How to get your building down to the ground, the task that now confronted me, has always been a big issue for architects and builders, not only from an engineering perspective—the foundation being the place where a building is most vulnerable to the elements—but philosophically too.
This is perhaps especially true in America. Our architects seem to have devoted an inordinate amount of attention to the relationship of their buildings to the ground—which makes sense, in light of the fact that Americans have always believed, with varying degrees of conviction, that ours is somehow sacred ground, a promised land. The Puritans used to call the New World landscape “God’s second book,” and in the nineteenth century it became the preferred volume of the transcendentalists, who read the land for revelation and moral instruction. It is at any rate the ground of our freedom and, given our varied racial and ethnic composition, the one great thing we hold in common—the thing that makes us all Americans. So it matters how our buildings sit on this ground.
This might explain why, when you compare a great American house such as Monticello to the Palladian models on which it was based, the overriding impression is that Jefferson has put his house on much more sympathetic terms with the ground. Where Palladio’s blocky, classical villas stand somewhat aloof from the earth, Monticello stretches out comfortably over its mountaintop site as if to complete, rather than dominate, it. The horizontal inflection that Jefferson gave to Monticello—this sense that a building should unfold along the ground—proved to be prophetic, for it eventually became one of the hallmarks of American architecture. It finds expression in the floor plans of turn-of-the-century shingle-style houses, which ramble almost like miniature landscapes in imitation of the ground on which they sit, and even in the ground-hugging ranch houses of postwar suburbia.
This same gesture of horizontal expansiveness, behind which surely stand dreams of the frontier and the open road, is what gave even a public work such as the Brooklyn Bridge its powerful sense of horizontal release—“Vaulting the sea,” as Hart Crane wrote of it, and “the prairies’ dreaming sod…” And though considerably darkened, the gesture survives in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, D.C., perhaps the most stirring meditation yet on the American ground. Along an extended horizontal slit cut into the Mall, the memorial draws us down into the American ground itself, where we come literally face to face with it, to contemplate at once its violation—the slab of granite chronicling the names of the dead it now holds—as well as its abiding power of healing and renewal.
But the greatest, and sunniest, poet of the American ground was Frank Lloyd Wright, who no doubt bore some responsibility for the complicated footings I was about to undertake as the construction of my hut began. Viewed from one perspective, Wright’s lifelong project was to figure out how Americans might best make themselves at home on the land that forms this nation. “I had an idea,” he wrote, “that the planes parallel to the earth in buildings identify themselves with the ground, do most to make the buildings belong to the ground.” That this was something to be wished for went without saying for Wright, who liked to describe himself as “an American, child of the ground and of space.”
“What was the matter with the typical American house?” he asked in a 1954 book called The Natural House. “Well just for an honest beginning, it lied about everything.” It had no “sense of space as should belong to a free people” and no “sense of earth.” The first defect he sought to remedy with his open, outward-thrusting floor plans and powerful horizontal lines. The second meant rethinking the foundation, something on which no architect before or since has lavished quite so much attention. (Though with my hut’s footings, Charlie seemed to be mounting a respectable challenge.) Wright held that houses “should begin on the ground, not in it as they then began, with damp cellars.” He spoke of conventional foundations and basements as if they were unpardonable violations of the sacred ground plane. Along with attics, basements also offended Wright’s sense of democracy, since they implied a social hierarchy. (This was more than just a metaphor: Servants typically occupied one space or the other.) For Wright, the proper space of democracy was horizontal.
Wright devised several alternatives to the traditional foundation, including what he called the “dry wall footing”: essentially a concrete slab at ground level set on a bed of gravel. But even when Wright built more conventional foundations, he would specify that the framing begin on the inside edge of the masonry wall rather than at the outer edge, as is the standard practice. The effect he was after was a kind of plinth, “a projecting base course” of masonry to help the house “look as though it began there at the ground.” Not that this solution was really all that honest, since the house only appeared to rest on the ground; in fact, it often rested on a conventional foundation wall that sliced through the ground to form a cellar. Here where our buildings meet the earth, the ideal and the possible often seem to eye each other tensely.
Wright’s projecting base course of stone also served visually to “weld the structure to the ground”—something, by the way, that at the time only an American was apt to deem desirable. For at the precise historical moment that Wright was taking such pains to wed his buildings to the land, many European modernists were turning their backs on it and dispensing with foundations altogether. Le Corbusier was setting his houses on slender white stilts, or “pilotis,” that stepped gingerly over the ground as if it were unwholesome, touching it in as few places as possible and all but cursing the gravity that made contact with the earth necessary at all. The house of the future was supposed to be as rootless and streamlined as an airplane or ocean liner.
Even when Wright himself went to war against gravity, his purpose was not to escape the ground so much as to honor it. At Fallingwater, in western Pennsylvania, he cantilevered a house out over the waters of the Bear Run not so that it might seem to fly (“A house is not going anywhere,” he once said, in a dig at Le Corbusier’s vehicle worship, “at least not if we can help it”), but as a way to elaborate and extend the stratified rock ledge on which it is literally based. In a sense, Fallingwater is nothing but a foundation: The living space is a steel-reinforced concrete extension of the ledge rock that anchors the structure to the ground. Even a house as gravity-defying as this one was still what Wright said all American houses should be: “a sympathetic feature of the ground” expressing its “kinship to the terrain.”
It was ideas such as these that stood behind Charlie’s design for the footings of my hut, a sketch of which arrived in the mail in early October:
This somewhat daunting construction drawing made at least two things plain: A building’s relationship to the ground was a more complicated matter than an architect might want it to appear, and the outward impression and the actual engineering of that relationship were two entirely different matters.
The impression Charlie sought to create with our rock footings (which he soon took to calling the building’s “feet”) was of an unusually comfortable, almost relaxed relationship between the hut and the ground. (In his original concept, you will recall, the building’s relationship to the ground was so relaxed that I was going to need a house jack to square it up from time to time.) The four boulders on which the building sat (or at least appeared to sit) implied even more than a “kinship with the terrain”; they suggested the hut was in some sense part and parcel of its site.
Charlie’s objection to standard concrete piers was that they would have pierced the ground; like Wright, he felt the building should sit on the ground plane, not in it. Unlike Wright, however, he wanted his building to rest very lightly on the ground—hence the four discrete rocks instead of a continuous masonry foundation along the building’s perimeter. Nothing should staunch the flow of space coming down the hillside and through the building.
