“It seems so strange,” I said, “to see it sitting up there, unattached.”
George looked over and smiled. “Well, you know most old houses aren’t connected to their foundations anyway, right?”
“Wait. What?”
“New ones are bolted down, but the old ones just sit on top.”
I thought of earthquakes, windstorms, floods—all things that happen in the Pacific Northwest on a fairly regular basis.
“What keeps old houses in place?” I asked.
“Gravity,” George said. “And luck.”
How could I not have known this? I wondered. Or maybe I did know but just didn’t want to acknowledge it, the way we never really want to acknowledge the suspension of disbelief necessary to move through our daily lives—to drive large metal objects at high speeds, get married, have children. Who could ever sleep soundly knowing their house was just itching to go on a walkabout? I had a vision of our hundred-year-old Craftsman in Seattle. We’d lived there for more than a decade, and we’d never actually been safe, if you thought about it.
* * *
—
IT IS PROBABLY FITTING that many houses in the United States are not attached to their foundations. We are a mobile population, after all. In 2007, the US Census Bureau calculated that the average American will move 11.7 times in their life, while Europeans will move only four times on average, according to a RE/MAX Europe study.
In this way, I am a completely typical American. I grew up moving. West to east to west. North to south to north. Not every year, but every five or so—an awkward length of time. I learned early the art of the quick setting down and pulling up of roots. I made friends, and then let them go. In that pre-Facebook time, I knew those friendships would never survive a life of hand-scrawled letters.
Perhaps that’s why as a general rule I remember the houses we lived in better than the people I knew. To this day, I am horrible at recognizing faces—but I can tell you the floor plan of almost any house I’ve ever been in. There is a mnemonic device developed by the ancient Romans called a memory palace. You take a building you know well, then mentally place each thing you want to remember within a specific room. The location helps you recall the memory. But for me, the building is the memory.
Ben, as you might suspect, had a different experience. He grew up in the same city for most of his life. He tends his friendships, and his network of contacts is legion. He is like one of those plants that you pull out of its pot to find there is no soil left, every bit taken up by roots. From the moment we met, I loved the centeredness of him. I wanted to be near it, and to have that for our future children. With each of their births I could feel a web forming between us. But it was when we lived in Italy that the concept of roots became a visual, tangible thing. I watched the love flowing down through the generations. You could almost taste it in the air. I wanted that for our family.
But here is where the irony of our current situation loomed large. In my desire to create a more family-oriented way of life, I was spending half my time away from my children and husband. And the stress was high enough that when something like the almost-fire happened, I saw only the risk that had come so near to our home. Just like when I was young, I kept focusing on the house, more than on the people within it. If I truly wanted a foundation for us, I knew that equation would need to change.
* * *
—
THE RED MACHINE GROWLED into action again, and the Baxter house raised higher. When it was finally dangling above our heads, Joe walked over.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
“Amazing.”
“By the way,” he said, “have you ever thought about moving your house?”
“What?”
“I mean, once it’s in the air, we can do whatever you want. Forward, backward, twirl it like a top. Why not? And it won’t change the cost much.”
This really was the day for having my mind blown, I decided.
George leaned forward, intrigued. “Hey, that’s a good idea. The north side of the house sits too close to the street anyway—if we moved the house deeper into the lot, that would help.”
He was right, I realized. For the most part, the setting for our house was the feng shui definition of perfect—facing south, on a hill, looking out to water, and surrounded by greenery. The one thing that had always bothered me was how close to the road it was. With those tall walls, it felt like it was looming over the passing cars.
I’d always thought that was just one of those things you had to accept. Now, I tried to picture it—our two-story house, spinning like a ballerina, choosing its own site.
“Maybe,” I said. Then, “Okay.”
“Great,” Joe said. “We’ll get on it.”
* * *
—
UNFORTUNATELY, HOWEVER, WE WERE having problems getting the city to approve a plan for our new foundation. It turns out the fill dirt below our house went even deeper than anyone had thought. The original concept had to be scrapped, and a new one was being devised with something called pin piles—thick pieces of galvanized metal pipe, driven down through loose soil until they strike hard dirt and stay, rock solid. The footings for the house are then attached to the pipes, the foundation walls are poured on top of the footings, and the house is, finally, bolted to the foundation.
