, the simple hut began to disclose a few of its layers of complexity. Others I wouldn’t encounter for several months yet, not until I’d begun to build it.
“The building is basically a pair of bookshelves holding up a roof,” Charlie began, a catch of nervousness in his voice. “It’s about living between two substantial walls that hold everything you’re about—or at least, everything this building’s about—and which channel all the air and space and energy streaming through this site.” As Charlie had predicted it would, the facts of the site had determined key elements of the building’s design. Its directionality, for example, was “given to us” by the flow of space between the rock and the hedgerow. The rock itself had dictated a building of great strength, Charlie explained; a lightly framed shack or gazebo would have been overwhelmed by the boulder, which “wanted a very beefy, post-and-beamy companion.” Yet there were also a couple of elements in the design that promised to feel extremely light and open to nature. The roof was a membrane of cedar shingles thin and delicate enough to transmit the tap of rain, Charlie said, and the two end walls would virtually disappear when I opened the main windows.
In plan, Charlie had indeed teased an entire building out of his original corner detail. Between the pairs of six-by-ten posts at either end of the rectangle ran foot-thick walls the length of the building; these were the bookshelves that held up the roof. Each of the short sides of the rectangle, the front and back, was dominated by a big, horizontal awning window that carried from post to post. These windows were hinged at the top to open inward; raised overhead and then hooked to a chain hanging down from the ridge beam, they would disappear into the ceiling, almost like garage doors. Across the front, or west wall of the building was the main part of the desk; directly opposite it, on the east wall, was the daybed, which hadn’t ended up on the thick wall after all. That’s because those walls had been interrupted by a pair of steps, which divided a lower work area in front from a smaller raised landing in back that accommodated the daybed and the entrance. In plan the steps divided the room into a square (the landing) and a rectangle that appeared to have Golden Section proportions; they also served to rhyme the floor of the building with the slope of the site.
Judith joined us at the table, carefully settling her eighth-month frame into the chair across from Charlie; Isaac would be born a few weeks later. “So this is where my child is going to go to smoke pot in fifteen years,” she said, patting her belly. “No,” Charlie smiled, pointing to the daybed on the blueprint. “This is where he loses his virginity.” Neither prospect had ever occurred to me, but of course my building would outlive my intentions for it in all sorts of unforeseeable ways. It was going to be a thing in the world, not just an idea in my or Charlie’s head.
Charlie walked us through the design. After stepping around the big rock, you would enter the building through a low door on the thick wall, arriving on the upper landing. To the left was the daybed, which would have a dropped ceiling above it finished in narrow strips of clear pine; the idea was to make this space somewhat more refined and intimate than the rest of the building, Charlie explained, a room within a room. Directly ahead as you entered would be a double casement window cut into the thick wall and obscured by a trellis smothered in vines.
From the little landing, the space stepped down into the work area, following the grade of the ground below. Charlie pointed out that since the height of the ceiling stayed constant, as you come down the steps “you’re going to feel the space lift from your shoulders”—a slight shift in mood. The workspace was dominated by a deep L-shaped desk that ran across the entire front and along most of the north wall, where there would be a little casement window tucked right into the bookshelf at desk height and opening directly on the rock. This window would allow me to see anybody approaching without getting up from my desk. Charlie said he’d placed the big window down low over the desk so that the pond wouldn’t come completely into view until you stepped down into the work area. “And then, when you pop those two awning windows open, the front and back walls are basically going to vanish, leaving nothing but air post to post. It’s the top-down-on-the-convertible effect we talked about, the whole building transformed into a screened-in porch.”
The thick walls would feel as strongly present as the thin ones would seem ephemeral, Charlie said. These were divided into five bays approximately thirty inches wide; three in the lower space, two above. Each bay was defined by what Charlie called a “fin wall,” a twelve-inch-deep section of plywood-faced wall jutting in perpendicularly from the building’s plywood sheathing. These dividers would run floor to ceiling, giving the walls their thickness and anchoring the bookshelves. Along with the rafters, the fin walls composed the building’s skeleton, which was entirely exposed. At the top of the wall each fin met a four-by-six rafter that carried the frame up to the spine and then continued down the other side, where it met another fin wall, almost as though the whole space were suspended within a wooden rib cage.
In the cross-section drawings, you could see how the thick walls did most of the work of the building. Many of the bays were filled with bookshelves, but others held such things as the stove, a stack of logs, the desk, two of the windows, the door, a nook for my computer, and another for stationery and supplies. It looked like I could reach just about all these spaces from my desk chair—retrieve a book, feed the stove, crack a window. Charlie had given me the cockpit I’d asked for. The building was indeed boatlike, not only in its radical economy of space, but also in its ribbed frame and pronounced directionality.
The front of the building looked fairly straightforward in elevation, though it too held layers it would take me awhile to appreciate. Two pairs of thick Douglas fir posts rose from rock bases on either side of a broad window that was divided into six square panes, three over three. The window was capped by a wooden visor, and above that a gable, which was pierced by a pair of tiny windows directly beneath the peak. These matched the windows under the peak of the main house, striking a slight family resemblance between the two buildings. To my eye the elevation made no obvious stylistic or historical reference, though with its clean geometry and strong frontality you would have to say it leaned closer to the classical than the Gothic. The front elevation gave an impression of being open (even without a front door), resolute, frank, and somewhat masculine—a fit companion for the boulder it would sit next to.
