Building a roof is by its very nature conducive to speculation, if only because one spends so much of the day so high up in the trees, taking in the big picture. In fact, the process of shingling a roof in wood is the sort of repetitive operation that actually benefits from a certain distractedness on the part of the shingler. Focus too closely on the work at hand and your shingles are apt to fall into a rigid, mechanical pattern, when it’s a more organic regularity, something just this side of casual, that you’re looking for. This I managed to achieve (shingling obviously played to my strength, such as it is), and perhaps the following reflections on roofs, and other elevated matters, deserve part of the credit.
To think about roofs is to think about architecture at its most fundamental. From the beginning, “the roof” has been architecture’s great synecdoche; to have “a roof over one’s head” has been to have a home. The climax of every primitive but narrative I’ve read arrives with the invention of the roof, the big moment when the tree limbs are angled against one another to form a gable, and then covered with thatch or mud to shut out the rain and the heat of the sun. If the first purpose of architecture is to offer a shelter against the elements, it then stands to reason that the roof is in some sense its primary creation. It’s the place where the dreams of architecture meet the facts of nature.
The roof also seems to be the place where, in this century, architecture and nature parted company, where the ancient idea that there are rules for the art of building that are given with the world—an idea first expressed by Vitruvius, and embodied in the myth of the primitive hut—went, well, out the window. At first the notorious leaking roofs of contemporary architecture seemed too cheap and obvious a metaphor for this development. But my time up in the rafters roofing and dwelling on roofs eventually got me to thinking that the leaky roof, taken seriously, might in fact have something to tell us about the architecture of our time.
But before I could think too hard about roofs as metaphor, I needed to learn something about them as structure, if I hoped to get mine framed and shingled and weather-tight that summer before the cold weather returned. Frank Lloyd Wright, who made much of roofs in his work (and who designed more than his share of leaky ones), wrote in his account of mankind’s earliest builders that “The lid was troublesome to him then and has always been so to subsequent builders.” Roofs have always been the focus of a considerable amount of technological effort, since, as Wright noted, “more pains had to be taken with these spans than with anything else about the building.” We tend to forget that, for much of its history, architecture stood at the leading edge of technology, not unlike semiconductors or gene splicing today. The architect saw himself less as an artist than a scientist or engineer, as he pushed to span ever-bigger spaces, to build higher and higher, and to realize such marvels of engineering as towers and domes. Historically, the roof has been the place where architecture confronted the challenge not only of the elements, but of nature’s laws.*
Perhaps this accounts for a certain anxiety that seems to hover over a roof, even one as seemingly straightforward as mine. It had never occurred to either Joe or me that our simple forty-five-degree gable roof was in any way pushing the technological envelope, but, unbeknownst to us, Charlie had been sufficiently concerned about its structural integrity to have an engineer look over his design and run a few calculations.
The July afternoon Joe and I first heard about the engineer—Charlie having accepted Joe’s dare-you invitation to help us cut and nail rafters—the architect came in for a lot of kidding. The day was very much Joe’s. Cutting rafters is a complicated and unforgiving procedure, and Joe had shown up on time and armed with a detailed sketch indicating the precise location and angle of each of the four cuts each rafter needed: the ridge and tail cuts at each end—parallel to one another at a forty-five-degree angle to the rafter’s edge—and the heel and seat cuts that form the “bird’s mouth” where the rafter engages the top of the wall—a rectangular notch that in our case had to have a slightly different depth, or heel cut, on each rafter to account for the fact that our two side walls were not precisely parallel.
Joe had clearly done his homework, could even spout the formula for determining the length of a rafter: , in which the rise is the height of the gable and the run is the horizontal distance covered by each rafter, or one half the width of the building. For his part, Charlie was feeling somewhat deflated after a punishing meeting with a client, and seemed in no shape to mix it up with a cocky carpenter who’d come equipped with enough geometry to frame a roof single-handed and who didn’t see much point in architects to begin with.
“Charlie, just explain this to me,” Joe began, gesturing with his big carpenter’s square. “The building is only eight feet by thirteen, correct? It gets a roof that’s framed with four-by-eight rafters and a ridge beam ten inches thick. Plus you’re calling for two collar ties and a pair of king posts, all of which you want us to dowel together. So tell me: How can we possibly have anything to worry about structurally? This building’s been designed for a three-hundred-year storm!”
Charlie managed a wan smile. He explained, somewhat sheepishly, that he’d needed to check with the engineer on the dimensions and spacing of the straps—the strips of wooden lath that run perpendicularly across the rafters to give us something to nail our shingles to. The fact that our rafters are a full thirty inches apart meant the lath would have to span an unusually great distance. Charlie had wanted to know the minimum dimensions he could safely spec these pieces, since the underside of the roof was to be entirely exposed. If the straps were too heavy, they’d wreck the delicate, rhythmic effect he was aiming for in the ceiling, which he’d told me was going to look something like the inside of a basket or the hull of a wooden boat. Yet if the lath were too light, it was liable to deflect, or bend, under stress.
While Charlie was working with the engineer to determine the dimension of the straps, he figured it couldn’t hurt to have him run the rest of the calculations on the roof. Charlie explained that any time you have an open, “cathedral” ceiling with no attic, there are special structural problems to solve. As gravity exerts a downward pressure on a roof, the rafters in turn want to push the walls outward, a force that in a traditional structure is countered by the ceiling joists, which tie each pair of rafters together at the bottom, joining them in a taut triangle. But when the living space reaches directly up under the roof, these joists are eliminated, so either the walls have to be sturdy enough to withstand the outward thrust of the rafters or an occasional cross-tie beam must be provided to counteract it. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who pioneered such a ceiling, and it may well have been the novel structural and insulating problems it raised that caused some of his roofs to leak. Following Wright’s example, Charlie wanted to give the interior of my building a pronounced sense of “roofness,” one of those instances in architecture where expressing a structure seems, ironically, to complicate its construction.
“Anyway, you’ll be happy to hear we’ve got nothing to worry about—the two cross-ties take care of our lateral stresses, and the king posts cut the weight carried by the ridge pole almost in half. And as far as those dowels are concerned, don’t forget that in a storm you have upward forces working on a roof, too.”
Joe and I both laughed; nothing about my building seemed in danger of blowing away. A few weeks before, as the frame was taking shape, I’d remarked to Charlie about how very heavy it looked. “But it’s not meant to be light,” Charlie had protested. “This is your study, your library—it’s an institution!” When I passed that one on to Joe, a look of concern swept over his face: “Mike, don’t you think there’s another kind of institution we should be talking to Charlie about?”
But there was nothing funny about the issue as far as Charlie was concerned. Charlie’s nightmares, I knew, featured collapsing roofs and deflecting cantilevers. No doubt the fact that this particular design was being built by a crew consisting 50 percent of me made him even more nervous than usual. Out of the blue, Charlie would phone to reassure himself I was using galvanized nails in the frame; he’d heard about a house on Cape Cod that had simply crumpled to the ground one day, the salt air having rusted its common nails to dust. No doubt such worries disturb the sleep of all architects to one degree or another. When the massive concrete cantilevers of Fallingwater were being poured, Frank Lloyd Wright, delirious with fever at the time, was heard to mumble, “Too heavy! Too heavy!”*
“You two can laugh,” Charlie said, “but I’m the one who’s ultimately responsible, and it makes me sleep better knowing that an engineer has run all the calculations.” He launched into a story he’d already told me twice before, about an opening-day bridge collapse in Tacoma. Joe chimed in with a few horror stories of his own, the sort of thing I imagine you could get your fill of in the bar at a convention of structural engineers, and by the time he got around to a fatal hotel atrium collapse in Kansas City, we were all feeling pretty good about our roof, about just how beefy it was going to be. While we talked, the three of us were lifting the chunky rafters into place, lining them up over the fin walls as best we could (our frame being, in Joe’s cheerful new formulation, “too hip to be square”) and then toe-nailing them to the ridge beam above and wall plate below with (galvanized) twelve-penny nails almost as fat as pencils. We had all eight rafters securely in place before Charlie had to drive back to Cambridge, and the completed roof frame looked for all the world like a gigantic rib cage, its great fir bones wrapping themselves around a sheltered heart of space. Add to this skeleton a skin of cedar shingles, and you had the very kind of place where a body wouldn’t mind riding out the storm of the century.
It seems difficult if not impossible to avoid figurative language when talking about roofs, they’re so evocative, so much more than the sum of their timbers and shingles and nails. To creatures who depend on them for their survival, it is perhaps inevitable that roofs are symbols of shelter as well as shelters themselves. Seen from afar or in a painting or movie, roofs also symbolize us—our presence in a landscape. Of course people have attached innumerable other meanings to roofs as well, and many of these meanings have changed over time. The traditional gable, for example, meant something very different after modernism than it did before.