Rumor had it that the plan for our new foundation could include as many as ninety pin piles, pounded deep into the ground. I’d said I wanted roots; it looked as if I’d get a whole metal forest of them.
The plans were not cleared through the city yet, but Joe had only the one opening in his schedule in the next four months. And so, with yet another leap of faith, we decided to lift our house—even if we didn’t know what would be going underneath it.
* * *
—
IT WAS AN EARLY Saturday morning at the end of April when Ben, Kate, Ry, and I set out, anticipating the thrill of seeing our house rise off the ground in its own magic trick of levitation. I’d told the kids about the Baxter house, and they were both disbelieving and excited, a rare feeling of family unity in the past weeks. The traffic that morning was unusually bad, however, each stoplight turning red, the cars sauntering along. Ben switched lanes like a slalom skier trying to dodge each gate, but it barely made any difference. The minutes were ticking away, and there was nothing I could do about it. When we finally pulled up to the ferry dock, the orange-vested man directing traffic put his palm up to pause us as we reached the front of the line.
I sat in the car, fingers crossed so hard I was afraid they’d crack. The last long couple of months had been hard ones. We’d pounded and sweated and smashed. We’d breathed in odors we hadn’t known existed. The week before, as I had sledgehammered my way through the very last wall of plaster, I’d encountered dead rat number twenty-eight, covered in hundreds of crawling white maggots, which simply evaporated as the light hit them.
And each time I’d left my family behind in Seattle, each time I couldn’t figure out what to say to Kate or Ben, we’d grown a bit further apart, disappearing to each other. A magic trick indeed.
Through all those months, there had been a stick and a carrot motivating us: the money we needed to save by doing the demolition ourselves, and the prospect of seeing the house lifted off the ground. The latter was the payoff for all of the work, the event that could bring us all back together.
We really, really needed that carrot.
I sent the ferryman a look of desperation—please, we must get there in time—but when a boat is full, it is full, and thus we were stuck, first in line for the next ferry, one of the few times in life when being number one is the last thing you want to be.
* * *
—
THE SITE WAS LITTERED with trucks and cars when we arrived, the house up about three feet off its foundation. A metal ladder leaned precariously where the front stairs had once been. The ragged ends of the wooden supporting beams dangled in the air; where the asbestos shi
ngles had been removed, the diagonal sheathing underneath was now exposed, black with rot. George was encircling the area with a yellow ribbon printed with CAUTION in bold black letters, which made it look as if we should have a hurricane named after us.
The kids were eagerly eyeing the ladder. At such times, they could look so much like their father it was uncanny.
“Can we go in?” they asked George.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s steady as a rock.”
“Be careful,” I said, but they were already scrambling up the rungs like sailors aiming for a crow’s nest. Ben followed.
Joe came up and saw me considering the caution tape. “You don’t have to worry,” he said, “Nobody will go in now. Once a house goes up, they never go in.”
“How much did it weigh?” I asked, hoping for good news.
“It was light. Thirty-five tons. That’s good. Lighter is cheaper. You all got a lot out of there.”
I started adding numbers in my head. We’d taken out seven and a half tons of trash. Ten and a half tons of plaster and lath. Seventeen tons of chimney. And then I realized something—by my calculations, we now had exactly half the house we had started out with.
* * *
—
“HEY, MOM,” RY CALLED from the front porch, “come in and see this.”
I clambered up the ladder, the metal rungs hard beneath the soles of my tennis shoes. Kate and Ben and Ry were standing by the south-facing windows looking out.
“It’s like being in a tree house,” Ry said, looking down at the ivy that covered the orchard. He was right. Three feet in elevation is no great distance—the height of a preschooler, the depth of the shallow end of a swimming pool—and yet the perspective was completely changed. It made flying feel possible.