Though Charlie is not one to clothe his design choices in philosophical language or otherwise make large claims for what he does, his footing detail does imply a certain attitude toward the ground, an idea about nature and place. As he explained it to me when I expressed reservations about the footing detail, setting the building on rocks found on the site was a way “to incorporate something of the ‘here’ of this place into the design of the building.” He reminded me of the etching Marc-Antoine Laugier used to depict the birth of architecture, the four living trees in a forest enlisted to form the four posts of his primitive hut. “Rocks are what your site is about,” Charlie said. “Concrete would register as foreign matter here, something citified and imported. This is obviously not a primitive or vernacular building, but that doesn’t mean it can’t meet its place halfway, that there can’t be some give and take.”
Looked at from this perspective, any building represents a meeting place of the local landscape and the wider world, of what is given “Here” and what’s been brought in from “There.” The Here in this case is of course the site, but the site defined broadly enough to take in not only the sunlight and character of the ground, the climate and flora and slope, but also the local culture as it is reflected in the landscape—in the arrangements of field and forest and in the materials and styles commonly used to build “around here.” Conceivably, a building could be based entirely on such local elements, but this happens more seldom than we think: Even a structure as seemingly indigenous as a log cabin built with local timber is based on an idea and a set of techniques imported in the eighteenth century from Scandinavia. Backwoods survivalist types living “off the grid,” as they like to say, may flatter themselves about their independence, but in fact it is only the beavers and groundhogs who truly build locally, completely outside the influence of culture and history, beyond the long reach of There.
And There, of course, is just another way of saying the broader culture and economy, which in our time has become international. The term takes in everything from the prevailing styles of architecture and the state of technology to the various images and ideas afloat in the general culture, as well as such mundane things as the prime rate and the price of materials, labor, and energy. In fact a whole set of values can be grouped under the heading of “There,” and these can be juxtaposed with a parallel set of values that fit under the rubric “Here”:
THERE |
HERE | |
Universal |
Particular | |
Internationalism |
Regionalism | |
Progress |
Tradition | |
Classical |
Vernacular | |
Idea |
Fact | |
Information |
Experience | |
Space |
Place | |
Mobility |
Stability | |
Palladio |
Jefferson | |
Jefferson |
Wright | |
Abstract |
Concrete | |
Concrete |
Rock |
The juxtapositions can be piled up endlessly, and though matters soon get complicated (look what happens to concrete, or to Jefferson and Wright), they can still serve as a useful shorthand for two distinct ways of looking at, or organizing, the world.
The tension between the two terms is nothing new, of course. Thomas Jefferson was dealing with this when he imported Palladianism from Europe and gave it an American inflection; Monticello represents a novel synthesis of There and Here, of classicism and the American ground. (For Wright’s taste and time, however, Jefferson was still too much the classicist, which suggests that Here and There are strictly relative.) In our own time, the balance between the two terms has been steadily tilting toward the There end of the scale. There are some powerful abstractions on the side of There, and in the last century or so these have tended to run over the local landscape. The force and logic of these abstractions are what have helped farmland to give way to tract housing, city neighborhoods to ambitious schemes of “urban renewal,” and regional architecture to an “international style” that for a while elevated the principle of There—of universal culture—to a utopian program and moral precept. Modernism has always regarded Here as an anachronism, an impediment to progress. This might explain why so many of its houses walked the earth on white stilts, looking as though they wanted to get off, to escape the messy particularities of place for the streamlined abstraction of space.
One reason Frank Lloyd Wright was for many years regarded as old-fashioned (Philip Johnson, in his International Style days, famously dismissed Wright as “the greatest architect of the nineteenth century”) is that, even as he set about inventing the space of modern architecture, he continued to insist on the importance of Here—of the American ground. Wright always upheld the value of a native and regional architecture (one for the prairie, another for the desert) and resisted universal culture in all its guises—whether it came dressed in the classicism of Thomas Jefferson, the internationalism of the Beaux Arts movement, or the modernism of Le Corbusier.
In retrospect, Wright’s stance seems the more enlightened one, and these days everybody has a good word for regionalism and the sense of place. But it remains to be seen whether the balance between Here and There is actually being redressed, or whether universal culture, more powerful than ever, is merely donning a few quaint local costumes now that they’re fashionable and benign. I’ve never visited a “neotraditional” town like Seaside, the planned community on the Florida panhandle celebrated for its humane postmodern architecture and sense of neighborhood, but I can’t help wondering if the experience of sitting out on one of those great-looking front porches and chatting with the neighbors strolling by doesn’t feel just a bit synthetic. In an age of Disney and cyberspace, it may not be possible to keep a crude pair of terms like Here and There straight too much longer, not when a “sense of place” becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold on the international market, and people blithely use homey metaphors of place to describe something as abstract and disembodied as the Internet.
So a lot more than wooden posts were resting on Charlie’s rock feet. Intellectually, I had no problem with the footings, or what they stood for. One of the reasons I wanted to build this hut myself, after all, was to remedy the sense I had that I lived too much of my life in the realm of There, so steeped in its abstractions and mediations that Here had begun to feel like a foreign country. In a sense, Charlie’s footing was exactly what I was looking for. What could be more Here, more real, than a rock?
And yet as his daunting sketch made plain, Charlie’s rocks weren’t entirely real. Oh, they were real enough in and of themselves, as I would soon find out trying to coax them to the site, but they couldn’t really do what they appeared to do: hold up the corner posts that in turn held up the roof. The hidden concrete footing with the spike of steel running through it would have to do that. The rocks might be real, but the idea that they were holding up the building by themselves was nothing more than a romantic conceit, a metaphor.
That’s because the building’s supposedly “comfortable relationship” with the ground didn’t take the reality of the ground into account. And the reality of the ground, American or otherwise, is that it doesn’t particularly want a comfortable relationship with the buildings that sit on it, no matter who their architects are or how fond their regard for the land. Frank Lloyd Wright knew this, Charlie Myer knows this, anybody who’s ever built knows this: The ground that really matters, the only ground on which we can safely found a building, lies several feet below the ground we honor, the precise depth depending on the downward extent of frost in any particular place.
