By the time Joe and I headed into the second winter of construction, our work together, even though it amounted to something less than one day a week, had acquired its own particular rhythms and textures and talk. Joe reveled in playing the role of mentor to my eager if still-somewhat maladroit apprentice, except for the occasional period of sulking, when he would temporarily revert to sullen clock-puncher. These episodes were invariably occasioned by a suggestion from me that we should perhaps consult the blueprints before undertaking framing a window opening or hanging a door. “You mean the funny papers,” Joe’d grumble. “Well, you’re the boss,” he’d shrug, egging me to take control, or sides; I never was quite sure which. But in time such episodes became more rare, for as my own confidence as a carpenter grew, I was less inclined to regard Charlie’s drawings as revealed truth, much to Joe’s satisfaction.
Working outside in the brief, chill days of December had a way of hurrying this process along. Architectural plans look different in the cold, especially when you’re rocking stiffly from boot to boot on top of fossilized mud, dispatching neural messages to toes and fingertips that go unheeded, and struggling to interpret lines on a drawing that only seem more ambiguous the harder you stare at them. Joe, can you see any framing to hold up that window? Nope, not a stick. Looks like he wants us to levitate this one. Under such circumstances the solidarity of carpenters is bound to intensify. After a while you can’t look at the blueprints—which by now have had their pristine geometries smudged by a parade of muddy thumbs—without thinking about the comfortable office in which they were drawn, the central heating and scrubbed fingernails and steaming pots of coffee. Such images had a way of magnifying any lapses in the architect’s renderings into affronts, any peculiarities of design into definitive proof of the woolly-headedness of the professional classes that do their work indoors. A class to which, it was true, I’d be returning myself first thing Monday, but for the time being my allegiance was to the double-gloved, triple-socked, shivering and quick-to-get pissed-off outdoor crew.
It was an allegiance I found myself compelled to declare late one December afternoon, to Joe’s unbounded delight. He had casually called my attention to a notation on the drawings that specified pine, of all things, for the piece of wood that framed the recessed rock window on the building’s north exterior wall. It never occurred to me this might be some sort of a test, but I passed it just the same. “Fuck that,” I said, surprising myself almost as much as Joe. Pine was a dumb idea on several counts: the shady north side promised to be perpetually damp (pine has no rot resistance to speak of) and every single other piece of exposed exterior lumber—from the roofing shingles to the trim—was cedar, of which we happened to have several beautiful lengths left. “We’re going to use one-inch clear cedar there, I don’t care what the drawings say,” I announced, and Joe erupted. “Yes! You’ve finally got it!” he shouted, launching into a gleeful little end-zone dance in the snow. “Mike, I have been waiting an entire year to hear you speak those fine words. Charlie’s down…he’s out!”
But sometimes Joe could take the Professor Higgins act a little too far. Probably because I’d proven such a willing pupil in matters of carpentry, Joe eventually began to think there might be other areas in which I stood to benefit from his instruction, and I soon found myself on the receiving end of lengthy lectures about child rearing, television, economics, and politics. I wouldn’t have minded this too much, conversation being one of carpentry’s best perks, except that Joe had a habit of stopping whatever job he was doing in advance of making a point and then forestalling its resumption until I had more or less conceded the wisdom of his argument. When we got to gun control—and sooner or later we always got to gun control—work all but ground to a halt.
I knew politics were on tap whenever Joe’d pop his hammer into its holster, rear back on his heels, and then lean forward punching the air with his index finger. Power tools silenced, the woods would ring with his rhetorical question: “Mike, do you want to know what’s really wrong with this country?” Whether the abomination of the day was crime or immigration or free trade or the varieties of idiocy regnant in Washington and Hartford, the monologue would somehow or other and often quite ingeniously wend its way back to the mother subject of gun control. The precise route we would travel from here to there I never could quite reconstruct—the transitions could be dazzling—but get there we would, and before it was all over I’d be treated to a soaring peroration from some Second Amendment deity whom he’d then challenge me to identify.
“‘Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops…’”
“Jefferson?”
“Guess again.”
“Tom Paine?”
“Wrong. Noah Webster, 1787. I thought you said you went to college.”
The jurisprudence of the Second Amendment was Joe’s specialty; no other amendment (and least of all numbers four, five, and eight) elicited the same fervent devotion. (Indeed, he believed that the solution to the crime problem involved crueler and more unusual punishment.) Joe was not himself a serious hunter, but he collected guns and knew an astounding amount about their history and technology, their lore and care and proper handling. Any time we heard the report of a hunter’s rifle, he would stop to announce the caliber of the gun in question and then proceed to enumerate its salient virtues and limitations. Joe was convinced that if I would only learn more about guns, I would not be so quick to endorse ignorant measures like the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban—which anyone with any sense at all and about $50 worth of mail-order parts could easily circumvent, and which—was I aware of this?—specifically exempted assault weapons manufactured by the Israelis. Joe left me with back issues of Shotgun News and all manner of NRA propaganda; once he presented me with a bullet of some advanced design that allowed it to travel just under the speed of sound so as not to make a sonic boom.
Like many people who regard gun control as the preeminent threat to our liberties, Joe’s politics occasionally shaded off into areas you really didn’t care to visit, the kind of places where the fantasies of Oliver Stone and the militia movement begin to fuzz together. I’m not entirely sure, though, whether it was the arrayed forces of conspiracy or stupidity that Joe deemed the greater threat; nor was I sure which offered safer conversational ground. Joe and I could just about agree on the folly of free trade or the perfidy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, but when he’d start in on his theories of evolution—how people are growing progressively more stupid because technology and the welfare state are interfering with the proper functioning of natural selection—I worked hard to steer him back to the relative safety of the Bill of Rights or, best and most benign of all, the perversity of architects.
On this last theme, Joe and I had lately found a broad stretch of common ground. We had coined a term that we hauled out regularly to damn anything in Charlie’s plans that in our estimation defied practicality or common sense: “Eight-one.” It was sort of like the cop’s “ten-four,” or the short-order cook’s “eighty-six.” The pine window trim was an eight-one, so was its thin-air framing; in fact, the windows taken as a whole were one great big eight-one, since they were designed, as windows in the real world very seldom are, to open inward rather than out. This and a few other details about their design meant the windows could not be ordered out of a catalog but would have to be custom-made at considerable expense. “Custom” would be a very generous translation of our “eight-one.”
Why “eight-one”? The term derived from the 8?1? height Charlie had specified for the walls in the main part of the building, a dimension calculated to offend every fiber in the body of any self-respecting carpenter. Lumber comes in standard even-numbered lengths; two-by-fours are either eight, ten, or twelve feet long, and plywood sheets come four by eight. Indeed, eight feet is virtually the common denominator of American construction, going all the way back to the standard dimension of a bay in Colonial houses and barns; ever since, the number eight has been one of the more prestigious integers in carpentry. In order to make all the 8?1? two-by-fours and lengths of plywood we would need to complete our walls and fin walls, a tremendous amount of wood would have to be wasted, not to mention sawing time, and, to a carpenter, waste is one of the forms poor craftsmanship takes. Whatever the architectural logic that dictated designing a wall one inch off of such a canonical dimension, to a carpenter it represented sheer perversity, a slap in the face of tradition, common sense, and frugality. Indeed you could argue—and believe me, Joe did—Charlie’s eight-one summed up everything that was wrong with the practice of architecture in America today.
I remembered once reading a story in Fine Homebuilding, the magazine for carpenters and serious do-it-your-selfers, about a contractor who had grown so sick of performing what he regarded as needlessly “custom” work for architects that, when the time came to design a house for himself, he made sure that every last piece of wood in it would be a standard dimension, the overwhelming majority of them eight feet. The ceilings were eight feet, the floor plan of every story and room was a multiple of eight, and all the windows and door openings were a simple fraction of eight. This fellow bragged of the fact that not only had he designed his house without an architect, but he had been able to more or less frame it without using a saw. But what made him proudest of all was that not a single piece of framing lumber had gone to waste.