Many of the important battles over style in architectural history can be seen as battles over roof types: the Gothic arch versus the classical pediment, the Greek Revival gable versus the Colonial saltbox, the international style flattop versus all of history’s pitched roofs. In this century, the pitched roof became the most hotly contested symbol in all of architecture. Nothing did more to define modernist architecture than its adoption of the flat roof—and nothing did more to define postmodernism than its resurrection of the gable. Since then, architecture’s avant-garde has sought to explode the very idea of a stable, dependable roof, violently “deconstructing” both the gable and the flattop. But the twentieth-century argument about roofs turns out to be about a lot more than that: it’s really an argument about the very nature of architectural meaning, which seems to have undergone a thorough transformation in the last few years. I’ve come to think this transformation holds a clue to the disappearance of the old idea that architecture was somehow grounded in nature, as well as to the subsequent rise of the kind of literary architecture I had found in the pages of Progressive Architecture. You can get a good view of these developments up on the roof.
“Starting from zero” was the rallying cry of modern architecture, and for the roof that meant banishing the gable, which the modern movement took as a key symbol of the architectural past—of everything musty and old and sentimental. Arguably the pitched roof (of which the gable is the most basic form) is architecture’s first and most important convention—wasn’t that the point of all those primitive-hut tales?—and under the modernist dispensation all conventions were to be tested against the standard of pure rationalism and function. The demonstrable fact that the pitched roof is supremely functional suggests that modernist rationalism sometimes took a backseat to modernist iconoclasm.
One of the aims of modern architecture was to rid the sprawling, many-gabled Victorian house of its many ghosts, all the historical encumbrances and psychological baggage that kept us from stepping out into the cleansing light and fresh air of the new century. In this sense modernist architecture was a therapeutic program. “If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house,” Le Corbusier wrote, “we shall arrive at the House Machine…healthy (and morally so, too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments that accompany our existence are beautiful.” In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthy were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-a-brac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.
Modernism’s program of psychological hygiene sought to rationalize everything about the house, to exorcise its ghosts and render it as unhaunted and transparent as a machine. Glass would supply the transparency, but it was the elimination of the pitched roof and its attic (along with the depths of the basement) that promised to vanquish the dead hand of the past, thereby helping to streamline the house’s occupants for the challenge of the new age. Of course there were some who protested the wholesale housecleaning: Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is an impassioned celebration of attics and basements and all those irrational but nevertheless powerfully symbolic places that modernism had banished from the house. People cannot dream in a “geometric cube,” Bachelard complained. But then, that was the point. The irrational symbolic power of things like roofs and attics is precisely what made them so objectionable.
It’s hard for us to imagine now just how powerful the taboo against gabled roofs in architecture was until very recently. I say “in architecture,” because of course ordinary home buyers and commercial developers never really surrendered their attachment to pitched roofs, though modernism did manage to diminish the pitches on the vernacular roof, working like some powerful g-force to flatten the steep Victorian gable into the shallow hipped roofs found atop millions of suburban ranches. The architectural historian Vincent Scully writes in The Shingle Style Today that when he set out to build a house for himself in New Haven in 1950, “the model of reality in which I was imprisoned”—he had just completed his dissertation—“made it unthinkable to employ anything other than a flat roof…”
A dozen years later Robert Venturi single-handedly cracked open this model of reality and freed all the architects who’d been trapped inside it. He built a house for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, that featured a gigantic, emphatic, in-your-face gable. The Vanna Venturi house, which was completed in 1964, proved to be the opening shot in architecture’s postmodern revolution—“the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century,” Scully has called it. Venturi has written that in 1964, even though there were a few single-slope shed roofs creeping back into architecture, the very act of designing a façade “where two slopes met to form a pediment contravened a taboo.” At the time, his big front gable was “both too familiar and too old-fashioned, too rare and too outrageous.”
What a revealing way to put it! For had Venturi’s gable been only “too familiar and too old-fashioned,” it would not have qualified as modern architecture. Instead of catching the eye of the Vincent Scullys of the world, the Vanna Venturi house would probably have been dismissed as revivalism—as something reactionary and nostalgic—or, worse, simply overlooked as a naïve vernacular building; after all, there had to have been a hundred thousand other pitched roofs erected in 1964. To count as modern architecture, Venturi’s building had to be “rare and outrageous,” too, and that it most certainly was.
For as anyone with eyes could see, there was something very peculiar about this particular gable. To begin with, it was on the long side of the house, which made it seem way too big—as if it had been exaggerated for effect, which of course it had. Then, right up at the top where the two slopes were supposed to meet, there was this odd space, a kind of gap tooth through which you could make out an oversized chimney rising several feet back from the façade. The gap made it appear as though there were nothing behind the façade; it flattened the gable out and made the whole house look more like a cardboard model of a house than a real, three-dimensional building. Venturi wanted to use a gable (what better ammunition for his assault on modernism?), but not one that could ever be mistaken for an “old-fashioned” gable. So he gave his gable a sharp ironic twist, exaggerating it and hollowing it out until it looked more like a comment on a gable than the thing itself. As Venturi himself puts it, “the pediment used in this fashion becomes a sign, a kind of representation…”
Venturi’s use of the word “sign” to describe his roof, rather than, say, “symbol,” is significant. Arguably his house in Chestnut Hill invented a whole new voice in which buildings might speak, and the shift from architectural symbols to signs is a key to that transformation. In using the word “sign,” Venturi is drawing on the vocabulary of semiology, which holds that all cultural activities can be profitably read as systems of signs that are structured like languages. Semiologists, and structuralists after them, borrowed their terms from the turn-of-the-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose theories have by now reached far beyond linguistics to influence literary studies, the social sciences, art criticism, and even, thanks in no small part to Robert Venturi, modern architecture.
The relationship of a linguistic sign to the thing it signifies, Saussure maintained, is accidental; signs get their meanings not from the things in the world they refer to, but from the system of signs of which they are a part. That is why a certain combination of letters—ng is an often-cited example—can mean something in one language while remaining completely opaque in another. It follows that the choice of any sign is completely arbitrary, purely a social convention. In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi’s influential study of architectural meaning, a book that is steeped in semiology, he offers his own example of the “arbitrariness of the signifier”: In the system of Chinese roads signs, green means “stop,” and red means “go.” Venturi encouraged architects to think of gables and columns and arches as signs too, elements as conventional as the letter combination ng or a green stop sign on a Chinese road.
In the years since Venturi built his mother’s house and published his two seminal manifestos, it has become the conventional wisdom, at least among architecture’s avant-garde, that architecture is a kind of language and that all its various elements—the gables and arches and columns, the axes and patterns of fenestration and materials—are best understood as conventions having less to do with the nature of the world or the human body or even the facts of construction than with the sign system, or language, of architecture itself. This was something radically new. Even modernists had paid pitched roofs and all the other symbols they detested the compliment of taking them seriously, treating them as if they actually had some weight in the world beyond architecture. Also quite new was the divorce Venturi was proposing between the imagery of a building and its underlying structure, a relationship upon which the modernists had sought to ground a whole aesthetic. By redefining a work of architecture as a “decorated shed”—an indifferent structure with signs on it—Venturi had driven a wedge between the meaning and the making of buildings.
The Vanna Venturi house was the first work of architecture built on the foundation of the new linguistic metaphor. Like the letter combination ng, the various elements of Venturi’s house—its gable and windows, the arch over its entranceway—are meant to be understood chiefly in terms of the language of architecture. In fact Venturi wants to make sure we look no further: he deliberately designed the house to resemble a model so that it would be, in his words, “not real so much as denotative.” The weightless, cardboard look, which has become a hallmark of postmodern architecture, is a way of announcing that the concrete Here of this building is less important than the abstract There of its signification; for Venturi and the countless postmodernists who followed his revolutionary example, the scrim of representation matters more than the reality behind it.
Thus the thin, abstract gable on the Vanna Venturi house has less to do with the world in which it rains and snows than with the increasingly hermetic world of architecture, which is in fact its true mise-en-scène. The space the building occupies is as much the space of images and information—of “discourse”—as it is the space of experience and place and the weather. Though its roof may well keep the rain off Mrs. Venturi’s head, her son is anxious that we regard it primarily as a communications device, a sign referring us to, and commenting upon, other roofs in architecture—the pediments of the Greek temple; the long, dramatic gable on McKim, Mead, and White’s shingle-style Low house in Bristol, Rhode Island; and, of course, every flattop in the modernist canon.