Around here the figure is forty-two inches—which is simply the depth below which no one can recall the ground ever having frozen. Anywhere above this point, rocks and even boulders will be constantly on the move, gradually shouldering their way up toward the surface under the irresistible pressure of freezing and thawing water. And any rock that sits on top of the ground, however immobile it may appear, is liable to get up and dance during a January thaw. The evidence was all around this place: in the tumbled-down stone walls that bound these fields like smudged property lines, and in the wooded waste areas where the farmer dumped the new crop of boulders he hauled out of his fields each spring. The extraordinary prestige that the ground enjoys, reflected in so many of our metaphors of stability and truth, is largely undeserved: Sooner or later that ground will be betrayed by a shifting underground. Which is why, in latitudes where the earth freezes every winter, a comfortable-looking relationship to the ground will require a somewhat uncomfortable amount of architectural subterfuge.
I wasn’t prepared to face up to the metaphysical implications of this fact quite yet, but I was ready to confront a practical one: If I was actually going to construct such a footing—one that implied a certain relationship to the ground but in fact depended on a very different (and undisclosed) relationship and therefore required not only the ostensible rock footing but a subtext of concrete and steel as well as a system to join these real and apparently real elements together—then I was going to need some help. I decided to take Judith’s advice and hire somebody, not only to assist with the footings but also to guide me through the countless other complexities that I was beginning to suspect Charlie’s “idiot-proof” design held in store.
Joe Benney was the man I had in mind. I first met Joe during the renovation of our house, when he was moonlighting for our contractor, helping out with the demolition, insulation, and all those other unglamorous construction tasks builders are only too happy to sub out. Joe’s day job at the time was in a body shop; fixing up wrecked cars is his passion, though bodywork is by no means his only marketable skill. Joe is, at twenty-seven, a master of the material world, equally at home in the realms of steel, wood, soil, plants, concrete, and machinery. At various times he has made his living as a mechanic (working on cars, diesel engines, and hydraulic rigs), a carpenter, a tree surgeon, a house painter, an excavator, a landscaper, a welder, and a footing man on a foundation crew. He also knows his way around plumbing and gardens and guns.
As you might guess from the number of careers Joe has already had at twenty-seven, none of them have lasted very long. From what I’ve gathered, and observed, the problem, if it is one, has to do with Joe’s mouth, not his hands. Joe hasn’t much patience for the kind of boss who fails to acknowledge that Joe knows more about his business than he does, which, unfortunately for Joe, happens to be the great majority of bosses. As I would soon find out for myself, Joe can also be a bit of a hothead; he says it’s his Irish blood. These qualities make for frequent job shifts and periods of unemployment, though since he is so variously talented these never last very long.
It happened that at the time I was puzzling over Charlie’s footing drawing, Joe was looking for some weekend work. I told him about the building, which I had been hoping to work on on weekends, and he offered to swing by to talk about it. Joe drives a small, somewhat beat-up Mitsubishi pickup, a vehicle longer on character than inspection-worthiness: no bumpers to speak of, smashed taillights, Grateful Dead decals on the cab window, and the name of his daughter—Shannon Marie—painted across the front of the hood. If not for the signature vehicle, I might not have recognized the fellow who climbed out of it that afternoon, with the broad cascade of auburn curls reaching halfway down his back. It’s only on a day off that you’ll see Joe without the cap (woolen in winter, baseball in summer) that he tucks his ponytail up into, to keep it clean on the job and perhaps also to keep down the grief. Joe is not very tall, but he’s a powerfully built thumb of a man, and depending on the current line of work, one section or another of his body is apt to be stuffed with muscle. Leaving aside his expertise, I very much liked the idea of having someone as strong as Joe around to help move boulders and lift six-by-ten posts.
We walked out to the site, where I showed him Charlie’s sketches for the building as well as the footing detail. He studied the drawings for a minute or two, made the obligatory carpenter’s crack about architects (“ivory tower,” etc.), and then said what he always says any time you ask him if he might be interested in a project:
“Piece a cake.”
We settled on an hourly rate and agreed to get started as soon as I had my building permit and the holes for the footing could be dug. Originally I had planned on digging them myself, but a backhoe was going to be on the property later in the month (to repair the pond; it’s a long story), so I’d figured I might as well have the excavator do it. Digging a half-dozen four-foot-deep holes in this ground by hand was a job I was happy to skip; it’s one thing to honor the rocks around here, and quite another to confront them at the end of a spade. Before he took off, Joe offered to give me a hand staking out each of the six holes to be dug—one at each of the building’s corners and then a pair in the middle of the rectangle, where the building would step down with the grade of the site.
Charlie and I had already staked two of the corners over the July Fourth weekend, deciding on the building’s precise location with respect to the rock (crouching a few steps back so as not to upstage it) as well as its orientation to the sun. Joe asked me how we’d determined the precise angle. It hadn’t been easy. The obvious solution would have been to adopt the orientation of the small clearing alongside the boulder, which ran more or less due east to west. But that angle would have admitted too much direct sunlight through the front window of the building, even with its visor, particularly on spring and autumn afternoons. Due west also put the big ash tree directly in my line of sight, which promised to block the sense of prospect from the desk.
So Charlie and I had experimented, the two of us standing side by side where the front window would be, facing dead straight ahead and revolving our bodies in a stiff, incremental pirouette, one of us occasionally leaving the front line to check the view from another imaginary window. As we pivoted the building on its axis, each ten-degree shift in angle caused a revolution in perspective from every window. We would nudge the front of the building into a winning prospect only to find that the south-facing casement window now stared out at a Ford Pinto up on blocks in my neighbor’s yard. This must have gone on for an hour or more, both of us reluctant to give up without testing every conceivable angle. We were planting the building, after all, determining what was going to be my angle on things for a long time to come. Finally we hit upon one that seemed to satisfy all the windows and avoid a too-direct confrontation with the ash or the afternoon sun. By the compass, my angle on things was going to be 255 degrees, or 15 degrees south of due west.