“And have you actually seen this house?” Charlie demanded to know when I told him the story. He was in town checking on another job, and had stopped by at the end of the day to go over a couple of problems that had cropped up in the plans. Joe and I’d been giving him a hard time about the eight-one walls and the in-swinging windows, the full scope of whose difficulty—their radical customness—having just sailed into view. The day before, I’d taken Charlie’s drawings to a millworker who’d informed me that not only would the windows as drawn cost several thousand dollars to fabricate, but that he couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t leak. I intended to get around to this before Charlie left town.
“Because my guess is that this Mister Eight-Oh of yours lives in one god-awful box. Oh sure, nobody actually needs an architect, if all you want is shelter, a dry box to work in. But you wanted something more.”
True enough, but surely architecture doesn’t require eight-one walls.
“Actually, I would argue that sometimes it does.” Charlie was clearly ready for us this time, and in no mood to let a pair of cranky weekend carpenters trash his profession. Charlie had come from a meeting on a new job he’d landed nearby; he was wearing his country-client attire, a graph-paper-checked shirt, chinos, and a sweater vest that together managed deftly to say to the client: informal yet billable. (Thankfully Charlie had taken my own job off the clock several months earlier, after I’d made some noises about the magnitude of the initial design fees.)
Charlie reached into the rank of pens lining his breast pocket. Taking a black Expresso Bold to our smeary copy of the blueprint, he proceeded to demonstrate how he’d arrived at the eight-one dimension, a complex puzzle revolving around the need to keep both the height of the door and the building’s distance from the ground at a bare minimum. “One inch less in that wall and the doorjamb on the landing would be grazing your head. I suppose I could have raised the lower floor an inch, like so, but then the front elevation starts to float—not good. And when I start adding inches to the height of the wall, entering the building isn’t nearly so nice—you lose that neat transition from low, tight doorway into big space. Way too ordinary.” It was reassuring to know that eight-one hadn’t been an oversight. But I didn’t buy that raising the floor one inch would have ruined the elevation.
“And by the way,” Charlie continued, hoisting his bushy eyebrows over an expression of mock injury, “the term ‘custom’ is a much friendlier way to describe what I do than this rude ‘eight-one’ business.”
Charlie’s disdain for the “way too ordinary” reminded me of a definition Le Corbusier had once proposed for architecture. Architecture, Le Corbusier had declared, is when the windows are either too big or too small, but never the “right” size. For when the window is the right size, the building is…just a building. Viewed from one perspective, Le Corbusier’s dictum is as succinct a confession of artistic arrogance as you could ask for, implying as it did that originality, if not eccentricity, was an end in itself. Architecture as the wrong-size window is precisely what had sent Mister Eight-Oh around the bend—and what made his radically stock response seem at least partly sane.
And yet, as Charlie was suggesting, where would you rather spend the afternoon? In the Villa Savoye, or Mr. Eight-Oh’s House of the Standard Dimensions? “Any building that’s trying not just to give shelter but to move us—to raise our spirits—is bound to break with our expectations in all sorts of ways,” Charlie said. “Sometimes you have to italicize a door or a window in order to make people see it freshly, and that might very well mean making it ‘too big’ or ‘too small.’ The fact is, your Mister Eight-Oh may have saved himself some trouble and some dough, but he’s missing out on the soul of a good building.”
Joe now tried to reel the conversation back down to earth, where he hoped to pick up some needed information and then with any luck call it a day.
“I hear what you’re saying about seeing things fresh, Charlie. But there are a couple things in these drawings of yours we can’t see at all—like the framing for this little rock window here. Sometimes Mike forgets to rub the lemon juice on these things and we can’t read the invisible ink.”
“Hey. Mike here knows all about invisible ink—that’s what he signs his checks with. But I hear you. I’ll fax you an S-K on that tomorrow.” “S-K” is architect talk for “sketch,” which seems a rather dubious abbreviation when you realize it actually takes longer to pronounce than the word it purports to crop. Evidently a certain amount of opaque insider talk is a professional imperative; indeed, without an inside and an outside you probably don’t have a profession.
All this backing and forthing was really just a warm-up for the talk we needed to have about the windows, the biggest eight-one of them all. All told there were eight of them, in five distinct types (the two big in-swinging awnings at either end of the building; one single-sash casement that swung out on the north wall overlooking the rock; one double-sash in-swinging French casement on the south wall, and then the two fixed and two operable windows in the peak)—all in a building not a whole lot bigger than a minivan. According to the lumberyard, only one of them—the out-swinging casement that would overlook the rock—was a stock item; the rest were as custom as custom gets. I told Charlie that the first millworker I’d taken them to, a giant, dour Swede named Tude Tanguay, had taken one look at the drawing of the awning window and pronounced it worthless. Tude guessed it might be possible to design an in-swinging window that didn’t let in the rain, but he was sure of one thing: This wasn’t that. “Architects,” Tude had growled, adopting the tone of voice other people reserve for the words “termites” or “telemarketers.” “Fellow who drew this doesn’t even show a drip edge,” he pointed out, pushing the blueprint aside. “Get me a better detail, then we’ll talk.”
Charlie acknowledged he needed to come up with a system to prevent water from seeping under the sash and promised to get me a sketch right away. Very gingerly, I asked him if maybe we shouldn’t reconsider the whole approach. Couldn’t we find stock windows that would give us at least part of what we wanted, for a lot less money and with some assurance they wouldn’t leak? But Charlie felt strongly that the windows were the wrong place to compromise.
“These in-swinging awning windows are absolutely key to the scheme. Remember, the whole idea here was to make the end walls vanish in summer—to turn your building into a porch. I don’t know of any better way to do that than with these windows.” He proceeded to tick off each of the stock solutions he’d considered—double-hungs, casements, and ordinary awnings—and explain why none would give us the effect we were looking for. In every case, the open window would leave a frame of mullions or visible sash instead of landscape wall to wall.
“These windows are your building’s face, Mike, your face and your frame. They set up the whole relationship between inside and outside, between the guy sitting in that chair and the landscape. To use stock windows here would be like buying those cheapo reading glasses they sell off the rack at Woolworth’s. Maybe they do the job, I don’t know. But you can’t say it’s the same thing as having your own prescription. That’s what these are: prescription windows.”
Joe was rolling his eyes. As he listened to Charlie talk, he’d been peeling off one layer of outerwear after another, getting ready to head home, and he’d stopped at a frayed black T-shirt with purple lettering across the chest that said, “What part of NO don’t you understand?” This was right up there in Joe’s collection of heavy-metal hostile-wear with his UZI DOES IT T-shirt. I told Charlie to fax me a detail for the windows. We’d see if we couldn’t figure out a way to make them work.
The problem with in-swinging windows, the reason you don’t often see them in this world, is best understood by comparing two drawings:
In a conventional out-swinging window (the one on the left), the stop against which the sash rests also serves as a weather barrier, effectively returning any water that seeps under the bottom edge of the sash back down the sill and away from the building. (The same holds true in a common double-hung window.) But when the window sash opens inward, which it can’t do unless the stop is to its outside, a certain amount of the rainwater that runs down the pane will find its way between the sash and the stop, and from there into the room. This is by no means a simple problem to solve. There is a very good reason for most windows to open outward; given the predictable behavior of water when presented with opportunities to infiltrate a building, a sash that swings out is the easiest and most natural solution, the fenestral equivalent of a pitched roof. Which is not to say the convention cannot be successfully defied, only that doing so will demand a more elaborate technology, and perhaps a greater degree of imagination on the part of its designer. It would help, for example, for the designer of such a window to be able to think like water, in the words of an old gardener I once knew.
When a few days later I received Charlie’s window detail, I wasn’t at all sure he had solved the problem. Basically what Charlie had come up with was a rubber gasket to close off the gap between sash and stop, as follows:
Thinking like water, I could easily imagine working my way down as far as that gasket, where it seemed to me I would be apt to linger and eventually do some damage to the surrounding wood, or maybe freeze and thaw enough times to crack the rubber gasket and then find my way indoors.
But what did I know? I wasn’t an architect, and I was only maybe half a carpenter, if that.