If this sounds like a lot of inside baseball, it is. In fact the Venturi house was completely opaque to me until I’d waded out into the ocean of commentary that has been written about it. And once I’d done my homework, I understood that reading is in fact an essential part of the “experience” of this house. (Just my luck!) Indeed, the Vanna Venturi house is the mother of all literary architecture, of every word-bound building I’d hurt my head on in Progressive Architecture. But was it also, my reading made me wonder, the mother of my building as well?
At the same time I’d been scaling the intellectually slippery slope of Robert Venturi’s famous roof in Chestnut Hill, back in Cornwall Joe and I were spending our Saturdays perched literally on top of my own, nailing down strips of lath in preparation for shingling. We’d made the lath out of two-by-fours cut lengthwise in half, then oiled them with wood preservative, since they were liable to come into contact with moist shingles; the oil raised the sweeping grain of the fir and made what had served as our foot- and hand-holds treacherously slick. My roof is exactly twice as steep as Venturi’s (the ratio of its rise to run is 1:1, compared to his 1:2), and yet it was much easier to get a hold on, since whatever sense of precariousness I felt up there that summer owed more to gravity and the oiled lath (the wood preservative had the consistency of chicken fat) than cerebration. Not that there wasn’t a fair amount of that, too. For in the speculative interludes provided by the pleasantly undemanding work of shingling, I found myself occupied with the question of just what, if anything, my anonymous gable roof owed to Venturi’s famous roof, since that was the one that had rehabilitated gables in the eyes of the profession. Did my not-so-primitive hut fit under the larger roof of postmodernism Venturi had helped to erect?
When Charlie stopped by one afternoon late in August, I was up on the roof working by myself, nailing down the last couple of straps in preparation for shingling. After showing off the progress Joe and I had made since his last site inspection, I asked him whether or not he considered my building to be postmodern. I understood this was not a polite question. No architect ever likes to be pigeonholed, or to acknowledge a debt to another architect, at least to one not yet dead. I also knew that the postmodern label covered a lot of architecture Charlie couldn’t stand.
“My knee-jerk reaction is, No, your building isn’t at all postmodern.” “Knee-jerk” suggested a more considered reaction might be on deck, so I persisted. But wasn’t there something postmodern about his use of classical proportions? And didn’t the pitch of the roof, along with the corner columns and the cornice, give the building a passing resemblance to a Greek temple—exactly the sort of reference a postmodernist might make?
“Well, in that sense, yes, I guess… Oh, I don’t know—” Charlie hates to find himself in even the most shallow theoretical waters. But after flailing around for a moment, he realized the only way back to shore was to start swimming. “Okay, look. To the extent that postmodernism made it okay to use historical elements again, I suppose you could say this is a postmodern building. And I guess I do think of it as a kind of temple. But it’s not like I went and arbitrarily stuck a classical temple top on an office building out on Route 128!” He was referring to a Robert A.M. Stern building near Boston.
“So then is it a question of attitude?”
“Of conviction, yes. Look, an architect can employ a historical reference in an ironic or mannerist way, which is what I think of postmodernists as doing, or you use it because you think there’s still something great about it, that it still has some value in a particular context. Those straps are a perfect example.”
As we were talking, I was applying a second coat of chicken fat to the lath with an old paintbrush. Charlie’s plans had called for the straps, which were spaced about five inches apart, to extend several inches beyond the first and last rafter, creating a reveal that had the effect of adding dentils to the façade of the building—another classical detail. Named for the teeth they resemble, dentils are the small square blocks that appear in series beneath the roofs of Greek temples, either directly above the cornice or along the slope of the pediment.
Charlie explained that the dentil is one of several classical ornaments that the Greeks derived from the timber framing on which they modeled their architecture; dentils were inspired by the exposed tips of the lath used to support the roofing material—which was precisely what the ones on my building were going to do.
“Now, a card-carrying postmodernist might use dentils too, but he’d do it in such a way that they were clearly mannerist or iconographic. They’d be purely and obviously decorative, for starters—pasted on, not structural. And then he’d either use lots and lots of really tiny dentils, or a handful of gigantic ones, to make absolutely clear the reference was playful or ironic. He’d probably want to paint them, too, for the added emphasis.
“But look at the straps on your roof. This is not a skin job. This is not irony. Those are real dentils! Oh, sure, they’re a classical reference, too. But the reason I used dentils on this roof is because they still happen to work—they’ll do a good job holding up our shingles, and explaining how our roof works. They’re still alive, is what I guess I’m trying to say.”
Charlie pulled a shingle from one of the bundles stacked on the floor and brought it to his nostrils. “Don’t you love the smell of fresh cedar? I could just about eat this stuff.” He passed the shingle to me as if it were the cork from a bottle of wine.
“Very often architects seem to be afraid to just come out and say they like something, they think they’ve got to take it back a little. So they’ll use some element they like—these dentils, say—but they’ll do it ironically as a way of protecting themselves. I suppose it’s partly a matter of audience: Is your audience your client, or is it really New York and L.A. and the magazines? Because if that’s who it is, then you’re going to want to somehow announce you’re a sophisticated, postmodern guy, that all this is just theater, instead of being willing to come out and say, ‘This is not theater. It’s here, it’s real, and I happen to like it.’
“So does that make me a postmodernist or not?”
Yes and no, I decided later. It seemed as though the postmodern movement had opened a door through which a lot of people like Charlie might slip, under the cover of their more ironically inclined colleagues. What separated the two groups was their demeanor as much as anything else. Charlie had seized the license offered by postmodernism, but he hadn’t bothered with the attitude that was supposed to go with it, the small print of pastiche on the back.
Charlie wasn’t the only one. Out beyond the increasingly rarefied world of academic architecture, there didn’t seem to be many other people paying attention to the small print, either. Postmodern architects might wield their historical reference in the correct ironic spirit, but how many people outside of architecture were really getting it? Because if somebody hadn’t read the accompanying texts, and didn’t know enough to spot the cardboard, he was apt to miss the signs for the irony exit and find himself driving shamelessly down the road of “nostalgia” (perhaps the dirtiest word in architecture today), reveling in the unself-conscious pleasures of old-fashioned pitched roofs and divided-light windows and stone façades. Right here lies an important reason for postmodernism’s success (another is the fact that faux tends to be cheap): The architects might be selling signs, but the corporate patrons and the individuals commissioning postmodern buildings were often buying the old-fashioned, beloved, and sorely missed symbols.*
But historicist architecture was only one current released by postmodernism, even if it was the most visible and popular one. Having freed architecture from its traditional obligations to space and structure and symbolism, postmodernism also opened the way to a series of increasingly radical experiments in formalism. These aloof, relentlessly abstract buildings may have looked quite different from Venturi’s, but their designers shared with him the conviction that architecture was a language; they just used different vocabularies to say different things. No longer driven by the exigencies of program or site or client or material or method of construction, the architect was now free as a sculptor, poet, or literary theorist, and he could enlist any set of metaphors or intellectual vocabulary he liked to drive his design. This might be architectural history, but it could just as easily be Boolean algebra, Chomskyan linguistics, inside jokes, conceptualism, cubism, pop culture, and, of course, deconstruction.
Peter Eisenman, whose own career describes an arc passing through a succession of these isms, is largely responsible for bringing this last and supposedly most subversive intellectual vocabulary to architecture. In the same way that Jacques Derrida sought to identify and then “deconstruct” a series of central metaphysical concepts in Western culture—humanism, phallocentrism, presence, truth—Eisenman and his colleagues set about deconstructing what they took to be architecture’s own set of fundamental assumptions. The big four were shelter, aesthetics, structure, and meaning. Also ripe for deconstruction were all those other things about buildings people take for granted: that form had some organic relationship to function, that inside was intrinsically different than outside, that right side up was the way you wanted a building to be, that the roof went on top. Derrida had attacked writers and philosophers for borrowing metaphors of solidity and presence from buildings; now the architects were going the great philosopher one better, attacking the solidity and presence of the buildings themselves.*
Beginning in the 1970s Eisenman designed a series of houses that “attempted to destabilize the idea of home”—apparently another dubious social construction. Perhaps the most famous of these houses to actually get built (most didn’t) was House VI, which happens to be in the town where I live. While I was roofing my own building, I read an article in the local paper about the travails of its owners and phoned them to ask if I could come by and see their famous house. The visit gave me my closest encounter with some of the astonishing feats of which architects are capable once they’ve put aside their usual concerns about client, site, materials, structure, place, and time. It took me deep into the very heart of architectural unreality.