Now Joe and I made preparations to fix this perspective in concrete. Once we had planted the four corner stakes, making sure they formed a rectangle of the dimensions specified on Charlie’s footing plan (14?2? by 8?9?), we checked to make sure it was square by measuring the diagonals; if the lengths of the two diagonals were equal, that meant the rectangle was square. This may have been the first time in my life I had successfully applied an axiom learned in high school geometry. Though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I was opening a chapter in my life in which the rules of geometry would loom as large as the rules of grammar ordinarily do. It seemed like a snap, too, but then I still had no idea how much less forgiving the new rules could be.
Now we had a life-size diagram of the building, outlined on the ground in yellow nylon string, and the effect of it, on the site but also on my spirits, was larger than I might have guessed. Part of it, I suppose, was the sense of satisfaction that often comes from making a straight line in nature—whether in a row of seedlings, a garden path, or a baseball diamond. “Geometry is man’s language,” Le Corbusier used to say, and it was cheering to see this perfect rectangle take shape on the rough, unreliable ground. (Who knows, but the fact that the rectangle’s proportions chimed with the Golden Section might have had something to do with it too.) All our abstract drawings on paper were at last being transferred to the real world.
While I stood there admiring the view from inside my box of string, Joe had been sitting up on top of the big rock, studying Charlie’s footing plan. He had been uncommonly quiet up to now, merely nodding as I explained to him the thinking behind the various decisions Charlie and I had made, and I had taken his silence for consensus. More likely, he’d been doing his best not to second-guess us, because now he interrupted my reverie with a question.
“Do you really want to put fir posts directly on top of a rock?”
I didn’t see why not.
“In one word? Rot.”
He explained that the end grain of the posts would wick up moisture from the boulders they sat on, a bad enough situation made worse by the fact that, among woods, fir offers relatively little resistance to rot.
“My building, I’d do it differently. But it’s up to you.”
“It’s up to you” just might be the single most irritating thing you can say to somebody under the circumstances, a cranky parody of the liberty it pretends to bestow. But I decided to keep a lid on my annoyance.
“So how do you suggest we do it?”
“Couple of options,” he began, settling a little too quickly into the role of tutor, his laconic manner of a few moments ago now a memory. I was treated to a detailed lecture about the virtues and drawbacks of pressure-treated lumber (wood that has been immersed under pressure in a solution of chemicals, including arsenic and copper, to kill off the microorganisms that dine on wood). This was followed by a disquisition on the relative weather-resistance of a dozen different tree species, beginning with pine (highly vulnerable) and ending with locust, which is so hard and rot resistant that it can be sunk naked into the ground. Redwood or cedar would apparently last much longer than fir, though both were considerably more expensive. Finally, Joe ran through a list of the various wood preservatives and sealants on the market, things we could apply to the end grain if I decided to stick with fir.
Everything Joe was saying sounded sensible, but I told him I wanted to consult with Charlie before making a decision. This was the wrong thing to say. I should simply have said I wanted to think it over. Invoking Charlie’s authority clearly annoyed Joe, who evidently had already concluded that Charlie was just another ivory-tower architect with his head in the clouds, if not someplace worse. Joe works hard at seeming to take things in stride, however. He maintains a whole vocabulary of phrases to indicate how non-chalant he is—“piece a cake,” “cool,” “I’m easy,” “no problem,” “no sweat”—as well as some novel contractions of these, one of which he now produced, along with a slightly offended, suit-yourself hike of the shoulders:
“Cake.”
Joe’s monosyllabic shrug masked strong feelings, and immediately I could see that this construction project was not going to escape the edginess that traditionally crops up between architects and builders, a complicated set of tensions rooted in real differences of outlook and interest and, inevitably, social class. On building sites all over the world, architects are figures of ridicule, their designs derided for their oddness or impracticality and their construction drawings, which on a job site are supposed to have the force of law, dismissed as cartoons or “funny papers.” What remained to be seen on this particular site, however, was exactly where I fit into this drama, since I was both client (traditionally an ally of the architect) and builder. The fact that I would be working on this project, and not just paying for it, changed everything. I was the patron of Charlie’s fancy ideas, but I also faced the practical problem of making them work, something I probably couldn’t manage without Joe’s help. Among other things, Joe was poking around to see whose authority I was placing first.
And I wasn’t sure. Joe had shifted the ground on me a bit, which is why I hoped to table for the time being the issue of how our fir posts would meet their rock feet. I’d always regarded Charlie as a realist among architects, somebody with his own feet planted firmly in the world, and an authority on practical questions. His footing detail may have gotten a little baroque, but that was only because its romance of the ground had been tempered by what seemed like some hardheaded realism about it—hence the four feet of concrete and the steel rods. What could possibly be more down-to-earth than that footing drawing?
But if Joe was right, he had spotted what appeared to be the Achilles’ heel of Charlie’s footing detail. It wasn’t a problem we had to solve right away—whatever we did about it, the concrete piers first had to be poured, the boulders drilled and pinned. Touchy though he might be at times, I felt relieved to know Joe would be along on what promised to be a treacherous voyage to the material underworld. I’d found my prickly Virgil.
A few weeks later I paid a visit to Bill Jenks, the local building inspector. Though Charlie hadn’t quite finished the construction drawings, with his rough sketches and the footing plan I could apply for the building permit I would need before Joe and I could pour the footings. On any construction project, the building inspector is a slightly intimidating figure, since he wields the power to order expensive changes in a design or force a builder to redo any work that isn’t “up to code.” He is the final authority—the building trade’s judge, superego, and reality principle rolled into one—and he holds the power to condemn any building that doesn’t meet his approval. I once asked a contractor whom he appealed to when there was a difference of opinion with the building inspector. The fellow squinted at me for the longest time, trying to determine if I could possibly be serious. He’d never heard of anyone questioning a ruling from the building inspector. But surely there must be some court of appeal, I insisted. What about due process? The Fourteenth Amendment? “I suppose you could appeal to the governor,” he offered after long reflection. “Weicker might be able to overrule Jenks.”
“Code” consists of a few thousand rules, most of them commonsensical (the minimum dimension of a doorway, for example: 2?4?) but many others obscure and seemingly picayune (the maximum number of gallons of water in a toilet tank: 1.6). The house that satisfies every jot and tittle of the building code probably hasn’t been built yet, which is why a building inspector is given wide latitude in the exercise of his judgments. He has the authority to sign off on minor transgressions. Or he can go strictly by the book. Most of the contractors I’ve met live in constant low-grade terror of the building inspector.