So I took Charlie’s detail back to Tude Tanguay, whom I found up in the woods behind his shop, slicing oak trunks into logs with a chain saw so easily they might have been baguettes. It was a threatening December morning, and the chill in the air was raw, arthritic. The big man had a black watch cap pulled down over his ears, and his Honest Abe half-beard was fringed with ice crystals. I felt like I was delivering a piece of unsolicited mail to Paul Bunyan. The detail was useless, Tude declared after a cursory glance at the paper, and for more or less the reasons I’d suspected. Yet whatever satisfaction I might have taken in being right was overshadowed by the grim realization that my architect seemed to know rather less about designing a weatherproof window than I did: a quite serious problem. I asked Tude if he had any suggestions.
“Not off the top,” he said, gunning his chain saw. “Let me think on it, get back to you.”
Sure.
I had much better luck with the next woodworker I tried, a fellow by the name of Jim Evangelisti, who worked out of a shop across the street from a local lumberyard. Evangelisti’s shop was in a tall-gabled, board-and-batten building in a neo-Gothic style I associate with rural hippies from the 1970s (Charlie would have called it a “woody goody”)—vaguely churchlike, with a soaring wall of divided-light sash in front and a hand-lettered sign above the door that said CRAFTSMAN WOODSHOPS. Jim was fortyish, sandy haired and compact. He had the sort of high-strung, slightly squirrelly demeanor I associate with cabinetmakers, along with the usual complement of smashed-up fingers. It hurt mine just to look at them.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas when I dropped by with my drawings, and Jim was doing some pro bono work on the Christmas display for Main Street, drilling holes for lights in a plywood Santa, a mentholated cigarette clamped between his teeth. I didn’t get the feeling there was a backlog of work in-house; Jim showed considerably more interest in my project than Tude Tanguay had, though he was precisely as flattering as Tude had been about Charlie’s window detail.
“Well this isn’t going to do us any good,” he said, flicking his fingers loudly against Charlie’s page. “You’ll have standing water on that stop, and he’s put his gasket way too far down—you can’t have water collecting there. You should also know right now I don’t make sash the way he’s showing it, with stops to hold the panes. I mount the glass with putty, same way it’s been done in New England for three hundred years at least.” Then he lit up another Kool and waved Charlie’s drawing at me. “You know what I call these?”
“Let me guess…”
“Cartoons.”
But when I asked him if he had a better idea, he actually did…sort of. Jim said that Greene and Greene, the California architects who specialized in bungalow-style houses around the turn of the century, had built the only successful in-swinging casement windows he had ever seen. It seems that Jim had worked on the renovation of a Greene and Greene house in Berkeley after he got out of college in the mid-seventies. He couldn’t remember exactly how the casements worked, only that they’d had an unusually steep sill and some sort of drip edge. “But most of the Greene and Greene drawings are at Columbia University. Maybe you could find a detail.”
We agreed I would look for one, while Jim worked up a price. But I hesitated. My confidence in Charlie’s window scheme was dwindling, and I was seriously considering bailing out on it, sacrificing what might well be a set of brilliant ideas to the legitimate demands of practicality. Though really, how brilliant was any architectural idea that so blithely defied the facts, the exigencies of construction and weather, which is to say the world we live in? It seemed to me Charlie had really dropped the ball on this one, that he had designed me the equivalent of a modernist leaky roof, an interesting but unworkable conceit. I was going to wind up like one of those quietly fuming clients of modern architecture who, when they dare complain to the master about the back-breaking chair or the drip on their heads, are forced to endure one of those delightful, one-eye-on-the-biographer quips about buckets and genius. (“This is what happens,” sighed one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s clients, resigned to her leaking house, “when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”) The willingness of people in this century to suffer on behalf of art (and someone else’s art, at that) may have been a precondition for the rise of modern architecture, but it wasn’t something I wanted any part of.
And yet…there was the promise of those prescription windows. Every window is an interpretation of a landscape, and the variety and inventiveness of Charlie’s fenestration, so specific to the site and circumstance (so custom, in the very best sense), was one of the most exciting parts of his design. What a sweet idea, to turn the writing house into a porch for the summer; Charlie’s metaphor of putting the top down on the convertible had stayed with me. Windows that opened in would also, I imagined, admit the landscape to the building, usher in that cascade of space, of chi, that had attracted me to the site in the first place. And I particularly liked the idea of the windows on each of the thick walls with their extreme close-up views: the hump of gray-green rock on my right and the tangled, fragrant, light-filtering vine on the south side, both shelved right there alongside my books.
So, sure, I was taken with the romance of these windows—this novel pair of glasses, eight lenses custom-ground. And yet every whisper of that tiny, hissing, deflationary word—“leak”—put my head in a mind to overrule my heart’s desire.
I couldn’t decide the question one way or the other for more than a minute at a time, so I figured I might as well pay a visit to Avery Library at Columbia, check out Jim’s tip. If I found a Greene and Greene window detail that looked like it might work, fine; if not, I would insist that Charlie redesign the windows. Over the phone, the librarian at the archive confirmed that they did indeed have a sizable collection of original Greene and Greene drawings—several thousand of them, in fact. I couldn’t decide whether this was good news or not; I certainly wasn’t about to spend a week chasing down the drip edge Charlie had dropped. The librarian didn’t know anything about window details per se (why would she?), but said that all the drawings had recently been put on a CD-ROM, which meant I could flip through them pretty quickly. I made an appointment for the following morning.
The resolution of the images on the CD-ROM was too poor for me to discern whether any given window opened in or out, but it allowed me to narrow my search to a series of houses with promising-looking casements. The librarian pulled my selections from the file drawers, spreading the delicate buff pencil drawings on a table while reciting the archive’s rules: no photocopying, no tracing, no ballpoint pens or ink markers on the table. Great. The last best hope for my windows, if not for the integrity of my building’s design, rested on my skill as a freehand draftsman, which was exactly nil.
I washed my hands and started going through the drawings. Most of the houses pictured were elaborately timbered bungalows with a great many shallow gables piled one on top of the other in a manner reminiscent of Japanese architecture. You could see why a cabinetmaker who called his business the Craftsman Woodshops would respond to this work: the Greenes’ designs owed a lot to the Arts and Crafts movement, sharing its emphasis on traditional craftsmanship in wood. With their exposed structures and hand-worked finishes, many of the houses look like celebrations of the very possibilities of wood and the art of joinery; they exhibited in their design and finishes a kind of transparency to the craftsmanship that made them. Coming at a time when such craftsmanship was under attack from the factory system, such an aesthetic had a strong moral cast, made a last-gasp protest against the machine age and an assertion of the dignity of work. It is a message that still seems to speak to many carpenters today (and not only to them).
By the end of the morning, I had found what I was looking for: an ingenious construction detail for an in-swinging casement window on a house in Pasadena. I kept going, and began to find variations on the same idea over and over again, in one house after another. The window must have worked, I reasoned, or else the Greenes would have tried some radically different tack or given up on the in-swing altogether. So I copied the window detail into my notebook as carefully as I could, checking it once and then again to make sure I’d left nothing important out (assuming of course that I knew what important looked like).
To my inexpert eye it seemed a fine solution, economical in the best sense. The bottom frame of the sash, or rail, doubled as a drip edge; by designing the rail to overhang the stop, the designer ensured that any water coming down along its face would fall onto the sill rather than the stop. And the curved profile of the stop itself eliminated any surface on which water might linger. At first I didn’t understand the purpose of the groove routed into the underside of the sash, but when I brought the drawing to Jim the following Saturday, he grasped its significance immediately.
“Capillary action. Water wants to migrate along the underside of a surface, so it’ll work its way back to that gap there unless something is put in its way. That’s what the groove’s for: Water will collect in it until the bead gets heavy enough to break the surface tension. Then it’ll drop onto the sloping side of that stop and down to the sill and away.” Here was a case of thinking like water at the Ph.D. level.
Jim felt the detail was definitely workable, though he’d need to adapt it some. For one thing, Connecticut gets a lot more rainfall than California does; for another, my windows would be made of painted pine rather than unfinished redwood (far too heavy for sash this size, never mind the expense), and he worried about the ability of such a slender pine stop to withstand the weight of sash banging against it. But he had some ideas. Jim gave me his price, which seemed fair in view of the complexities. It was, however, somewhat more than I could afford. Jim suggested I could shave several hundred dollars off of the total if I was willing to make the four little peak windows myself, a job he assured me was fairly straightforward. So we pulled these items out of the deal and shook hands on it.