Pulling into the driveway on a hot summer afternoon, my first impression of the house was that it resembled some sort of spiny gray-and-white spaceship hovering several feet above the lawn. The architect had recessed the foundation from the intersecting planes that comprise the house’s walls, and this made it appear as though the building never quite touches down on its site. There’s no façade to speak of, and no visible means of entry. Eisenman’s idea, I read later, was to overturn the usual relationship between inside and outside, in which the façade of a building inaugurates the process by which we make sense of it; here, sense-making (such as it is) was deliberately frustrated until you were inside.
Eventually I located the entrance, a gunmetal steel fire door hidden around a corner, and met the Franks, a friendly couple in their early sixties (Dick is a food photographer, Suzanne an architectural historian) who appear to have done more than their fair share for the glory of contemporary architecture. Suzanne has written an illuminating book about the house, Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response, that details both the satisfactions and the trials of living in a work of art. The book recounts the time Eisenman called to say that he was bringing Philip Johnson over to see the house. Apprehensive about the great man’s reaction, Eisenman asked the Franks if they wouldn’t mind removing the baby’s crib from the house so Johnson could experience the building in its pristine form; the Franks obligingly put their baby’s crib out on the lawn. There’s a picture of Eisenman in the book, visiting the construction site; the architect looks like the hippest professor you had in college: bushy, well fed, bespectacled, and smoking a pipe.
Asked at the time why he took what appeared to be a cavalier approach to his clients’ needs, Eisenman patiently explained that his goal was to “shake them out of those needs.” That may explain why the single bathroom is accessible only by walking through the Franks’ bedroom. Or why, in deference to the complex geometrical system that governs the design, the floor of the tiny master bedroom has a gaping slot cut through it in such a way as to rule out a double bed. (There’s one need the architect had presumably shaken his clients out of.) One column, its location dictated not by the structure but by the geometry, awkwardly divides the dining area in such a way as to frustrate conversation at the dinner table.
As for the roof, it too has been “destabilized,” and in more ways than one. Originally punctuated by flat “windows,” the roof is designed to look all but indistinguishable from a wall. This is apparently because the architect wanted to invert the “conventional” relationship of roof and wall, as well as up and down; there’s also an upside-down staircase suspended over the dinner table, and a column suspended from the roof that fails to reach all the way to the ground. In theory the house should look pretty much the same if you were to rotate it in space. But the flat, fenestrated roof leaked so badly that the frame of the house rotted out within just a few years of construction.
When the Franks decided that they would replace a section of their flat roof with a gently sloped one, Eisenman, an old friend, publicly attacked them for spoiling the lines of his design, and the Franks found themselves accused of “cultural vandalism” in the pages of Art in America. A few years later the Franks drained their savings to have the house almost entirely rebuilt. This time they were able to work out a few compromises with Eisenman, who signed off on conventional bubble skylights, a slight pitch in the roof, and even a double bed that bridges the slot in the floor.
After I’d signed the guest book, adding my name to an impressive roster of some of architecture’s leading lights, I thanked Suzanne and Dick for their hospitality. On the drive home it occurred to me that the best way to understand the Franks’ strange home was as a kind of antiprimitive hut for our time. For House VI offers the precise negative image of the old hut ideal, an alternative myth that denies point by point everything about architecture that the canonical hut had claimed about nature and structure and material and shelter.
The primitive hut had said that the forms and meaning of architecture were derived from nature; House VI was a virtuoso display of architecture as the pure product of culture—of whatever sign system the architect chose to deploy. The primitive hut said that architectural structure was an expression of its materials and how it was made; both the structure and materials of House VI were perfectly silent; there’s no way to tell that there’s a conventional balloon frame under the building’s “dematerialized” surface, a surface that at various times has been clad in stucco and acrylic. The purpose of the primitive hut was to shelter us, to minister to our needs; House VI seeks to destabilize the notion of shelter, to shake us out of our needs.
In fact these two contending dreams of architecture were equally unreal; this much now seemed clear. To claim that nature was the source of all architectural truth was just as absurd as the postmodernist’s claim that architecture rested on no foundation whatsoever, that it was culture all the way down. No doubt the truth lay somewhere in-between. The old hut designers and the new ones, I understood after visiting House VI, are equally deft cartoonists of what is surely a more mixed reality.
Eisenman and architects like him are hell-bent on liberating architecture from every conceivable earthly bond: from program, function, history, home, the body, and nature itself. It is, to be sure, a daring project, provocative as art, or philosophy. It’s a poignant one too, for as the revenge of nature, and client, on House VI suggests, it is probably doomed. Looking around House VI, trying to make sense of its geometrical inversions, of the elegant There its architect wants me to dwell on, I found my attention kept snagging on the banal, neglected Here of the place: the cracks in the paint job on the upside-down staircase; the way my head grazed a beam as I climbed the right-side-up one; the dust balls collecting in the corners of the slots in the walls; the smell of the Franks’ spaniels; the mildew already starting to stain the space-age acrylic that had been sprayed on the exterior when it was rebuilt. Nothing more than the usual wear and tear, but here it leapt out rudely, offering what seemed like a kind of rebuke. What it made me understand is that House VI was never so perfect, never so true to itself, as the day before the day the Franks moved in. Or perhaps you have to go back further still, to the day it was first drawn. Ever since, the house has been in a steady process of decline, as the ordinary frictions of reality and everyday life, the dogs and the people and the rain, have taken their incremental toll, sullying Eisenman’s dream of pure architectural Idea. Architecture might be done with nature, but the experience of House VI, now on its third roof, suggests that nature will never be done with architecture.
I know, I promised I wasn’t going to make too much here of leaky roofs. But I was thinking about leaks all the time that summer, since so much of our work on the roof was aimed at preventing them. Charlie had sent me a brochure issued by the Cedar Bureau, a trade organization to which he accords an almost papal authority. The bureau advises builders on the correct handling of cedar shingles (by far the best kind for wood roofs), and we followed their counsel to the letter. From the bureau we learned such things as the proper grade of cedar to use on a roof, the best kind of nails to secure them with, the optimal gap to leave between adjacent shingles (they need room to expand in the heat), how to overlap all the seams on one course with the shingles of the next, and precisely how much of every shingle should be exposed to the weather (no more than 5½? on a roof of our pitch).
There was a lot to it, which is why Joe and I found ourselves taking far greater pains with our roof than with, say, our walls. Though the whole building was to be skinned in shingles, we were using white cedar on the walls and red on the roof; red was considerably more expensive, but you wanted its superior stability and weather resistance on the roof. Everything I was learning about how to make a roof impressed on me that the roof was, well, different. You couldn’t possibly work on one and still seriously entertain the idea that roofs and walls might be handled in the same manner. From up here, that was strictly a drafting-table conceit. Am I starting to sound like a cranky carpenter ragging on ivory-tower architects? Maybe, but the work of roofing does little to encourage a belief in the arbitrariness of roofs, or their deep linguistic nature.
Joe would watch me carefully as I lapped my shingles, letting me know when a seam in one course edged too close to the seam in the course below. He taught me how to notch the handle of my hammer 5½? from the end; this way I merely had to flip the hammer over to set each shingle’s proper exposure to the weather, instead of having to reach for my tape. (Working up on the roof, you want as few tools to worry about dropping as possible.) He taught me the proper way to cut a shingle: how you scored the shingle with a utility knife, then broke it cleanly along the grain. And he taught me how to cultivate randomness in the widths of my shingles by reaching into the stack without looking. Shingling, Joe would travel methodically across one face of the roof as if it were an ear of corn, then move up a course and return, shingling his way in the opposite direction. At first I moved haltingly across the roof’s opposite slope, but after a few courses I absorbed the rhythm of the work—reach for a shingle, slap it down on the one below, adjust its exposure with my handle, flip the hammer, nail it down, reach for another—and began to match his swift and easy pace.
The shingles themselves, colored an earthy red shading to tobacco, surprised me with their inconsequentiality. At the business end they were less than half an inch thick, and they dwindled to paper at the other. It was nothing to break one of them in half. Yet layered and woven with enough care, these aromatic slips of cedar made a sturdy shelter, could withstand even a New England nor’easter. It wasn’t until I’d handled a few hundred of them that I fully appreciated the design of Charlie’s roof, the way he’d underscored with his fat rafters and fine lath the delicate weave of wood that a shingle roof is. Building it, you knew this was a roof designed by someone who’d probably once done some roof work himself, someone who had given a lot of thought to what a cedar shingle is.
The architect Louis Kahn used to talk about interrogating his materials in order to learn what they “wanted to be”—that is, what the distinctive nature of a material suggested should be done with it:
You say to brick, “What do you want, brick?” Brick says to you, “I like an arch.” If you say to brick, “Arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?” Brick says, “I like an arch.”