Charlie said that drawing the elevation had been a struggle, that the double posts had given him a lot of trouble. A single post would have been easy to resolve, Charlie explained; simply run it up into the frame of the building, so that it turns into the gable’s first rafter. But how do you terminate an inside post? If it travels up into the gable, it looks like a mistake, “or some kind of Gothic stick-style reference.” The obvious solution would have been to cap the posts with some kind of capital, or a cornice running across the front of the building. “But that immediately says ‘Greek Revival’—makes the building seem like some postmodern temple plopped out here in the woods. I wanted to avoid those kinds of associations at all costs.”
I asked him why that was so important.
“Because I wanted this building to be it’s own person. If I’d used the Greek Revival solution, it would have been too literal, too referential. The building immediately becomes part of a specific discourse. You’d look at it and start thinking about Venturi, about postmodernism and irony. It’s also just too easy. Suddenly you no longer even have to look at the building—one glance at the Greek Revival sign on the front and you’ve got it, you’re done. That’s much too fast, too cerebral. I want you to experience this thing, not read it.”
It was the wooden visor that had given Charlie a way to resolve his corner detail without falling into postmodern mannerism. “This little guy here does a lot for us,” he explained. As a practical matter, it meant I could leave the window open in the rain, and in the late afternoon it would keep the sun out of my eyes. In formal terms, it actually is a kind of cornice, since it runs across the base of the pediment and caps the double columns. But a visor is so emphatically casual that it immediately shrugs off any classical associations, defusing any hint of formality or pretension in the elevation. “If this thing’s a temple,” Charlie said, “it’s a temple that wears a baseball cap.”
I recalled the notion of architectural propriety we’d discussed in Boston. Charlie had taken pains to make certain that the building not come off the least bit flashy, though often he seemed to have arrived at his simple effects by a very complicated route. My building may have been a primitive hut—a wooden rectangle of space defined by four corner posts and a gable roof—but it was a most sophisticated primitive hut, a considered object from the ground (where its “simple” rock footings disguised modern concrete piers) up to its peak, where the two inconspicuous windows peered out at the world, knowingly.
“I took what you said to heart,” Charlie said at one point near the end of his presentation. “That your building should seem fairly straightforward outside, yet have a kind of density within. We certainly could have done something a lot zippier in elevation—the tower scheme, say. Or we could have put a metal roof on it instead of these cedar shingles. But how self-conscious do we want to say we are?” This seemed like a particularly telling way for Charlie to phrase his sense of propriety. It suggested that self-consciousness, and complexity and sophistication, are given, inescapable—this was, after all, a building designed in the last decade of the twentieth century, a “primitive hut” in the woods that will nevertheless house a computer and a modem and a fax machine, not to mention my own word-bound, hypertheoretical self.
With only a few small modifications, this was the building I would set out to build a few months later. Charlie had managed to give me everything I had asked for without compromising the basic idea of a hut, and he had done so with an impressive economy, even a measure of poetry, and by using the most basic of materials: a frame of Douglas fir, plywood walls, a skin of cedar shingles. The building also promised, at least on paper, to suit its site as well as it suited me, to make a fit companion for that boulder. It appeared that Charlie had found a way to harmonize my wishes with the facts of this particular landscape.
That evening, after Charlie had left for Boston, I reread the first letter I’d sent him, setting forth my many tangled wishes for the building. The desk, daybed, bookshelves, stove, sitting area, even the porch (or at least, a sense of “porchness”)—all the elements and patterns I’d specified were there. But instead of simply adding them up or stringing them together, Charlie had, like a boat builder, found intelligent ways to layer a great many different things into the confines of a single eight-by-thirteen-foot room. One pattern overlapped another, so that the thick walls were enlisted to help create the sense of an entrance transition, for example, and the desire to echo the topography was used to establish the two distinct spaces. Instead of adding a porch to the room, Charlie had found a way to turn the room into a porch.
Rereading the letter, I realized he had achieved something much more difficult as well. My letter had articulated two completely contradictory images of the building: as a safe and wintry refuge on the one hand and, on the other, as a room that would throw itself open to the landscape. In Christopher Alexander’s terms, these were the conflicting forces at work in my dream for the hut: the simultaneous desire for enclosure and freedom. Charlie had invented, or discovered, a form that promised to bring these two impulses into some kind of balance. Two thick walls holding up a thin roof: this was the pattern, more or less. And this pattern had been there almost from the beginning. Because there it was, right on the cover of Charlie’s book of images, the design that had annoyed me with its obscurity and which now seemed clear as day:
Using little more than this pair of thick walls, opened to the landscape on either end, Charlie had found a way to animate the space in the hut and grant his client’s warring wishes for an equally strong sense of refuge and prospect.
On paper, at least. Because right now, any talk about the experience of space in my hut was idle, a matter of hunch and speculation. There was no way I could be sure Charlie’s design worked the way he said it did without actually building it and moving in. This might not have been the case had Charlie designed a more conceptual or literary building—a hut built chiefly out of words or critical theories or signs, the kind that, once worked out on paper, is as good as built (if not better). Just think, this whole project would have been done now, everything but the explanatory texts. I could have slipped back into the warm tub of commentary, and never have had to learn how to cut a bird’s mouth in a rafter or drill a half-inch hole through a boulder in order to pin it to a concrete pier. But no such luck. This particular building was meant to be experienced, not read. Only part of its story can be told on paper; the rest of it would be in wood.