You might think that, since the building inspector’s mission in life is to look out for the interests of the consumer, who on this particular job happened to be me, Jenks could in this instance be expected to go fairly easy. In the days before my interview with him, the approach of which instilled in me a moderate but unshakable level of dread, I’d taken no small comfort in this theory. But when I tried it out on Joe, the night before my meeting, he said I could forget it. The building inspector is paid to take a very, very long view, Joe explained. He’s thinking about hundred-year storms (the worst storm to hit a region in a century, a conventional standard for structural strength) and about the persons yet unborn who will own and occupy my hut in the next century.
My first impression of Jenks did little to relieve my anxiety. Actually, it wasn’t an impression of Jenks himself, but of his boots, which stood rigidly at attention outside the door to his office. They were knee-high black riding boots, easily a size thirteen, that had been arrayed with military precision and buffed to a parade-ground sheen. The boots said two things to me, neither of them reassuring. First, any man who would wear them was without a doubt drunk with power, very possibly a closet sadist or a collector of Nazi paraphernalia. Second, such a person had a serious fetish for meticulousness: You could shave in the shine on these boots, they butted the wall at ninety degrees dead on, and the space between them appeared to have been microcalibrated.
These were the boots of the man who would be judging my craftsmanship each step of the way.
Fortunately, the man himself wasn’t quite as intimidating as his footwear, though he certainly took his sweet time looking over the drawings I spread out across his drafting table. Jenks was slender and tall, perhaps six foot two, though his posture made him seem considerably taller: The man was plumb. Picture a two-by-four with a handlebar mustache. For a long time Jenks said nothing, just stood there smoothing down the ends of his great black handlebars as he walked his eyes over every inch of Charlie’s drawings.
“Looks to be sturdy enough,” he announced at last. I took this as a compliment, until I realized he was making fun of the beefy four-by fir timbers Charlie had spec’d for the frame, which were substantially more substantial than a one-story outbuilding required. “See a lot of tornadoes out your way?” I laughed, largely, and it seemed as though everything was going to be all right. Which it was, until he got to the footing detail and stopped. He began tapping the drawing with his pencil eraser, lightly at first, then much harder and faster. “Nope. I won’t approve this as drawn. Any framing within eight inches of the ground must be pressure-treated, and that includes the posts sitting on these rocks.” Joe had been right; the footing was indeed my hut’s Achilles’ heel.
But Jenks was willing to give me the building permit anyway, provided I signed a piece of paper promising to make the changes he specified. He instructed me to call for a field inspection as soon as we’d poured the footing, then again when the framing was complete. I left his office feeling buoyant, official, launched at last. When I got home I walked out to the site and nailed the bright yellow cardboard building permit to a tree. The following morning, we would pour.
Concrete is peculiar stuff, so accommodating one moment, so adamant the next. Not that it’s the least bit mercurial—few things in this world are as reliable as concrete. Wet, it can be counted on to do almost anything you want; it’s as happy taking its formal cues from a mold as it is acceding to gravity. Vertical, horizontal, square or curved, ovoid or triangular, concrete can be made to do it all, no complaints. Once cured, however, the stuff’s incorrigible, as stubborn and implacable as rock. What was feckless is now transcendently determined, and all but immortal. In the case of concrete, there’s no turning back, no melting it down to try again, as plastic or metal permits, no cutting it to fit, like wood. Here in a handful of cold gray glop is the irreversible arrow of time, history’s objective correlative. A fresh batch of concrete can pass into the future along an almost infinite number of paths—as road, bridge, pier, sculpture, building, or bench—but once a path is taken, it is as one-way and fixed as fate. Right here is where the two meanings of the word “concrete”—the thing and the quality—intersect: for what else in the world is more particular?
These are the kinds of thoughts working with concrete inspires, on a suitably gray and chilly November afternoon. Although one or two steps in the process are critical, for the most part mixing and pouring concrete doesn’t fully engage the intellect, leaving plenty of room for daydream or reflection. Mainly it’s your back that’s engaged, hauling the eighty-pound sacks of ready-mix to the site, pouring them into a wheelbarrow along with twelve quarts of water per bag, and then mixing the stiff, bulky batter with a rake until it’s entirely free of lumps. The stuff is very much like a cake mix, in fact, except that each batch weighs more than three hundred pounds (three bags plus nine gallons of water) and licking the fork is not a temptation. You can make concrete from scratch too, mixing the gravel, sand, and Portland cement (a powder fine as flour) according to the standard recipe (roughly, 3:2:1 for a foundation), but for a job this size Joe had recommended ready-mix, the Betty Crocker of concrete.
Pliny wrote somewhere that apples were the heaviest of all things. I don’t know about that. It’s my impression that eighty pounds of concrete weighs a good deal more than eighty pounds of almost anything else, apples included. Apples at least show some inclination toward movement—they will roll, given half a chance—whereas a bag of concrete lying on the ground very much wants to stay there. Add water, and the resultant mud is so thick and heavy—so stubbornly inert—that dragging a tool through it even once is a project. I would plunge my rake head down into the mire and then pull at it with all the strength I could summon, which yielded maybe six or seven inches of movement, copious grunts, and an almost exquisite frustration at the sheer indifference of matter at rest. Hats off, I thought, to the Mafia capo who first perceived the unique possibilities for horror in sinking a man’s feet in cement. For Joe the stuff behaved a good deal more like cake batter, however, and whenever my stirring grew so lugubrious that the concrete threatened to set, he would take the rake from me and, throwing his powerful back and shoulders into the work, whip the concrete smooth as if with a wire whisk.
For forms we were using sonotubes, which are nothing more than thick cardboard cylinders—stiffened, oversize toilet paper rolls sunk into the earth. Whenever Joe judged a batch of concrete “good to go,” the two of us would shoulder the wheelbarrow into position, tip it down toward the lip of the sonotube and then, with a shovel, herd the cold gray slurry into the cylinder. It would land four feet down at the bottom of the shaft with a sequence of satisfying plops. The sonotubes were cavernous—fourteen inches in diameter, broad enough to give our boulders a nice, comfortable seat—and it took almost two barrow loads to fill each one. But by the end of the day all six had been filled—more than a ton of concrete mixed and poured by hand. Then with a hacksaw we cut lengths of threaded steel rod and inserted them in the center of each concrete cylinder. We bent the submerged end of each rod to improve its purchase on the concrete and then left about eight inches exposed above the top of the pier; to this pin we would bolt our boulders.