Jim had said it would be okay with him if I wanted to watch him build the windows, so early on a Monday morning I came by his shop. On a pallet by the front door stood a short stack of fresh, rough-sawn white pine planks of various lengths, knot-free and covered in a soft blond down. Nothing about this wood made you think “window”; it could not have been more opaque or inert. And yet what Jim proposed to do before the morning was over was transform this stack of lumber into intricate skeletons of finished white pine, the airy frames of six divided-light windows. The singleness of “stock”—what Jim called the raw pine—would be translated into that rich, antique, and multifarious vocabulary English offers for the parts of a window: sashes and stiles, muntins and mullions, sills and jambs and rails and casings and lights.
Jim’s shop consisted of two large rooms divided by wooden racks stacked with handsome slabs of unfinished oak, cherry, mahogany, maple, and pine. Both spaces were crowded with doors, windows, cabinets, and countertops arrested in various stages of fabrication, and the whole place looked as though a blizzard had recently passed through, coating everything in several inches of fresh, fragrant sawdust, Jim included. The back room held two large, low tables where Jim did his layouts and glue-ups. Up front were a half-dozen machine tools spread out around the room in a rough approximation of an assembly line, separate stations each for the planer, shaper, table saw, tenoner, mortiser, and drill punch. It seemed like an awful lot of machinery for a woodworker as devoted to tradition as Jim professed to be.
“They’ve improved on the chisel some,” Jim said as he set to work, bunching the sleeves of his sweatshirt at the elbows, “but the mortise joint is still the best we know how to make.” In this Jim’s thinking was in keeping with the Arts and Crafts movement for which he obviously felt a kinship. Gustav Stickley, the turn-of-the-century furniture maker who promoted Arts and Crafts ideas in America, had objected not to the machine as such but to the uses to which it was being put, including mass production and the devaluing of craftsmanship. “When rightly used,” Stickley had written in The Craftsman, the influential magazine he began publishing in 1900, “the machine is simply a tool in the hand of a skilled worker.”
In Jim’s hands, the machine was a howling and slightly terrifying agent of transformation. Working with a swiftness that went some distance toward explaining the condition of his fingers, Jim escorted each rough plank from one station to the next, guiding the pine along on a journey of ever-increasing refinement and specificity. First he would select a piece of stock from the pile by the door and feed it through the planer, a steel sandwich of spinning blades that peeled a thin, even layer from both sides of the wood at once, leaving it smooth and plumb. Now Jim would lay the piece down against a full-scale diagram of the window he’d drawn on a masonite board, decide on its role (muntin, stile, rail, etc.) then mark it for width and length and cut it on the table saw. Next the stock would enter the snout of the shaper, from which it emerged looking like a piece of finished molding, its square corners having acquired the curved profile of a coping or fillet, ogee or reverse ogee, depending on the bit used. Shouting over the scream of the machine, Jim said that shaper bits cost upward of a thousand dollars apiece, so it was tough luck if I didn’t like the one he owned. My windows received the same austere profile you see all over New England, their crossbars, or muntins, narrowing down from glass pane to nosing in three quick curving steps, each about half the size of the one preceding. Not too finicky, but not too plain either; I liked it fine.
From here on, the destiny of the various pieces of stock diverged, as some were designated tenons and others mortises, male or female depending on how they would ultimately fit into the window frame. The muntin bars that would hold the panes of glass in place would all be tenoned into the stiles and rails for maximum strength; each muntin passed through a tenoning machine that whittled its ends down to a narrow rectangular tongue of wood. The beefier members that would receive the muntin bars went instead to the mortiser, a modified drill press that cut perfectly matched notches using a spinning bit in combination with a chisel. Every one of these machines looked and sounded hungry for fingertips.
Once all the pieces had been cut and shaped, Jim spread them out on his worktable and began fitting them together, like a puzzle. With a gentle tap of his wooden mallet, the tenons snapped smartly into their notches, the molding designs neatly turning the corners and matching up, concave fillets meeting fillets, convex copings meeting copings. The machine tolerances were so exact that, except for the largest sash, whole frames virtually squared themselves. Satisfied with the fit, Jim would take the frames apart, spread glue over tenons and into notches, and then reassemble them. After checking for square, he’d clamp the frames end to end and put them aside to dry. In a day or two, he’d send the frames out to the man who did his glazing. “There’s a knack to working the putty just right,” he explained when I asked why he subbed out this particular step. “Glazing’s an old-timer’s game.”
Once the frames were assembled, I studied Jim’s drip edge detail. It looked like this:
It was ingenious, if not quite as economical as the Greene and Greene detail on which it was based. Like theirs, the bottom edge of my sash extended well out over the stop, in order to conduct water away from the window, and it had a groove routed along its underside to thwart any capillary action. But below, the design diverged from its model, since Jim had decided he couldn’t taper the stop, as the Greenes had done, to minimize its surface area. Pine wouldn’t have been strong enough, for one thing. But the more serious problem, and the one I never saw coming, was that in an awning window (as opposed to a casement like the Greenes’), when the projecting drip edge swung inward, it would follow a slight downward arc that would actually collide with any stop that wasn’t either set well beneath it or angled the wrong way—that is, toward the building’s interior, rather than away. (You had to think like wood as well as water in this business.) Jim’s solution was inspired: He angled the stop toward the building so that the drip edge would clear it coming in. Then he routed a second groove along its surface to collect any water seeping under the sash, which would then flow out through a series of weep holes drilled through the stop. Basically, Jim had provided a second line of defense.
I congratulated him on the design, a critical detail of my building that no one except perhaps another carpenter would probably ever notice. Jim was unexpectedly cranky about it. “I’m not going to start complaining yet, but I’ve got two extra days in this job already, just thinking. Architects get a lot of money to come up with this kind of detail.” Maybe, but it seemed to me that this is precisely the place where, nowadays at least, architecture stops, where it comes down either to finding a craftsman like Jim Evangelisti or a bucket.
Except for the tapping of the wooden mallet, the final assembly was mercifully quiet, and Jim talked a little about the path that had brought him to the Craftsman Woodshops, which turned out not to be so far from where he started. Jim’s family had owned the lumberyard across the street, so he’d always been around wood and carpenters as a kid, but it wasn’t until he went away to college, in Vermont, that he got serious about woodworking. One of his professors at Godard was building an authentic timber frame house, cutting his own wood off the site, milling it by hand, and framing the structure solely with hand tools—no electricity allowed. It was the seventies, remember, and Vermont was teeming with back-to-the-land types who (not unlike members of the Arts and Crafts movement) made a moral and political virtue of traditional craftsmanship and self-reliance.
After college Jim moved out to California, where he heard about the restoration of a Greene and Greene house in Berkeley. “I saw right away that the architect in charge didn’t have a clue,” Jim said. “I mean, he was butt-jointing everything for chrissake! Didn’t know the first thing about the joinery in that house. I practically had to force them to let me work on it.” As I listened to Jim describe the months he spent on the job—replacing a porch railing and restoring an ornate footbridge that he still had a dog-eared drawing of—I could see that the job had been a high point for him, and a formative experience. He’d found his calling. That, and his lifelong bête noire: the well-paid and ignorant architects he always seemed to end up bailing out.
And yet, Jim’s architect-bashing aside, it seemed to me he and Charlie had important things in common. Not least was their deep appreciation for the American vernacular and the indigenous architecture that had drawn on it so fruitfully before modernism turned everybody’s attention back to Europe. Charlie and Jim were both children of the seventies, their approach toward building having been shaped by an odd confluence of currents that was at the time helping to return American architecture to American sources. One of these currents was of course postmodernism, which by the mid-seventies had sparked a revival of interest in the American shingle style, a homegrown domestic architecture with deep vernacular roots. Also gathering momentum during the seventies was the push for historic preservation. And then, coming from an entirely different quarter, there was the back-to-the-land movement, which had its own reasons to revive vernacular building styles and methods, such as timber framing; it also happened to share many of the values of the Arts and Crafts movement. (You remember the crafts.) Though it seldom finds its way into the architectural histories, American hippie architecture of the 1970s played an important role, chipping away at modernist ideas from below while more academic postmodernists attacked them head on. So while Jim was lending a hand to the revival of timber framing in Vermont, Charlie was studying at UCLA under Charles Moore, the postmodernist with perhaps the deepest feeling for the American vernacular.