The stuff we make our buildings out of—our bricks and cedar shingles, our concrete and stucco and even plastic—is perhaps the first way that nature expresses itself in our architecture. Working attentively with their materials can draw the architect and builder into a kind of dialogue with the material world; you learn a lot about a shingle—and about red cedar—watching how it responds to your handling. Of course the architect doesn’t have to honor his materials in the way Kahn describes; he’s free in designing to interrogate a philosophical conceit rather than a brick or a shingle, or to strive for a “dematerialized” look in his surfaces. But he probably runs certain risks in doing so. Sooner or later a stain will expose the materiality of his stucco or plastic, if the rain doesn’t undermine it first. Try as it might, no building ever transcends the stuff it’s made of.
Materials are so essential to our physical experience of a place that to disregard them—to ignore the coldness of steel, the dumb strength of concrete, the sympathy of wood, whose temperature never startles—is to throw away a great deal of architecture’s expressive power. Is the nature of that power linguistic? Certainly my shingles signified specific things to my mind (“New England,” for example), but they also addressed my senses more directly, with their aroma, their delicateness, with the impression they gave my hands of wanting to be layered and woven for strength. It seemed to me you wouldn’t seriously argue that architecture was a language unless you’d forgotten the specific heft of a cool brick, or the smell of fresh cedar warmed in the afternoon sun. The reality and presence and Hereness of these things, the sense they give us of wanting to do one thing and not another, exert a worldly pressure on building that an architect would have to go out of his way to ignore. As for a builder, he wouldn’t even think to try.
While we shingled, Joe and I talked, mainly about “ice dams.” Ice dams are probably the most serious threat facing a roof in the northern latitudes. It seems that when snow on a roof is melted by the heat radiating upward from the interior of a building, meltwater streams down the slope until it reaches the much-colder eaves, where it’s apt to freeze again, building up in a heavy block along the lower edge of the roof. This is why Charlie had spec’d two-by-six planking under the first three feet of shingles, instead of the relatively light straps we were using higher up.
But weight is apparently not the only danger an ice dam presents. A thick one will block the flow of meltwater in the spring and actually force it to back up the slope of the roof and then under the shingles, where it is liable to infiltrate the building and drip onto one’s head. One reason roofs are steeper in snowier climates is to prevent ice dams, since a steep roof will shed precipitation more quickly than a shallow one; the steeper a roof’s pitch, the less likely it is meltwater will travel back up its slope. Perched near the peak of my own roof, holding on to the slicked straps for dear life, I had the testimony of my own body to these facts, as the muscles in my legs registered the slope’s distinct wish to shed my weight.
The easiest way for an architect to avoid problems with his roof is to pay more attention to vernacular practice. Vernacular roofs—most of which happen to be pitched, the precise pitch varying with the latitude and local snowfall—reflect the experience of thousands of builders over hundreds of years; they represent a successful adaptation to a given environment, a good fit between the human desire to keep dry and the predictable behavior of water and wood under specific circumstances. There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting something more adventurous, but, as in the case of an evolutionary mutation, there’s a greater risk that the novel design will fail. When Frank Lloyd Wright declared that “If the roof doesn’t leak the architect hasn’t been creative enough,” he had a point. There seems to be an inherent tension between architectural novelty and sound construction.*
The vernacular roof suggests another way that nature finds its way into architecture, sanctioning one solution and rendering others suspect. After long trial and error, builders discovered that the pitched roof worked best at keeping the rain out of buildings built in wood. So it means something to say that, under certain circumstances, a pitched roof is more “natural” than some other kind—that is, more in keeping with the way this world we’ve been given seems to work. And we can say this without having to say anything categorical about “nature.” All we’re saying is that, whatever nature really is, it seems to behave in one way in the case of a pitched roof, and another in the case of a flat one. We may not know nature directly, as the deconstructors never tire of reminding us, but we do have long experience of what works and what doesn’t work in nature. My own hard-won experience of right angles, for example, has convinced me that, whatever the deconstructivists might think, ours is indeed a ninety-degree world. Lloyd Kahn, once a leading advocate of dome-shaped houses, came to a similar conclusion after actually building and living in one:
What’s good about 90-degree walls: they don’t catch dust, rain doesn’t sit on them, easy to add to; gravity, not tension, holds them in place. It’s easy to build in counters, shelves, arrange furniture, bathtubs, beds. We are 90 degrees to the earth.
The subject of leaky roofs also suggested to me that there might be certain architectural conventions that “mean” in a less arbitrary way than signs do. Geographers tell us they can infer the climate of a region from the steepness of the roofs found there; the steeper the slope of the typical roof, the more snow the region receives. The pitch of a vernacular roof may be conventional, but it is not arbitrary; it represents something more than caprice or fashion or a “social construction.” Put another way, the roof derives at least one of its meanings—the one about climate—not from the agreement of a group of people in architecture or the field of geography, but from certain facts of nature. Its form is less like a combination of letters in a language than a body part or camouflage device that, far from being arbitrary, exhibits a specific fitness to its environment.
Even Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman would grant this much to nature: Architecture’s roofs should not leak. Oh yes, and one other thing: gravity—architecture has got to stand up too. Eisenman allows that a building must work as structure (it should stand up) and shelter (it should stay dry)—though he insists it needn’t look like it stands up and stays dry. But after that, anything goes. Venturi adds that, since anyone can make a shed stand up and stay dry, the really good minds should occupy themselves with the signs and ornamentation.
And this is how big-time architecture is practiced today, at least by stars like Eisenman and Venturi. Read the credits on important new buildings and you will invariably find two architectural firms listed: one you’ve heard of, and another you probably haven’t. For example, on the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, perhaps Peter Eisenman’s most famous actually constructed building, he shares credit with an obscure local firm by the name of Richard Trott & Partners. The famous architect’s firm will give a building its signature look—deconstructivist, postmodern, whatever—and then a second, unheralded firm is called in to flesh out the design in such a way as to make sure the building will stand up and stay dry and pass muster with the building inspector. In effect, the whole leaky roof problem has been subbed out.
As this division of architectural labor suggests, the work of construction and the work of design have drifted some distance apart, and you can’t help but wonder (especially when you’re groping for a reliable foothold on a slicked roof) whether this gulf might not help explain the increasingly abstract and literary quality of so much contemporary architecture, not to mention a great many leaky roofs. The history of architecture is the history of the widening of that gulf, from the time when master builders designed and built buildings themselves; to the Renaissance, when architects began designing buildings but left decisions about construction and ornament to craftsmen on site; to our own time, when celebrated architects concentrate on the skin of the building, the details of construction fall to local engineering and design firms, and the craftsman, the one with his hands on the thing itself, has been reduced to an unconsulted laborer. It stands to reason that the greater an architect’s distance from the actual work of making buildings, the more likely he would be to embrace what Venturi has called an “architecture of communication over space.”
By now, a tendency to emphasize signs at the expense of space, or physical experience, is probably built into the way contemporary architecture gets practiced and judged. The architect is bound to stress There in favor of Here when There is where the architect works. The arena in which a great deal of the work of architecture is performed today is on paper: in the articles and photographs used to disseminate and comment upon buildings and chart the rise and fall of architects’ careers. Building buildings is no longer even a prerequisite to a successful architectural career, as Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Robert Venturi, and a great many other current and former paper architects can testify. (Eisenman is probably right to suggest, as he once did, that the actual building of House VI was all but incidental to the project.) In the case of buildings that do get built, since it is very often not the client’s but the media’s opinion that really matters, architects will naturally tend to emphasize those elements in their designs that can be communicated effectively in the relevant media, and these are inevitably going to have more to do with two-dimensional signs than with three-dimensional space, more with images and information than with the tactile qualities of materials and the experience of space. This kind of work has acquired a name: “magazine architecture.” Of course, it never rains in magazines.
Rain and gravity: Are these really the only facts of nature architecture has to worry about? Is structure and shelter as far as the architect’s obligation to reality goes? For a long time it seemed to me that this might in fact be the case; that Venturi and Eisenman had driven nature into a very tight corner indeed, and, after taking account of those two irreducible basics they could safely ignore it. The rest was all culture and fashion and taste: Anything goes. I couldn’t see any way out of this tight corner—until, that is, I chanced to talk to Charlie about a somewhat unusual commission he was working on the summer I raised my roof.
It was, of all things, a design for a birdhouse, and what he told me about it made me wonder if the place of nature in architecture might not be more extensive and subtle than a postmodernist would think. Specifically, Charlie was designing a wood duck house for a man who had built a pond to which he was eager to attract wildlife. The wood duck is a threatened species that is apparently quite choosy about its nesting sites. Charlie started from the assumption that his client was in some sense a duck, even though he understood he had to design a structure that would please the eye of his human (and fee-paying) client as well. So he spent a couple of afternoons at the library of the comparative zoology department at Harvard, learning all he could about the needs and nesting habits of Aix sponsa.