By now the two of us matched the color of the dimming, overcast sky, each cloaked in a fine gray powder that had infiltrated every layer of our clothing, even our skin. I don’t think my hands have ever been more dry; the insides of my nose and sinuses felt like they were on fire. (Joe said that the limestone in the Portland cement sucked the moisture out of tissue.) I was also exhausted, stiff, and chilled to the bone, wet concrete being not only heavier than any known substance, but colder too. Some part of me that didn’t appreciate these sensations inquired sarcastically if the experience had been sufficiently real. Joe counseled a hot shower, ibuprofen, and a tube of Ben-Gay.
By the next morning the concrete had cured enough that I could stand on the piers. To do so was to acquire a whole new appreciation of the concept of stability. Maybe it was just the hardness of the concrete, or the width of the piers, which were as big around as the seat of a chair, but I had a powerful sense that I stood upon reliable ground, beyond the reach of frost heaves or flood, beyond, in fact, the reach of almost any vicissitude I could think of. Suddenly I understood the prestige and authority of foundations. Whatever happens to the building erected on top of it, bound as it is to bend under the pressures of weather and time and taste, the foundation below will endure. The woods all around here are littered with them, ancient cellar holes lined in fieldstone. Though the frame houses they once supported have vanished without trace, the foundations remain, crusted with lichens but otherwise unperturbed.
I could see why so many writers and philosophers would be drawn to the authority of foundations for their metaphors of permanence and transcendence. The classic example is Walden, which is at bottom (to borrow one of the book’s most well-worn metaphors) an extended search for a good foundation—for the ground on which to build a better, truer life. Thoreau’s goal, he tells us in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” is to reach down “below freshet and frost and fire [to] a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” Truth is to be found below the frost line.
Western philosophers have always been attracted to such images of the reliable ground, along with the various other architectural metaphors that arise from it. Descartes depicted philosophy as the building of a structure on a well-grounded foundation; in similar language, Kant described metaphysics as an “edifice” of thought raised up on secure “foundations” that in turn must be placed on stable “ground.” Heidegger, a critic of this tradition (who nevertheless likened thinking to building), defined metaphysics as a search for “that upon which everything rests”—a search for a reliable foundation. By borrowing these kinds of metaphors, philosophers have sought to grant some of the firmness, logic, and objectivity of buildings to systems of thought that might otherwise seem a good deal less manifest or authoritative. Architectural metaphors can also lend an air of immortality to a philosophical idea, perhaps because there are buildings standing in Europe that are older than philosophy itself.
So it makes good sense that contemporary critics of metaphysics—who, tellingly, lump all of its various schools and practitioners under the rubric of “foundationalism”—would spend as much time and energy as they do attacking its reliance on architectural metaphors. Jacques Derrida has made a brilliant career of illuminating the inconstant “undergrounds” beneath the supposedly firm and final ground of metaphysical truth. It’s for good reason that the most famous critique of metaphysics goes by the name of “deconstruction.” (There is a large irony here in the fact that, after centuries of lending philosophers the authority of their architectural metaphors, architects today should be so eager to borrow the one metaphor from philosophy—deconstruction—whose express purpose is to attack that very authority.)
But while the prestige of foundations may have been unfairly exploited over the years in the selling of various philosophical and literary bills of goods, it’s hard to see why this borrowing should make anyone doubt the credibility of unmetaphorical foundations—the kind made out of real concrete and steel. Whether or not Thoreau can fairly lay claim to it, whether or not I can actually sense it standing on top of my concrete piers, a certain kind of truth does reside forty-two inches beneath the ground, down there beneath freshet and frost. A foundation rooted this deeply can be counted on in a way that, say, some philosopher’s idea of the truth cannot, no matter how “grounded” he claims it to be. For one thing, I don’t have to subscribe to its meaning in order for it to work. It doesn’t mean; it just is—something hard and real and unambiguous that Joe and I have added to the world. Step down on the footing, hard, and you will not think: Hmmm…ambiguous.
But what about the building that doesn’t have such a good foundation to stand on? What happens when builders dispense with their notions of frost-line truth in the way that some contemporary philosophers have? While Joe and I were humping progressively more obstinate sacks of concrete from his truck out to the site, I’d speculated out loud about whether it was absolutely essential for a footing to go the full forty-two inches. I knew all about frost heaves, but I was starting to wonder just how big a difference it would really make, aside from the inconvenience of sticking doors and windows, if my building did move a few inches this way or that each winter—if it went along with the natural slipping and sliding of earth, rather than trying to resist it absolutely. Exhaustion can sometimes encourage one’s thoughts in a romantic or even relativistic direction, and with each sack of mud mix I hoisted to my shoulder, the notion of building directly on boulders, of letting the ground have its way with the building, seemed a little less crazy, and even sort of poetic. If things got too far out of kilter, I could always resort to the house jack.
Joe, who can carry two bags of ready-mix at a time, one on each shoulder, had offered me a quick refresher from high school geometry about the instability of four-sided forms as compared to, say, three-sided ones. It’s a fairly easy matter to collapse a cube by applying pressure to its surfaces unevenly, which accounts for the ubiquity of tripods, the endurance of pyramids. But long before our cube would collapse, the shifting of its foundation would set in motion an incremental process that would doom the building just as surely. The slightest movement of the footings would ramify throughout the structure, gradually eroding one after another of its right angles; “trueness,” in the carpenter’s sense, is the first casualty of a poor foundation. First the door frame falls out of square, since it is braced on only three sides. Then the windows. A building is a brittle thing, and eventually its seal against the weather will be broken—through a crack in the roof, perhaps, or in the slight discrepancy that arises between a ninety-degree window sash and what has become an eighty-nine-degree window frame. Now, a drip at a time, water enters the building and the process of its decomposition begins. As Joe put it, “Pretty soon, it’s termite food.”