In fact it wouldn’t be too much to say that Jim and Charlie, having started out from two such different places, had been working their way toward the very sort of neotraditional window coming together on this worktable at the Craftsman Woodshops. For the divided-light window, along with timber framing, pitched roofs, wooden shingles, and a great many other vernacular elements, was one of the casualties of modernism that architects like Charlie and craftsmen like Jim have both done their parts to revive. Here in microcosm was that collaboration, between the postmodern temper and the craftsman ideal—the “neo” and the “traditional.” Not that the collaboration was an easy or even a friendly one. The architect, being a modern artist, was not content merely to revive an idiom but insisted on giving it a fresh turn (the too-big window, the in-swinging sash), his novelty forcing the craftsman back on his wits (and his memory of forgotten solutions, such as the Greenes’ drip edge) to make it all work. Or to bail him out, depending on your point of view.
Of all the revivals of the postmodern period, perhaps the most surprising is the divided-light window. The pitched roof, after all, could justify its return strictly on utilitarian grounds: a case can be made that a gable was simply the best way to keep the weather out of a house. But the muntin bars dividing a window into small panes of glass can make no such claim for themselves. Indeed, from a purely technological standpoint, they have been obsolete in all but the very largest windows since the invention of rolled sheet glass near the end of the eighteenth century. It isn’t until the modern period, however, that they disappeared completely, only to be brought back again in the last few years—thanks (once again) to Robert Venturi, who put a gigantic, divided-light window on the façade of his mother’s house. (Actually it’s a sliding glass door bisected by a thick horizontal muntin bar.) The story of the fall and rise of the humble muntin, which I started looking into after my time in Jim Evangelisti’s shop, turns out to shed some light not only on how my own particular windows came to be, but on the whole history of the idea of transparency in the West, which is itself a kind of sub-history of our changing attitudes toward nature, objectivity, and the notion of perspective—a person’s and a building’s both.
Muntins were originally invented as a way to gang together numerous small panes of glass when that was the only kind there was. Before the development of sheet glass, a windowpane was made by blowing a glass bubble, flattening it out, and then cutting the biggest possible square from the resulting pancake, which was rarely more than a few inches on a side. A dozen or more such panes could be combined into a window using muntin bars to hold them in place. These panes are called “lights” because for a long time that’s about all they were good for: too small and ripply to offer views of any consequence, their main purpose was illumination.
In early American houses, window lights were few and far between. Most glass came from England, and during the Colonial period windowpanes were heavily taxed. Before improvements in the design of fireplaces, the light that windows offered also had to be weighed against the draughts of cold air they admitted. Not that anyone at the time would have wanted even a Thermopaned picture window, assuming such a thing had been within the grasp of technology: the taste for looking at landscape, which was an invention of the romantics, still lay in the future. And in America, where the outdoors was still regarded as a howling wilderness, the haunt of Satan and Indians and abominable weather, the desire to gaze out of a window, except for the purpose of spying a threat, was slight, or nil. Refuge in those days counted for more than prospect.
Indeed, the early Colonial window, with its high proportion of wood to glass and its parsimonious admission of light, was probably a fair reflection of the prevailing attitude toward the world outside. Medieval Christianity, as well as Puritanism, drew a sharp line between the spiritual sanctuary provided by interiors and the profanity of the outdoor world. When the world beyond the window consists of so much peril (spiritual and otherwise), that window is apt to be small and difficult to open.
The development of clear, leaded glass in 1674, followed a century later by sheet glass made with iron rollers, coincided with—and no doubt helped to promote—important changes in people’s attitude toward the world beyond the window. Beginning with the Enlightenment, people were less inclined to regard the world outside as perilous or profane; indeed, nature itself now became the site of spiritual sanctuary, the place one went to find oneself, as Rousseau would do on his solitary walks. Nature became the remedy for a great many ills, both physical and spiritual, and the walls that divided us from its salubrious effects came to be seen as unwelcome barriers. As Richard Sennett suggests in a fascinating study of perception and social life called The Conscience of the Eye, transparency—of self to nature, of self to other—became a high Enlightenment ideal. Writes Sennett, “The Enlightenment conceived a person’s inner life opened up to the environment as though one had flung a window open to fresh air.”
Sentiments of this kind, abetted by improvements in glassmaking, led to a dramatic increase in the size of windowpanes and sash over the course of the eighteenth century. The floor-to-ceiling casements known as French windows, which first appeared at Versailles in the 1680s, became popular on both sides of the Atlantic during this period (Jefferson installed several of them at Monticello), as did the gigantic double-hung windows that the Dutch invented around the same time to light the interiors of their long, narrow homes. Muntin bars were still commonly used in windows, but for a new purpose: They helped distribute the weight of the panes, thereby making it possible to build much larger windows. Beyond providing air and light, windows now admitted the landscape to the interior of a house.
A line of historical descent can be drawn from the Enlightenment window to the modernist glass wall, and Sennett draws a convincing one, passing through the great Victorian green-houses—the first vast spaces to be enclosed in glass, creating the novel sensation of being at once indoors and outdoors—on its way to the Bauhaus’s curtain walls and the glass houses built by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. But it seems to me this line of historical development spent at least part of the nineteenth century in America, passing close by Concord, where Emerson was imagining himself a “transparent eyeball” in Nature, and Walden Pond, where Henry Thoreau was giving voice to the dream of a transparent habitation.
The fenestration of Thoreau’s own cabin was nothing special: the sole double-hung window that punctuated the long wall where he kept his writing table probably did little to relieve the interior gloom of the house at Walden. But Thoreau’s imaginary architecture was way out ahead of what he actually managed to build, and it proved by far the more influential. You’ll recall how he waited until the latest possible moment that first fall to plaster his cabin walls, so much did he enjoy the transit of breezes through his building’s frame, “so slightly clad.” Sworn enemy of walls and bounds and frames of any kind, he declared that his favorite “room” at Walden was the pine wood outside his door, swept clean by that “priceless domestic,” the wind. In a memorable passage, he described cleaning day at Walden, when he moved his writing table and all his household effects outside on the grass, turning his house inside out. “It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,” he wrote, “and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house.”
Thoreau’s dream of a house utterly transparent to nature, one in which the usual distinctions between indoors and out have been erased, is a beguiling one, and no doubt lies somewhere in back of my wish for a building that could be turned into a porch any time summer afforded me a benign enough afternoon. It probably lies behind Philip Johnson’s glass house too, whose transparency does not so much destroy all sense of enclosure as extend it to the tree line outside, which becomes the house’s true walls.
In the twentieth century, the ideal of transparency became closely bound up with the whole utopian project of modernism, and it embraced a great deal more than nature. Modernist architecture sought, too, a transparency of construction (hence no trim) and function (no ornament) and space (no interior walls). Since transparency implied truthfulness and freedom, and opacity suggested deception, it was perhaps inevitable that glass would emerge as the supreme modernist material—though “material” is perhaps too stingy and earthbound a word for everything that glass represented in the modernist imagination. Far from being a mere building material, plate glass offered nothing less than the means for building a new man and a new society, one in which transparency would break down once and for all the barriers that divide us one from another, as well as from nature. Seemingly the most modern and least haunted of materials, glass promised to deliver humanity from the burden of its past and equip it for a shining future.
In 1914 a German engineer and science fiction writer named Paul Scheerbart extolled the millennial promise of glass in a rhapsodic manifesto:
We mostly inhabit closed spaces. These form the milieu from which our culture develops…. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher plane, so must we willy-nilly change our architecture. And that will be possible only when we remove the sense of enclosure from the spaces where we live. And this we will only achieve by introducing Glass Architecture.
Scheerbart went on to predict that the word Fenster was about to vanish from the dictionary, as windows gave way to glass walls.
The artists and architects of the Bauhaus took this man for a prophet. Even the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, a fervent admirer, championed the glass cause, declaring that “to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.” The absolute exposure guaranteed by glass would purge society of its ills like a cleansing blast of light and fresh air. Some went so far as to claim that glass architecture heralded the end of war, on the theory that people in glass houses would know better than to throw stones (a transparent-enough idea, anyway). For a time, glass was invested with the sort of mystical significance and magical possibility that for most of history has swirled around gold.