To succeed, Charlie’s little building would not only have to stand up and shed water (the postmodern shed’s bottom line), but must exhibit a whole series of other characteristics necessary to win the attention and ensure the comfort of wood ducks—characteristics that don’t fit under the rubric of ornament; no “decorated shed” was likely to do the trick here. The entrance, for example, had to be four inches in diameter, an aperture large enough to admit the female but not the male; this is an arrangement a nesting wood duck evidently insists upon. The opening should be several inches deep as well, to prevent a raccoon from reaching in to snatch the eggs. Beyond that, the interior needed to be a well-ventilated vertical space dropping down below the entrance tunnel. Lastly, the house had to be sited either directly over a pond or no more than a few feet from the shore, so that the mother could conduct her ducklings to the safety of open water soon after their emergence from the nest.
The basic idea, as Charlie explained it to me, was to recreate the characteristics of a fairly large woodpecker hole in a dead, hollowed-out tree near a pond or in a swamp—the wood duck’s natural habitat. Charlie was free to design the building to look any way he wanted—vernacular, postmodern, deconstructivist, whatever—but in a few key respects it had better remind a wood duck of a woodpecker hole in a tree or no wood duck would ever come near it. What struck me as significant about this was that Charlie was attempting not to fool the wood duck, who would understand perfectly well that this gabled house on stilts (it wound up looking a lot like a Charlie Myer house) was neither a tree nor a woodpecker hole, but to somehow evoke those things. In a sense, Charlie’s wood duck house was an acknowledged piece of artifice designed to symbolize the wood duck’s natural habitat; as one thing that referred to another, you might say it was a kind of duck metaphor.
I know; I’m talking about ducks. Yet Charlie’s wood duck house made me appreciate that, even to a duck, the landscape brims with meaning. Certain formations in it imply certain qualities: To a duck, a deep hole set high over water connotes safety and convenience. This suggests a couple of things that seemed at least potentially relevant to human architecture. Meaning is not always a function of language or even communication; to wood ducks at least (who by the way can also communicate among themselves in the usual manner, by quacking), the things of this world are not mute but sometimes speak to a creature directly, carrying meanings of shelter, of danger, of nourishment, of sexual opportunity—all meanings that don’t depend on a sign system or culture of any kind. The meaning of a four-inch hole set high over water is the product not of an agreement among wood ducks—of cultural consensus—but of the species’s evolution. It came into the world whenever it was that wood ducks first figured out that, given the shape and size of a wood duck body and certain facts about the species’s reproduction, this particular formation denoted a superior shelter; in the case of this species, “symbolism”—perhaps even in some sense “taste”—is a by-product of survival: of what works.
And yet there’s no denying the existence of countless symbols and conventions that are entirely arbitrary and cultural. Even Charlie’s wood duck house featured symbols that almost certainly meant nothing to a wood duck, that were strictly part of a system of signs, a language you had to learn. There were a series of details, for example, that signified a human home: the gable roof, a trio of tiny windows along each side, and some ornament around the entrance that heightened the sense of ceremony there. These things were obviously directed not at ducks but at people.
What this suggests is that very different orders of symbolism can coexist in a building. Some symbols are patently just as arbitrary as the postmodernists say. How else to account for the fact that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, great white fluted columns on the front of an American house symbolized republican virtue in one part of the country and a slave-holding aristocracy in another? Had Charlie put fluted white columns on the façade of his duck house, they would have been nothing more than a sign, as meaningless as ng to a duck and, for that matter, to anybody else not versed in that particular human cultural system. So how could you have it both ways: fluted columns that were wholly arbitrary and four-inch holes (or, closer to home, pitched roofs) that were clearly fitted to the facts of nature? The birdhouse suggested a simple hypothesis: Maybe architecture speaks in more than one voice, the first grounded in meanings at least partly given by nature and another trafficking in meanings determined mainly by culture.
Soon after formulating this hypothesis, I found some human backing for it right in my own human building. Joe and I had finished shingling our roof, capping it at the peak with two well-caulked, -glued, and -screwed-together cedar ridge boards, and we’d turn our attention to closing in the rest of the building. We nailed four-by-eight sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood to the frame, whole ones first, and then smaller sections cut around the rough openings where the windows and the door would go. A layer of house wrap and then shingles would later be stapled and nailed, respectively, onto the plywood sheathing to complete the building’s walls.
No other single step in the whole construction process had so swift and dramatic an impact on the building as the nailing up of that plywood cladding. After just a couple of hours of work, the building, which before had stood open to the weather on all sides, had acquired a skin and with that an interior; what had been merely a wooden diagram of a structure was suddenly a house. Until now, Joe and I would always “enter” the structure willy-nilly, stepping in between any two studs wherever we pleased. But as soon as we had nailed up the last sheet of plywood, the only way in was through the door.
I tried it first, approaching and entering the building the way we were meant to, and the experience took me aback. Now that the building was clad, its bulk blocked the view down to the pond as you came around the big rock and turned into the site. What I saw before me was the body of the building to my left and the mass of the boulder on my right, two hulking forms separated only by a triangular wedge of space that closed down to a point where house and rock almost touched. Stepping through the narrow doorway, beneath the overhanging eave (inches above my head), then under the low cornice plank and between the two fin walls, the sense of constricted space suggested by the narrow wedge of ground outside seemed momentarily to intensify. But as soon as I had arrived inside and stood there on the upper landing, I could feel the space begin to relax around me.
Now I turned to my right and stepped down into the main room, drawn by the flood of light and landscape coming in through the big rough opening on the west wall where my desk would go. Two things seemed to happen simultaneously as I stepped down into the main space. This bright sense of broad prospect all but exploded right in front of me—the shimmery pond framed now not only by the oak and ash outside, but by the thick, vertical corner posts inside as well—and the weight of the ceiling, this canopy of shingles layered like so many leaves against its frame of lath and rafters, was lifted right off my shoulders as if I’d been suddenly relieved of a heavy winter coat. I noticed how, on turning into the light-filled opening beneath the lifting-off ceiling, you could not help but let out a chestful of air, as your body perceived and then entered into this most welcome release of space going on all around it.
And yet not all around it, for this was no glass house, after all. On either side of me an arm’s length away stood these two tall, thick, companionable walls that lent the space an unmistakable sense of refuge; I felt as though I captained this broad prospect from the safety of a sturdy enclosure. The tall walls so near at hand did something else too. They gave the building a pronounced trajectory, funneling the space coming down from the hillside behind it straight through this stepping-down wooden chute (through me, it almost seemed, standing directly in its path) and then out again, firing it between the trees and down into the pond below. There was something buoying about this, in the way the prospect said “Ahead!” and seemed to join the two senses of that word—prospect as seeing and prospect as opportunity. The building’s interior seemed to underscore, or re-present, certain qualities of the landscape outside it: the powerful flow of chi running through it that I’d sensed back when I sited it, the delicateness of the overhanging canopy (reproduced in the leafy shingles and boughlike rafters), the counterpoised senses of prospect and refuge. Coming in from outside, these qualities of the site seemed more available, not less.
So here it was, this place of my own that I’d been working on for so long, and now I could feel it working on me. And “feel” was the right word for it too, for my experience of the room was a matter of so much more than just the eye; sure, the view was a big part of it (and the easiest to describe), but the experience of the space was at least as much a matter of the shoulders, of whatever that whiskery sense is that allows us to perceive the walls around us even in the dark. Even with my eyes shut tight I know I could have sensed that constriction of space followed by its sudden release, my brainstem performing some ancient animal calculus on the sense data streaming in, measuring the slight but perceptible changes in the properties of the air, subtle swings in its temperature and acoustics, even in the shifting scents of the different woods all around me. Our vocabulary for describing the work of the senses may be impoverished (one reason, perhaps, they don’t get much play in the architectural treatises), but that doesn’t mean the senses aren’t always at it, giving shape to our sense of place, making the experience of space just that: a fully fledged experience, something greater than the sum of what you can read about or glean from the photographs in a magazine.
Joe was outside, gathering up his tools and getting ready to go, when I called him in to check out the new room. Plainly it worked on him too, because he gave a tremendous smile of satisfaction as he stepped down into the room and drank in the view. “Cool” was as much of an observation as he managed at first, and then: “It feels like I’m standing in a wheelhouse. On the bridge of the Mothership Organic! Mike, I think we built a goddamn boat.” And there was definitely something to that. The ceiling did recall the ribbed hull of a sailboat, and the walls and windows left no doubt as to which way the prow lay, but what really made you feel that this might be the bridge of a ship was the sense of command you felt standing at the window, riding high over the landscape spread out before you, a fine, beneficent breeze of space (of chi?) at your back.