As it happened, the dismal end result of precisely this process could be observed only a few steps from the sturdy pier on which I stood. In the woods on the far side of the path to the site stood, or I should say lay, a pair of decrepit outbuildings that had recently collapsed. Today these structures are nothing more than a sandwich of boards, but ten years ago, when we bought the place, a wall or two still stood—they were still recognizable as buildings. I remember thinking that they looked like capsized boats arrested in the process of sinking, in slow motion, back into the land. One of the structures appeared to have been a handyman’s shack, the other a chicken coop. The ridge beam of the shack had collapsed on one side, submerging one end of the house in underbrush. The floor by now was earth, the floorboards having rotted away, and a maple tree was growing out through the window at the gable end still standing. Inside, if that word still meant anything, staghorn sumacs were ganged around a rusted stove.
It was a forlorn, slightly spooky place. Fewer than twenty years had passed since someone had lived here, and already the signs of habitation had grown faint, as the forest went methodically about the business of erasing the shack from the landscape. Lumber was reverting to trees, geometry to rank growth, and inside to outside, in a swift reversal of human work. Today, all that remains is a roughly shuffled deck of boards sprawled amid the second growth, something you might not notice if it wasn’t pointed out.
I don’t know for a fact that a shallow footing is responsible for the shack’s ruin. It could as easily have started with a leak in the roof. But however it found its way in, the culprit, the chief means by which the forest reclaims any human construction, is the same: water. Lumber may not be alive exactly, but it is still part of the nutrient cycle of the forest and will return to it sooner or later. With our foundations and shingles, our paint and caulk and weather strip, we can stave off that time, postpone wood’s fate, sometimes for hundreds of years. But, like everything else once alive, lumber is on loan from the land and in thrall to water, which, in concert with the conspiracy of insects and microorganisms we call rot, eventually will reduce it to compost. In the end it was this tug of life that pulled down the shack.
It occurred to me that, on my little chart, the ruined shack definitely came under the heading of “Here,” and now even more than during its inhabited days. Indeed, the shack was in the process of succumbing utterly to the Here of this place; it was precisely those elements that had come from There—the geometry of its rafters; the manufactured goods on its shelves; the electrical wiring that, by linking the shack to the national grid, had made it possible to read a book or write a letter in it after dark—that nature was erasing. It is Here, I realized, that abhors all those things and has as its purpose their obliteration. In its ultimate form, Here consisted not only of the local boulders we planned to enlist in the new building’s footings, but also the local termites and bacteria and the dark sift of compost forming on the forest floor beneath the old building, all the cycles of growth and decay at work in this ground, its powerful tug of life—and also death. (Which is one unromantic fact about the ground that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not overlook.) No, Here wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to embrace too tightly.
It was in fact something you wanted to thwart, to defy, even as you flattered it with romantic architectural details such as rock footings. “Nature is hard to overcome,” we read in Walden, of all places, “but she must be overcome.” This, according to Le Corbusier, is architecture’s first principle and purpose: to defy time and decay. That, and to wrest a space from nature to house all those things we value—books, conversation, marriage—that nature has no place or use for. A good foundation, these three and a half feet of concrete interposed between me and the damp, hungry ground, is how we start.
Yet it is only a start. For even with the three and a half feet of concrete, Joe and Jenks were both convinced my foundation would fail my building unless something was done about the joining of its wood frame to its rock feet. When I first brought this problem to Charlie’s attention, soon after Joe raised it, he had suggested we could simply soak the end grain of the fir in a bucket of Cuprinol, no big deal. Later, when I told him Jenks was insisting on pressure-treated posts, Charlie seemed taken aback, and somewhat resistant. Charlie knew perfectly well that code prohibited untreated wood to come within eight inches of the ground; he had just figured the boulders themselves would provide that margin. It was a question of perspective: To Charlie the boulders were part of the foundation; to Jenks they were part of the ground.
Charlie hated the idea of going to pressure-treated. The corner posts figured prominently in his design, and pressure-treated lumber is ugly stuff. Most of the wood used in the process is inferior to start with, typically an unlovely species like Southern yellow pine, which has a tendency to “check,” or crack, along its loose, uneven grain. The chemical bath in which the wood is soaked also tinges it an artificial shade of green that is virtually impossible to remove or hide. I asked him about switching to redwood or cedar, as Joe had suggested. He guessed the cost would be prohibitive (and he was right: six-by-ten redwood posts would have cost $280 each, cedar not a whole lot less), and anyway, those species seemed too exotic for my hut. Fir might come from the Northwest, Charlie said, but it was used so commonly in New England as to be a vernacular building material. Another Here/There deal, in other words. I didn’t think I wanted to mention this line of logic to Joe.
Charlie said he needed a few days to come up with an alternative. In the meantime, Joe and I moved ahead with the footings. We spent part of one Sunday collecting eligible boulders from around the property. Not surprisingly, the land offered a rich field of candidates, and we carefully weighed the dimensions, color, and geology of several dozen, factoring in a handicap based on a given boulder’s proximity to the site. A cubic foot of granite weighs approximately 150 pounds, so a boulder sitting more than, say, a hundred yards from the foundation really had to be gorgeous to receive serious consideration. Within an hour we had wheelbarrowed or rolled a half-dozen promising rocks to the site, most of them flattish specimens of granite or gneiss about a yard wide and at least eighteen inches deep; anything smaller, we decided, would seem dinky beneath the big posts. We avoided shale or slate, rock that is more likely to crack under pressure, and even though we found some nice limestone and marble, these didn’t look indigenous, so we passed. In short order I’d become a connoisseur of the local stone and could see that Cornwall rock had a certain look to it. Its skin was mottled gray-green, and its shapes were softly rounded, every sharpness weathered away. So these qualities became part of our ideal.
Joe had managed to borrow a rotary hammer from a landscaper he worked for, and the tool, which is actually a high-powered drill, made surprisingly easy work of boring half-inch holes through the boulders for our pins. The drill was the size of a viola and heavy enough that it wanted two hands, and ideally a big gut, to hold it steady, like a jackhammer. We took turns, one of us wielding the drill, the other a bucket of water, used to dissipate the heat generated by the bit boring through rock and to flush out the fine stone dust that collected in the deepening cavity. The bit emitted a terrible scream as it ate into the stone, but the granite yielded easily, almost as if it were tooth.