It was structural steel that made glass architecture something more than the dream of socialists and science fiction writers. Since the birth of architecture, the size of windows—and especially their horizontal extent—has been constrained by the load-bearing function of the wall; many of the great innovations in architecture—such as the Gothic arch and the flying buttress—have had as their aim the freeing of walls so that they might hold bigger windows. If the history of architecture truly was, as Le Corbusier wrote, “the struggle for the window,” then with the invention of structural steel, that struggle was won. No longer needed to support the weight of the floors, walls could now hold vast horizontal expanses of undivided plate glass. (Needless to say, the muntin bar—being no longer functional, and hopelessly old-fashioned—didn’t stand a chance with the modernists.) With a further assist from the elevator (glass walls being easier to live with high up in the sky) and the air conditioner, glass architecture now leapt off the drafting table.
But in practice glass architecture was full of unexpected and not altogether pleasant ironies, some of which undoubtedly prepared the way for the return of the muntin and the traditional window. As anyone who’s spent any time behind the curtain wall of an office building could tell you, plate glass was discomfiting in ways the theories hadn’t anticipated. One felt exposed and vulnerable behind a wall of glass. Some claimed this was a vestigial, bourgeois sentiment that people would eventually outgrow, as “moral exhibitionism” caught on. But there was another problem. Instead of connecting people to what lies beyond it, plate glass seemed to do the very opposite, to evoke a sense of alienation. The glass wall had an unexpected way of distancing you from the world on the other side, from “the view.”
The exigencies of glass construction were partly to blame: glass walls, and even the “picture windows” that soon emerged as the glass architecture of the common man, had to be extra-thick for strength and double- or triple-glazed for insulation. Since such “windows” were obviously too large and heavy to be opened, the practical effect of glass architecture, as Sennett points out, was to achieve a transparency that was strictly visual. Not that this troubled the modernists, many of whom belonged to a long tradition in the West of favoring the eye over the other senses. The eye, Le Corbusier had declared, was “the master of ceremonies” in architecture; sometimes in his sketches he would draw an eyeball as a stand-in for the occupant of a house. Yet without the additional information provided by the senses of smell and touch and hearing, the world as perceived through a plate of glass can seem profoundly, and disconcertingly, inaccessible. More so, even, than the world beyond a wall of wood or stone, perhaps because the transparency promised by glass arouses sensory expectations that the material can’t fulfill.
At street level too, plate glass proved unexpectedly alienating, inside as well as out. During the day, the glass building was scarcely transparent at all, and its reflectivity often made it an aloof and ghostly presence on the street. Faceless, cold, it seemed constitutionally incapable of making any connection with its surroundings, except to mirror them, mutely.
The wall of glass itself created a powerful social barrier that its champions had failed to foresee; to the extent that glass facilitated a “moral exhibitionism,” this was not a pretty or uplifting sight to behold. There are avenues in midtown Manhattan—Park in the Fifties, say, or Madison in the Sixties and Seventies—lined with posh shops and banks and galleries where the wall of plate glass at street level serves to isolate those well heeled enough to be buzzed in as effectively as a castle moat. There is one particular block in the Fifties on Sixth Avenue, the Manhattan thoroughfare that gave itself most wholeheartedly to modernism, where a homeless woman can gaze up and watch a famous magazine publisher making deals behind the glass wall of his second-story corner office: there’s the phone pressed to the ear, the hand gestures, the suit jacket draped over the arm of the sofa. The only reason I know about this homeless woman is that I was once inside this particular office, and briefly caught her eye, across the gulf of glass. It was a connection, I suppose, but not the kind that the modernists had prophesied.
If plate glass in the city tended to underscore the distances between people, in the suburbs and the countryside its effects were less brutal but no more socially constructive. In the suburbs the picture window, in search of a suitably picturesque view, tended to turn the attention of the houses away from the street, where the front porch had fixed it, and back toward the landscape. Magazines such as House Beautiful published articles on how to avoid the “fishbowl effect” of picture windows by planting hedges out front or restricting them to the backyard; either way, the large expanses of undivided glass tended to avert one’s gaze from the neighbors and the street, furthering privacy at the expense of community.
Most modernist houses were designed for (if not always built in) the sort of unpeopled rural landscapes where transparency promised to be somewhat more congenial to the homeowner. If the mass-market picture window took one’s eyes off the street, the genuine modernist article—the glass walls and fenêtres en longueur—was inconceivable unless you owned the whole street or at least enough land to obliterate its presence. (Though even then, the sense of exposure is apparently hard to take: Philip Johnson doesn’t actually sleep in his glass house, but in a cozy old Colonial down the road.) The modernist house with its glass walls is as impractical on a small plot of land as a picturesque garden with its ha-ha: Both require large and isolated holdings for the proper functioning of their transparencies.
So much for the glass utopia.
Like most people, I have never actually lived in a glass house, but when I was a boy my parents built a summer home at the shore whose design, I realize now, was beholden to the modernist dream of transparency. My father designed it himself with the help of a contractor, which suggests just how general some of these ideas had become by 1965. The house was a modified A-frame built on an open plan, with kitchen, living room, and dining room all flowing together, and its front wall, which looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, was almost entirely glazed: There were sliding glass doors on one side, a big horizontal picture window on the other, and above, undivided plates of glass rising all the way up into the peak. A half-dozen other houses were similarly deployed along a strip of sand dune, and together they resembled a flock of weathered gray birds perched on a wire, all staring intently ahead. Indeed, our house had only a couple of windows on its side walls, and these were cheap little double-hungs, strictly for ventilation. It was the big view that my parents had bought, and it was the big view and nothing else that their house was going to look at.
What I remember about our glass wall and its big view (besides the fact that the living room was always too hot and you never entered it except fully dressed, even though the only creature apt to look in was a gull) was that the ocean view was best appreciated from the couch, as if you were watching a movie—which the proportions, or “aspect ratio,” of the picture window closely approximated. It must be a convention of our visual culture that an image of roughly these proportions says, “Look no further: Here’s the whole picture,” because I can’t remember ever feeling the urge to get up from the couch for a closer look. A smaller or squarer window, on the other hand, seems to invite us to step up to it and peak out, glimpse what lies beyond the frame on either side. Every opening in a wall proposes a certain amount of mystery, and this is directly proportional to its size, with “keyhole” at one end of the scale. But a big window, and especially a big horizontal window, offers no more or different information when your nose is pressed against it than it does from a distance, so why get up? Like the single-point perspective of a Renaissance painting, the picture window posits an unmoving eye situated at a specific point in space, and this might as well be coordinated with the location of a particularly comfortable sofa.
My parents’ view also acquainted me with the peculiar distancing effect of plate glass. Ours was double-glazed, and unless the big slider had been left ajar, the seal of the wall was complete. You saw the waves break white out beyond the dunes, but heard nothing; watched the sea grass bend and flash under the breeze, but felt nothing. There was a deadness to it, a quality of having already happened. The view seemed far away, static, and inaccessible, except of course to the eye.
Our picture window’s horizontal format probably contributed to this impression. As painters understand, the horizontal dimension is the eye’s natural field of play, the axis along which it ordinarily takes in the world. Compared to a vertical format, which is more likely to engage the whole body, inviting the viewer into the picture as if through a door, the horizontal somehow seems cooler, disembodied, more cerebral. This might be because people seem instinctively to project themselves into the spaces they see, and we don’t imagine our upright bodies passing through a horizontal opening, just our eyes, and possibly our minds.
Only much later did I realize that my parents’ picture window contained its own implicit philosophy of nature, one perhaps not quite as benign as its sheer appreciativeness might suggest. True, compared to the attitude of fear or antagonism toward the outdoors implied by the small pre-Enlightenment window, the picture window tells a considerably friendlier story about nature. Yet to put nature up on a kind of pedestal, as the picture window does, is to hold it at arm’s length, regard it as an aesthetic object—a “picture.” Our sole involvement with it is the gaze, which is fixed, cool, timeless, and possessive. (For this is “our” view, and we resent anybody who tampers with it.) The picture window turns the stuff of nature into a landscape, the very idea of which implies separation and observation and passivity—nature as spectator sport, which suited my father the indoorsman just fine.