Perhaps what makes the experience of space so difficult to describe is that it involves not only a complex tangle of sense information (hard enough to sort out by itself) but also the countless other threads supplied by memory and association. As soon as you’ve begun to register the sensory data, the here-and-now-ness of the place, there arrives from somewhere else all the other rooms and landscapes it summons up—and in this particular case a couple of boats (and perhaps a tree house) as well. Even so, describing the experience of this room now, while it is still not much more than a thin shell of space, is probably as easy as it’s ever going to get, for as Joe and I add to it the layers of finish and furnishings and trim, each carrying its own valence of memory and allusion, the complexity of the experience will only thicken. Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be.
And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does in fact speak to us, and that we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left-brained talk about signs and conventions would have us think. I would venture, in fact, that we respond to it rather more like a wood duck than a deconstructionist. For whatever else you can say about it, the experience of coming into my building for the first time was not foremost a literary or semiological experience, a matter of communication. This is not to say that the experience wasn’t rich with meanings and layered with symbols; it was, but the meanings and symbols were of a different order than the ones the architectural theorists talk about: no key was required to unlock their meaning.
Well, actually there is one key needed to unlock the experience of this room, though it is not a textual key and it is a key all of us possess. I mean, of course, the human body, without which the experience of the room as I have described it would be meaningless. For only a body like our own (upright, and of more or less the same scale) could have fully registered the pleasing sequence of constriction and release I felt upon walking into the building or the expectant forward trajectory I’d sensed standing at the window, or been moved by the sense of prospect and refuge created by the juxtaposition of those thick walls and big windows—the window exactly wide enough to fill your field of vision completely, the walls almost close enough to give a reassuring tap.
So you don’t have to take my word for it, or think my building unique in this regard, let me offer another, more well-known example: Grand Central Station, in Manhattan. As an architectural space, Grand Central is of course loaded with signs, literal as well as semiotic, having to do with the significance of arrival and departure, the rich symbolism of a railroad station in the heart of a great city, the whole complex of social meanings woven into that great cosmopolitan thrum. But anyone who has ever strode through this space recognizes that it works on us at a very different level as well. This is how J. B. Jackson describes it in an essay called “The Imitation of Landscape”:
…to the average man the immediate experience of Grand Central is neither architectural nor social; it is sensory. He passes through a marvelous sequence; emerging in a dense, slow-moving crowd from the dark, cool, low-ceilinged platform, he suddenly enters the immense concourse with its variety of heights and levels, its spaciousness, its acoustical properties, its diffused light, and the smooth texture of its floors and walls. Almost every sense is stimulated and flattered; even posture and gait are momentarily improved.
What Jackson is describing here sounds very much like the experience of constriction and release one feels passing through a dense forest and then stepping out into a broad clearing or meadow, the close, shadowy canopy of trees suddenly yielding to the soar of sky. Jackson writes that Grand Central, like many great architectural spaces, is among other things “an imitation of landscape”—of the various familiar forms of nature that precede architecture and have always supplied it with an especially rich trove of symbols. Owing to its scale, Grand Central is a particularly dramatic example of such an imitation, but the sequence of constriction and release we feel stepping out of a forest into a clearing is probably one of the most common spatial gestures, or tropes, in all architecture; even my little building contains it. It seems to me that spatial tropes of this kind—prospect and refuge is another—speak to us more deeply, more physically, than mere signs do, since our sense of their meaning depends on nothing more than the fact of our bodies and those forms of landscape with which everyone has had firsthand experience.
But if these examples seem too speculative, consider an even more elemental symbolism of space: vertical and horizontal, up and down, forward and back. Contrary to the teachings of Euclidean geometry, we don’t really exist on an indifferent Cartesian grid, one where all spaces are alike and interchangeable, their coordinates given in the neutral terms of x, y, and z. Our bodies invest space with a very different set of coordinates, and these are no less real for being subjective. As Aristotle noted, up carries a very different connotation than down, front than back, inside than outside, vertical than horizontal. Vertical, for example, is more assertive than horizontal, associated as it is with standing up and the dominance such a posture affords, and though many of the meanings we attach to the vertical have grown more complicated than that (pride, hierarchy, aspiration, hubris, and so on), all are at bottom related to certain natural facts—specifically, to the upright stance of our species. Though something like verticality has been embroidered extensively by culture and history, its moral valence revised again and again (think of the fresh prestige Frank Lloyd Wright invested in the horizontal), its very meaningfulness—the basic terms on which an architect such as Wright could work his changes—is something given to us, not made. And it came into the world at the moment when our species first stood erect. Our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to.
Our bodies are of course what get left out of a theory that treats architecture as a language, a system of signs. Such a theory can’t explain the physical experience of two places as different as Grand Central Station and my little shack, because the quality of those experiences involves a tangle of mental and physical, cultural and biological elements that the theory can’t account for, blinded as it is by old Western habits of regarding the mind and body as separate realms. Taking the side of the mind in the ancient dualism of mind and body, this theory can only explain that part of architecture that can be translated into words and pictures, published in magazines and debated at conferences. An architecture that ignores the body is certainly possible: the proof is all around us. But I doubt it will ever win our hearts.
It was to the body—to my body—that I owed the happy discovery that some of the reality I’d taken up a hammer to find was indeed still out there, and still available to me. I owed it to the body at rest, which had sensed in its shoulders the squeeze and release of the space in that room, but also to the body at work, sinking a chisel into the flesh of a Douglas fir, negotiating gravity in the raising of a roof beam. Not that I can ever hope to sort out all the different threads of sense and thought, body and mind, that have gone into the making of this experience (and this building), but then, that’s precisely the point. It was only after my hands had woven a shelter from these slender leaves of cedar that my mind could grasp the poignancy of a shingle roof. Only after I’d raised onto its base a Douglas fir post fully as heavy as I am did I really understand the authority of a column.
To manhandle such a post into place, to join it to a beam that holds up a roof, is just the kind of work to remind you that, no matter how much cultural baggage can be piled onto something like a column (for as we’ve seen, it can signify republican virtue, Southern aristocracy, postmodern wit, and even deconstructivist violence), it is at bottom different from a word in a language. Though perhaps a bit muffled by current architectural discourse, the architectural column still speaks to us of things as elemental as standing up, of withstanding gravity, and of the trees that supported the roofs of our first homes on earth. It’s not uninteresting when Peter Eisenman takes such a column and suspends it from the roof of a house so that it doesn’t quite reach down to the ground, but he is wrong to think my annoyance at the sight of it is purely ideological, a matter of seeing a cherished cultural convention upset. Our regard for gravity is not just a question of taste.
It seems to me that as a metaphor for the process by which architecture comes by its conventions, evolution is much more useful than language. Certain architectural configurations (or patterns, to use Christopher Alexander’s term) survive simply because they have proven over time to be a good way to reconcile human needs, the laws of nature, the facts of the human body, and the materials at hand. Some of these patterns—load-bearing columns, right angles, pitched roofs—appear almost everywhere we are, but there are others that vary from place to place and from time to time. Grand Central’s spatial trope of constriction and release resonates most powerfully in a culture raised on a deeply forested continent, in a place where the moment of coming into a clearing has had a special urgency and savor. The important point is not that these forms are necessarily universal or natural, but simply that they are not arbitrary; they are the by-products of the things and laws and processes of this world.
This is not a new idea, only a half-forgotten one, a fairly recent casualty of the modern artist’s cult of novelty. In architecture’s first treatise, Vitruvius describes a remarkably similar evolutionary process, and he was writing almost two thousand years before Darwin. Vitruvius recounts the invention of the first building not as revelation but as a gradual process of trial and error involving many, many builders, in which good ideas survived through imitation while bad ones fell by the wayside.
And since [the first builders] were of an imitative and teachable nature, they would daily point out to each other the results of their building, boasting of the novelties in it; and thus, with their natural gifts sharpened by emulation, their standards improved daily. At first they set up forked stakes connected by twigs and covered these walls with mud…Finding that such roofs could not stand the rain during the storms of winter, they built them with peaks daubed with mud, the roofs sloping and projecting so as to carry off the rain water.
In Vitruvius’ account good ideas are the ones most closely tuned to the nature of reality, something we only discover after the fact, by observing, and remembering, what works.