Now the boulders looked like monstrous gemstones; strung on a length of steel cable, they’d make a necklace for a Cyclops. We set them in mortar, slopping scoops of steel gray mud on top of the piers to form a custom-fitted seat beneath each rock. It took the two of us to hoist a boulder over its steel rod, struggling to line up the tiny hole with the even tinier pin, a process not unlike threading a 350-pound needle. The weight of the rocks could easily have crumpled the steel, so before we could begin to lower a boulder onto its pin we had to position the opening over it exactly, peering through the pinhole in the rock, as if it were the lens of a microscope, until the tiny metallic point swam into view. As we struggled to reconcile these rough beasts to their improbable new purpose, the orderly drafting table in Cambridge where the rock footings had had their immaculate conception seemed a world or two away. Did Charlie have any idea what was involved in making these footings actually work? For the first (but not the last) time, I was able to join in Joe’s diatribe against the architectural profession with some gusto.
After we’d secured our boulders to their pins with lug nuts, two more holes in each rock remained to be drilled, to anchor the pins that would hold the posts in place, preventing any sideways movement, or “shear.” Now the location of each hole became more critical still, so we measured our diagonals once again to make sure we were square. Next we cut a short length of steel rod for each hole, into which we squeezed a dab of Rockite, a space-age mortar that Joe claimed would form a bond stronger even than the granite itself; once the stuff set, it supposedly could hold up a truck. The other end of each rod we’d slip into a hole drilled in the bottom of a post.
Now our footings were ready to receive their posts—once we’d settled, that is, on an acceptable way to join them. Charlie had come back with the idea of using post anchors: small aluminum platforms that are typically used to protect the wood framing on decks from their concrete footings. A post anchor is like a shoe; it elevates the wood an inch or so above the concrete in order to keep its end grain from getting wet. Since post anchors are commonly used to join ordinary lumber to concrete, we figured the precedent might help persuade Jenks to accept Charlie’s footing paradigm—in which the boulders are regarded as part of the foundation rather than the ground—and drop his insistence on pressure-treated lumber. The only problem was, we could find no manufacturer who made post anchors large enough to accommodate a six-by-ten post. The biggest we could find were six by six.
First Charlie suggested we have anchors custom made, a notion I refused to pay the respect of serious consideration. I’d already been floored by the quotes I was getting from lumberyards for the “appearance grade” fir Charlie had spec’d for my posts ($80 each; I needed eight), and I told him I wasn’t about to engage the services of a metal foundry in the construction of a hut. A day or two later he faxed me a sketch, in which he proposed we cut back the ends of our posts at an angle so they could accommodate six-by-six post anchors, like so:
A note was scribbled beneath the drawing: “How about high-heeled shoes for our posts, instead of workboots? I kind of like it.” I didn’t. They looked like pigs’ feet to me, incongruously feminine, and far too delicate for the weight they had to bear. It seemed to me the footings were getting too fancy now, too careful. They made you think of furniture, the legs of which traditionally taper as they near the ground in a gesture of refinement. In a building, which I think of as being a lot more businesslike about how it gets its weight down to the ground, the same gesture seemed too clever, even slightly ironic.
Then I had an idea of my own. Why couldn’t we simply place a thin piece of pressure-treated lumber between the end grain of the post and the surface of the rock? If this wooden pad had the same footprint as the posts—a ten-inch section of a two-by-six, say—it would scarcely be visible, especially after the wood had aged. We could sell it to Jenks on the theory that it was no different from the pressure-treated sills builders commonly interpose between ordinary wood framing and the top of a new foundation. Aside from the fact that nobody else had come up with the idea, which made me suspect some lurking flaw in it, my pressure-treated minisill seemed like a workable and cheap solution. So what had I overlooked?
First I tried the idea out on Joe, who loved it. He even broke out one of his cherished workplace clichés for the occasion: “Mike, you’re a genius with a J.” And I did sort of feel like patting myself on the back, this being very possibly the most nuts-and-bolts empirical idea I had had in my life. Charlie was considerably less enthusiastic, however. My solution would work all right, he allowed, but it was inelegant.
“Come on, Charlie, we’re talking about a tiny detail here. Nobody is ever going to notice it, except maybe you.”
“I can’t help it,” he grumped. “I’m a micro-architect. These ‘tiny’ details are everything.”
But Charlie understood the time had come to compromise. He had to concede my solution was a whole lot better than pressure-treated posts, and he offered to call Jenks to make the case as to why the boulders should be regarded as part of the foundation and my pressure-treated shoes as traditional foundation sills.
Jenks bought it. We were off the ground at last.
Three and a half feet of concrete, three threaded steel rods, a few scoops of mortar, one granite boulder, one lug nut, two dabs of Rockite, and now a pair of pressure-treated shoes: my hut’s “rustic” rock footing had certainly gotten complicated since Charlie first conceived it. As Joe and I worked on the pressure-treated pads, drilling and then seating them on their own beds of mortar, I thought about just how much effort, ingenuity, and technology it had taken to achieve such a seemingly simple and artless effect. Yet to look at the footings now was to have no idea of their complexity: Here were four boulders in a clearing in the woods, laid out to form a rectangle. Aside from the wooden pads sitting on them, the only clue to the fact that these were no ordinary boulders were the incongruous silver lug nuts that bolted them to the world.
And yet the footings weren’t perfect, at least by their architect’s lights. Until now, all of the artifice and subterfuge employed in their construction had been invisible, kept backstage or underground. But the pressure-treated shoes promised to alter slightly the hut’s appearance, to put a tiny crimp in the “comfortable relationship” between its corner posts and the ground. Its posts would be barefoot no longer. Their new shoes constituted the building’s first visible compromise with the exigencies of construction—the hut’s first declension from its drafting-table ideal.
This bothered me at first. But after a while I began to appreciate that such compromises were an inevitable part of the work of building, if not, in some sense, its very essence. The building that refuses to embrace the contingencies of regulation and economics, of the weather and the ground, of the available technology and the abilities of its builders, is a building that never gets built. Joe has an expression he trots out from time to time, often around quitting time, when we’ve paused to look over the day’s work, or after he’s decided that some bit of carpentry he’s been struggling with for too long is never going to be perfect, but will have to do. “Call it good,” Joe will say. It seemed the right thing to say about the pressure-treated shoes. They weren’t ideal, but they would do. My building had fallen into the world.