Of course, the rural picture window doesn’t make a picture out of any old stretch of nature. Nobody ever placed one directly in front of a group of trees or the face of a boulder, and my parents never thought to put theirs on the wall that faced a pretty grove of gnarled beetlebung trees. No, a picture window must give the horizon its due, and the content of the view will always be something “special,” by which we usually mean “picturesque.” The space invariably will be deep (divided into near, middle, and far); the land pristine and changeless (except for the effects of weather and seasons), and there will be few if any signs of human work.
Implied in the very idea of a picture window is an assumption that there is a “special” nature that is entitled to our gaze and care, and an ordinary nature that is not. In this the picture window is in tune ideologically with tourism and environmentalism, both of which lavish their attention on those landscapes that most nearly resemble wilderness—places unpeopled, timeless, and pristine; nature out there—at the expense of all those ordinary places where most of us live and work, and which may be just as deserving of our attention and care. There might be some kind of window that discloses the beauty of such places, but it is not a picture window.
Though a picture window obviously has a frame (you can’t have a window or even a glass wall without one), it pretends otherwise. A frame always implies a point of view, the presence of some ordering principle or sensibility. Yet by eliminating muntins (which call attention to the sash) and stretching out horizontally to the peripheries of our field of vision, the picture window suggests that its view of nature is perfectly objective and unmediated: This is it, how it really is out there. And the full-scale glass wall goes even further, dropping the “out there” from the claim, since now any distance between ourselves and nature has supposedly been eliminated. If the picture window resembles a pair of eyeglasses so large the wearer loses sight of the frame, the glass house is a contact lens. The conceit of its more radical transparency is that the frame can be eliminated, leaving us with a perfect apprehension of nature, a clear seeing with nothing interposed save this inconsequential pane of glass—whose own reality everything has been done to suppress.
But perhaps the tallest tale told by plate glass is of man’s power and nature’s benignity. The promise of modernity was that we could master nature with our technology and science, and what better way to express that mastery—flaunt it, even—than building houses made of glass? Humankind has outgrown the need for refuge, the glass house says; now prospect alone can rule architecture. I was reminded of the ridiculousness of this particular conceit every time the weather bureau issued a hurricane warning for our stretch of Atlantic seaboard. My father and I would scamper up ladders to crisscross the great glass wall with webs of masking tape. The tape was supposed to help the glass withstand the gales, and these flimsy paper muntins did somehow make us feel marginally safer as the wind blew. After a few years of hurricane alerts, the glass wall had been scarred by the fossil traces of tape glue, an abiding rebuke to its boast of transparency.
While waiting for Jim Evangelisti to finish and truck over the windows, Joe and I spent a couple of Saturdays building the four small peak windows. Charlie hadn’t drawn these units in any detail, so fabricating and designing them proceeded hand in hand. We decided on a narrow stock for our windows—one-by-one pine for the sash; three-quarter-inch for the casing—since our rough openings were only a foot square and I wanted as big a pane of glass as possible. Following Jim’s example, we drew a full-scale diagram of the windows on a sheet of oak tag; this became a template for the dozens of precisely dimensioned pieces of pine we needed to cut.
I manned the table saw, cutting strips of pine to length and mitering their ends, while Joe handled the more sensitive routing work, making the grooves that would hold our glass and form our joints. Since two of the windows were to be operable (one at either end of the building, for ventilation), the frame of their sash needed a sturdy joint that could be counted on to hold its right angles indefinitely; only a sash that remained perfectly true would open reliably and keep out the rain. After we fit the pieces together and checked the frames for square, we glued the corners, resquared and clamped the assembly, and then tacked the joints with brads for good measure.
After the frames had dried, I attached them to their casing with hinges and then attempted to glaze the sash, a process that did indeed require a certain knack, as Jim had mentioned. The windowpane is held in place with a beveled bead of glazing putty, which is applied to the corner where it meets the wood frame with a putty knife that must be wielded at a precise forty-five-degree angle. Move the knife too slowly and the putty blobs up on you; move it too fast and it tears. Turning corners neatly is the real test, though, requiring skill and a bit of nerve. By the time I’d glazed my fourth window, I could manage a respectable straightaway, but my corners remained somewhat bulbous.
Luckily for me these windows would be twelve feet off the ground, so no one would ever be in a position to observe the gentleness of my learning curve. I took heart in what I’d read about the Arts and Crafts movement’s liberal line on mistakes: “There is hope in honest error,” one designer had declared, “none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque. Certainly the mark of my own unhandy hands was visible in these windows, which were hopeful in the extreme. Joe held up one of the finished sashes to his face and peered out at me through its frame. “It’s a window.” This was about all you could say for it, apart from the fact it was the absolutely squarest thing Joe and I had so far managed to build.
Jim delivered his own rather more accomplished windows on Christmas Eve, and Joe and I had them all installed by the end of an unseasonably warm New Year’s Day, a swift and hugely satisfying process that revolutionized the building both inside and out. Since Jim had already put on the hinges and painted the sash (a deep blackish green), installation was basically a matter of squaring and plumbing each casing in its rough opening in the wall, then securing it to the frame and hanging the sash.
And on an ordinary building this would have been a snap. But since ninety degrees was not this particular building’s predominant angle (no blaming Charlie for that one), we struggled for a while trying to determine exactly what plane each window should occupy in its wall; our rough openings were rough. After some adjustments and difference-splitting, we slipped the window casings into their openings. Shimming them with scraps of leftover shingle, we’d nudge the jambs a fraction of an inch this way or that and then, after consulting the level and the square, lock the right angle into place with a long galvanized wood screw. It was right here that the ever-widening gyre of oblique and obtuse angles that had bedeviled the construction from the start was finally halted; had it not been, my windows would never have closed properly. Now we lifted each sash into its casing, interlocked the knuckles on each half of hinge, and then inserted the brass pin that held the two halves together. The windows were in.
From the outside, the building was suddenly much more interesting to look at—because now the building looked back. It had a face. Roused by glass from its long material slumber, the structure now seemed something more than the sum of its wooden parts, as though, Oz-like, it had been inspirited. Especially after we’d installed the two windows in the peak, from which they peered out with a supervisory air, the building looked, if not alive, then at least like a pretty good metaphor for consciousness, with its big awning windows reflecting back the landscape in what seemed almost a form of acknowledgment. Like water in the landscape, which is likewise reflective and transparent by turns, glass has a way of inflecting whatever holds it, quickening what was formerly inert, suggesting other layers and dimensions, depths to plumb. And though I’m sure a big pane of plate glass would have animated the building too, I doubt it would have made it look nearly as, well, smart as my building now seemed. (Joe said the little windows up in the peak had given the building its brains.) Undivided plates of glass often wear a glazed expression, look blind. Muntins wink.
Inside too, the windows had invested the building with a kind of intelligence, a point of view. What had been a single uninflected horizontal view out over the desk was now divided into six discrete square frames. The surprise was just how much more you could see this way, now that there were six focal points instead of one, and twenty-four edges composing the scene instead of four. Here, top center, was a picture of the white oak, holding a great bowl of space in its bare upturned arms. Below it was a frame of vegetable garden blasted by winter; another of the iced pond, a glistening white tablet pressed into the freezer-burned earth; and, in the third, a trio of slender tree trunks leaning into the frame from offstage, almost close enough to touch. I don’t think I’d ever noticed these particular trees before; they were exactly the sort of ordinary, near-distance imagery we automatically edit out of a panoramic view. For someone not blessed with great powers of visual observation, the grid of muntin bars was a lesson in looking, a little like the graph paper art students sometimes use to break a scene down into manageable components.
I noticed that any movement on my part would radically revise the content of the six frames; the fixed point perspective of the undivided rough opening (much like a conventional picture window’s) had given way to a shifting mosaic of views. Standing up on the landing, the view was strictly middle distance, looking down to the massive trunk of the white ash rising out of a chaotic, unmade bed of boulders. Only when you stepped down into the main room did the full picturesque prospect, with its deep and orderly space, pop into view. I thought of Charlie’s metaphor of the prescription glasses, because the sensation recalled how putting on a fresh pair can snap the world so vividly into focus. I realized that Charlie had put the central window just where he had—down low over the desk—in order to seduce me into taking my seat, since there is where the prospect was most pleasing.