One of the advantages of using a metaphor of evolution like Vitruvius’—or, for that matter, Christopher Alexander’s—to describe architecture is that it can take account of the tangled web of culture and nature we encounter in something like a building or in an architectural convention such as a column. It allows us to walk away from the cartoon opposition of nature and culture that has bewitched all builders of primitive huts, Peter Eisenman included. The human needs and the natural materials that go into the process of generating an architectural form are different from time to time and place to place; culture can enter into the process without rendering the whole thing arbitrary. It’s worth remembering in this context that it was evolution that generated human culture—and language—in the first place, and that culture ever since has been working to modify evolution; notice the emphasis Vitruvius puts on talk—“boasting”—in the evolution of architecture.
A convention or pattern such as “windows on two sides of a room,” which Alexander claims we value because it allows us to more readily read expressions off people’s faces, might not work nearly so well in Japan, where shadowiness and reserve are prized more than psychological legibility. What this suggests is that the pattern is cultural without being in any way arbitrary, and that the process that generated it has a certain abiding logic. That logic, which is the same trial-and-error logic by which evolution proceeds, is the path out from the real things of this world to the forms of our architecture. It happens to be a path unavailable to our words; a writer or philosopher would be crazy not to envy it.
The mystery is, why would modern architecture ever want to turn away from this path, to trade such a distinction for a place in the common tub of images and information where I found it?
That tub, this culture of ours so steeped in words and signs and images, poses a mortal challenge to architecture. For buildings aren’t very well adapted to life in such an environment, one that puts a premium on mobility and ease of translation. Despite the best efforts of postmodern architects, buildings, unlike signs, don’t travel well; they can’t be digitized, and the good ones are dense with the kind of particularities and sense impressions that can’t easily be summarized, much less sent over a wire or bounced off a satellite. About a memorable building we will often say “you had to be there,” which is just another way of saying that the experience of the place, its presence, simply couldn’t be translated into words and signs and information; the Here of it can’t be communicated There.
You would think architects would cherish this about their work, if only because it makes architecture unique, a ballast amid the general weightlessness of an image culture. At least that’s what I thought going in. As makers of real things that endure (things that get pointed to), didn’t architects have it over the makers of words and images, those things that merely point, and that vanish as soon as the spotlight of our regard moves on? The work of building engaged them in a dialogue with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two cents to the conversation of culture.
But apparently the prestige of that conversation is so great today that architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society. So with the crucial help of Robert Venturi, who announced to his colleagues in Learning from Las Vegas that “the relevant revolution today is the current electronic one,” architecture set about repackaging itself as a communications medium, playing down undigitizable space and experience—architecture’s old brick-and-mortary Hereness—and playing up the literary or informational angle for all it was worth, until it seemed as though buildings were aspiring to the condition of television.
This has been a bad bargain, and not just for someone like me, who’d hoped by building to find a Here with which to counter the thrall of There in my life, but for architecture too. By allowing itself to become a kind of literary art, architecture might win itself a few more commissions from the Disney Company, but only at the price of giving up precisely what makes it different and valuable. Not that this troubles Robert Venturi. He has said he can’t see much point in building grand public spaces anymore, now that television makes it possible to watch other people without leaving home.
As Venturi’s comment suggests, the relationship between the information society and architecture may resemble a zero sum game. The culture of information is ultimately hostile to architecture, as it is to anything that can’t be readily translated into its terms—to the whole of the undigitizable world, everything that the promoters of cyberspace like to refer to as RL (for “real life”). And yet notice how even these people are drawn to architectural and spatial metaphors, as if to acknowledge that, even now, architecture holds an enviable, inextinguishable claim on our sense of reality. Such terms as “cyberspace,” “the electronic town hall,” “cybershacks,” “home pages,” and “the information highway” belong to the great tradition of raiding architecture for its real-world palpableness—its presence—whenever someone’s got something more abstract or ephemeral to sell. Once it was the philosophers, now it is the so-called digerati. The game, however, seems very much the same.
But architecture would do well to distrust this sort of flattery, because the cyberculture’s interest in place is cynical and ultimately very slight. For what finally is the ultimate architectural expression of the information culture we’re being told is upon us? Try to picture this not-so-primitive hut: a roof, beneath which sits a man in a very comfortable, ergonomically correct chair, with a virtual reality helmet strapped around his head, an intravenous feeding hookup tethered to one arm, and some sort of toilet apparatus below. Think of him as Vitruvian man—the outstretched figure in the circle in the square drawn by Da Vinci—updated for the twenty-first century. All that the information society really needs from architecture, apart from the comforting effect of its metaphors, is a chair and a dry cybershack to house this body. Assuming, that is, the digerati don’t succeed in their dream of completely downloading human consciousness into a computer, in which case the work left for architects, and the space left for these irredeemable bodies of ours, will be skimpier still.
I’ve built my own primitive hut according to a more old-fashioned blueprint; no doubt a deconstructivist would dismiss it as nostalgic, or perhaps, considering its imperial prospects, dangerously anthropocentric. But don’t get the wrong idea: this is not Thoreau’s crude shack in the woods that Joe and I have been building. The blueprint calls not only for a telephone but a fax machine and a modem and a cubby for my computer; regarded from one angle, mine is a kind of cybershack too, for this building and its occupant are going to be on-line, at least some of the time. (I am not going in for the IV hookup, the VR helmet, or the toilet, however.)
From what I can tell so far, Charlie has designed me a building that will provide a good counterweight to whatever information and signs will be streaming into it (and my head) over that telephone wire—a credible enough Here with which to meet the There on the line. He’s given me plenty of reasons to gaze up from the flickering screen, whether to check in on the view, scan the bookshelves, or even contemplate the complicated underside of my roof, which already exerts quite a presence in the room. It also manages to keep out the rain, by the way: I checked this out at the first opportunity, which came with a torrential thunderstorm a couple of days after Joe and I had capped it. No roof is really done until it has been tested by a storm; when this one came, I sprinted out to the building as the summer rain slammed down, and nervously poked a flashlight beam up into the rafters, searching the cedar shingles for telltale blotches or stains. There wasn’t a one; my roof was tight as a drum.
I sat for a while on the step waiting for the rain to subside, watching it strafe the surface of the pond and fall from the eaves in sheets. I think I enjoyed this rain as much as any I’ve been in, listening to it tattoo the shingles overhead, producing an agreeable clatter. Drop by drop it was testifying to the soundness of my roof, reason enough to like it, but there was also the way the din seemed to underscore the ceiling’s beauty, the ear drawing the eye up into the rafters, into that complicated weave of wood and work and meaning that Charlie had dreamed up and Joe and I had actually made.
I especially liked the way the lucid geometry of rafters and lath set off the rough chiaroscuro of shingles, the one so very human in its order and the other so reminiscent of tree bark and fish scales, forest canopies and fields, of nature working in her best e pluribus unum mode, fashioning something of beauty and consequence from simple slips of wood, leaves, blades of grass, and shadows. The juxtaposition of geometry and variousness set up a rhythm that was pleasing to the eye. It also brought out the character of the different woods, the long, legible grain of the fir throwing into relief the furriness of cedar, and this along with the visual rhythm gave my roof an almost emphatic Hereness.
Present it most certainly seemed to be. And yet at the same time the ceiling seemed to re-present too, offering up its allusions to boat hulls and leaf canopies, tree houses and classical dentils, a web of allusion fully as complex and layered as the weave of its wood and workmanship. So which was it, Here or There? Not either/or, I decided, but both: Here and There, shelter and symbol, nature and culture at once. And then it occurred to me, as I gazed out at the view down toward my arbor, just then draped in the velvety purple vestments of a clematis jackmanii, that a building was probably less like a text than a garden. For it is the garden that manages, in a way that few things in this life do, to celebrate the here and now (with its full complement of sensory satisfactions) while at the same time summoning the there and then by means of its symbolism. The garden’s mode is not metaphor exactly—one thing for another—but something else: one thing and another. Unlike a painting of a landscape, say, or a poem about nature, behind which stands nothing but pigment or marks on a page, the garden offers us an experience whose power does not depend on codes or conventions or even the suspension of disbelief, though all those things are at work here too, making the experience that much richer.
So, I guess you could say I liked my roof well enough. Already it had proven itself capable not only of keeping the rain off my head, which you’ll have to take my word for, but also of housing the farflung speculations of its builder, whose soundness you can judge for yourself. Thoreau regretted he hadn’t put a somewhat bigger and higher roof over his head at Walden, since “you want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port…Our sentences [want] room to unfold.” My roof, my place, promised at least that much: to offer a decent habitation for my thoughts. But something more too, something specific to my life and perhaps my times as well. Out there in this new room of mine, dryly enjoying the summer rain with its fine tang of ozone, it seemed just the place to sit and compose a word or two on behalf of the sights and sounds and senses of this, our still undigitized world.