I knew this because I’d brought a chair out to the building to get some idea what working in front of this window would be like. It was the same chair I’d stood on back when I was deciding on the site, and now I slid it up to a chalked line representing the edge of my as-yet-unbuilt desk and sat down. This turned out to be the only spot in the room from which I could readily pop open and peer out of the little recessed window directly to my right—yet another way Charlie had deployed his windows to lure me to my desk. We seem to gravitate naturally toward windows (Christopher Alexander says this is because we’re “phototropic”), and Charlie was using this fact to organize my experience of the room.
This particular window reminded me of the little triangular smoking windows cars used to have up front, or the side window in a prop plane’s cockpit, the one the pilot slides open to receive the manifest from the ground crew. My own cockpit window overlooked the big rock, making for a decidedly unpicturesque view, all jammed up with the muscled back of a boulder not three feet away. This particular frame was like a blown-up photograph, a detail dwelling on the intricate map of lichens and moss that covered the granite skin. The view was utterly bereft of prospect; it told of rootedness and refuge instead, not at all what you expect from a window.
And yet it was perfectly in keeping with the building’s parti, the two thick walls giving refuge side to side while the thin ones, which seemed even thinner now that they’d been glazed and delicately subdivided with muntins, opened up to prospect fore and aft. Across the room the other thick wall was now pierced by a French casement that opened on no “view” at all but a latticework of cedar. In a year’s time this trellis would be draped in leaves and the casement would open directly on a second and entirely different image of refuge: the gardener’s hedgey green wall, no farther away than your nose.
Behind me the big awning looked up the hill toward the meadow, which seemed to tumble down toward it, and, high above, the two peak windows on either gable each admitted a paragraph of sky—just enough light to flatter Charlie’s boat-hull ceiling, throwing its rhythms of wood into relief and coloring its fir straps blood orange. Though all the new windows were badly smudged, and the early winter sun was feeble, the little room was awash in a light that already seemed its own.
Naturally I had to test out the operation of my windows too. Each of them had its own custom operating system (tracking down workable hardware for these had been almost as difficult as finding the drip edge detail). What came as news to me was the way a particular arrangement of hinges and handles on a sash could call forth a particular physical gesture in the act of opening it, engaging the body in a very specific way. This building now summoned a whole vocabulary of these gestures, and each expressed a slightly different attitude toward the world outdoors. It was something an actor would have grasped immediately, how, say, hoisting one of the big awning sashes and hooking it to its chain (they hung from a chrome chain suspended from the ridge beam) felt like lifting a garage door overhead and heading out into the bright workaday morning, or maybe it was more like propping up the wooden flaps on your root beer stand—another hopeful A.M. gesture that said OPEN FOR BUSINESS. Whereas pushing open the rock window, which was hinged on the side and swung out like some kind of utility door, had something distinctly hatchlike and vehicular about it: You almost wanted to reach out and give somebody the old thumbs-up before shoving off. As for the French casement on the south wall, this window opened in an altogether different and more genteel world—a bedroom, say, or kitchen—and the action of its sash called for a refined, even feminine gesture, two hands drawing the day in like a breath. This window you could open in your pj’s, where the side window called for a uniform, maybe, or jumpsuit.
However attired, I could see that opening up and closing this building was definitely not going to be a swift or simple operation. For one thing, the procedure had to be executed in the correct sequence, always opening the French casement after raising the awning, lest the swinging sashes collide. It looked like summer mornings were going to enlist me in a skippery ritual of rigging and tacking the various parts of my building, and then at day’s end performing the reverse operation, carefully stowing everything and battening down the hatches, my own landlocked rendition of the seafarer’s rigmarole. One thing this building’s attitude toward the world outside its windows would not be was passive.
So what story did my windows have to tell, about nature and our relationship to it? The answer to this question eluded me at first, perhaps because the pictures of nature my windows offered were so various that they seemed to defy generalization. One frame might attend to the picturesque while another threw that whole idea into question, making a nice case for nature’s unspectaculars: the anonymous trees and weeds and ho-hum topographies of the middle distance. And still others had little use for pictures at all, preferring instead to snag a northerly breeze or wedge of overhead light. But maybe that was the point, or if not the point (for I doubt Charlie intended it) then at least the effect: to suggest that nature might be more various than any one of our conceptions of it. That any single view—whether it be wilderness or garden, sublime or picturesque, refuge or prospect—is only that, a version of nature and not the whole of it.
In place of the single, steady gaze, the room proposes a multitude of glimpses, and these are so different one from the next that sometimes it’s hard to believe a single tiny room that wasn’t a vehicle could supply them all. The picture of nature on offer here seems partial, mobile, and cumulative, built up not only from glances and gazes but also from the various bodily sensations that opening a particular window can provide, beginning with the feel of a handle’s grip and ending with a sample of the afternoon air. And every one of them is distinct—not only the view but the grip and even the air, whose scent and weight seem to shift with the cardinal points. And come summer, when I move into full porch mode, throwing the house as open as a gazebo or belvedere to the breeze and rush of space, the picture of nature on offer here will be more layered and complicated still. “Picture” won’t even be the word for it.
But then what about the word “transparency”? Surely that is part of the story these custom windows have to tell, with their in-swinging sash that can open the better part of a wall to the outdoor air. This is not, however, the transparency of a modernist, fooling the eye with an illusion of framelessness, so much as the qualified and much more sensual transparency of the porch. A porch is always frankly framed, as my building will be, by its thick, heavy walls, the ever-present ceiling, and the wooden visor in front that, like the visor on a cap, is a constant reminder that something’s been edited out, that here is one perspective. Rather than pretend to framelessness, to objectivity, opening all my windows will turn this whole building into a frame.
The romantics and the modernists were right to suspect the window frame of standing between ourselves and nature, between us and others, but I suspect they were probably wrong to think this distance could ever be closed. It won’t be, not by glass walls, not by flinging windows wide open, not even by blowing up the houses. For even outdoors, even in the pine wood that Thoreau said was his favorite room at Walden, we are still in some irreducible sense outside nature. As Walden itself teaches us, we humans are never simply in nature, like the beasts and trees and boulders, but are always also in relation to nature: looking at it through the frames of our various preconceptions, our personal and collective histories, our self-consciousness, our words. There might be value in breaking frames and pushing toward transparency, as Thoreau and his fellow romantics (the Zen masters too) have urged us to do, but the goal is probably beyond our reach. What other creature, after all, even has a relationship to nature? The window, with its qualified transparency and its inevitable frame, is the sign of this fact of relation, of difference.
This was, for me, a slightly melancholy discovery, since it had been in quest of a certain transparency that I’d set out on this journey. By building this house off in the woods, and by making it with my own hands, I’d hoped to break out of a few of the frames that stood between me and experience, especially the panes of words that boxed in so much of my time and attention and seemed to distance me from the world of things and the senses. Though I suppose I had accomplished this, it seemed clear now that what I’d really done was trade some old frames for a few new ones. Which might be the best we can hope for, transparency being as elusive as truth. Not that the trying wasn’t worth the effort; it was. Just look at what I had to show for it: this building and these new windows, for one thing, which have given me so much more than a view. And then there were the new and sometimes warring perspectives I’d acquired along the way—that of carpenter and architect, I mean, not to mention apprentice; there were all those new windows too. Maybe it wasn’t as important to see things as they “really” are as it was to see them freshly, scrupulously, and from more than one point of view.
Charlie had been right all along about going custom. To do so might not be straightforward or cheap, yet clearly it is possible to improve on the standard windows, these ways of seeing we’ve inherited. Some windows are better than others, can cast the world in a fresher light, even make it new. As Charlie said, you can pick up a pair of glasses at Woolworth’s, or you can spring for a prescription.
Yet there is still and always the frame, even if one has perfect vision and sleeps out under the stars. Transparency’s for the birds, for them and all the rest of nature. As for us, well, we do windows.