I turned and gazed around at the interior. There was still more demolition to do. The old windows and all that rotten diagonal sheathing would soon be gone. We weren’t keeping that much—a floor plan, a collection of studs, a memory of bones. On the north side of the living room, near the door, I spotted the outline of the old front stairway on the wall, visible now, heading up like a directional arrow. Keep going.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME WE went outside again, Joe and his crew had finished loading up their gear and were standing around swapping stories and jokes. Ben got a call and walked off down the road a bit, talking quietly into his cell phone.
“So how do you move a house?” Ry asked Joe.
“Soap,” he said.
“Soap?”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get it either at first,” Joe said. “I mean, flakes? Liquid? Finally, we got some guys down at the house movers’ convention in Texas to tell us. They said Ivory soap, in bars. And you need it to be really fresh. Safeway goes through the most volume, so we get it there, same day we use it.”
He grinned and headed off to his truck, as if his explanation made all the sense in the world.
“Soap?” Ry said to me. I just shook my head, as confused as he was.
The trucks pulled away, and the kids, seeing that the source of entertainment had left, wandered down into the lower yard to look at the cribs. The towers reminded me of the Jenga game, the one with all the blocks where you take out one at a time and hope the whole thing doesn’t fall down.
“Don’t go under the house,” I called to the kids. They looked back at me.
“Duh,” Kate said, but she smiled just a little.
* * *
—
AS I WATCHED THEM wandering between the ivy orchard and the house, Ben walked back up, putting his phone in his pocket.
“You remember the stock we sold to buy the house?” he said to me in a low voice.
I nodded. It was hard to forget, especially with our investment looming above us in all its questionable glory.
“The stock’s gone down eighty percent in the last three months,” he said.
“You’re kidding.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We would have lost everything.”
I walked straight into his arms and stayed there for a long moment. Then I went over to our foundationless house, stretched up on my toes, and kissed it.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
DESIGN
It’s a lot easier to correct mistakes with an eraser than with a sledgehammer.
—George Nash
AND THEN, AFTER ALL that sweat and destruction, all those deadlines and anticipation, everything stopped while we waited for the city to approve the plan for our foundation. Week after week after week.
There are few things you can do while you’re waiting for the wheel of bureaucracy to slowly crank its way around to you. Worry is one of them; design, its more logical and productive sibling. Design happens in the realm of the mind, on its own schedule. Thus, while we might not have been able to make physical progress on the house, we could at least move forward in our imaginations.
The interesting part—stuck there in the no-man’s-land between reality and fantasy—was knowing that each choice we made now would influence who we would become once those plans turned into our home.
* * *
—
THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER consciously thinking about how the designs of our built environments affect us was when I was a new student at Occidental College and encountered the administration building. The structure rises up in the center of the campus like Mount Olympus itself, a giant glass cube, its four corners supported by angular white columns. The walls of the main floor are made of clear glass, through which you can see across an almost empty lobby. No desk, no receptionist, only a few tall potted plants. In the middle of the floor, a large staircase spirals down to the subterranean and often windowless lower administration offices. An elevator tucked discreetly into a wall of the main lobby whisks you to the offices of the upper administration, which seem to float above the earth, protected from view by walls of tinted glass. No matter how hard the various presidents of the college have tried to be egalitarian, open, and receptive, the very building they work in works against them.
When Winston Churchill made his famous comment about shaping our buildings, and their corresponding effect upon us, it was part of his impassioned plea to re-create the House of Commons in its original form after the bombings of World War II. Churchill prevailed, and the iconic rectangular room where the two political parties face each other was reconstructed. Through his words, Churchill helped to ensure tradition and patriotism, but he also shaped the way that the British government would function moving forward. It would take great imagination to see beyond a two-party system, given that there is literally no room for anything different.
Space matters. How we divide it matters. When architecture student Michael Murphy worked with physician Paul Farmer to develop new kinds of hospitals in Rwanda, they created buildings where the corridors are outside, air circulation is natural, and each bed has a window. Mortality rates plummeted. Later, for a completely different project in Montgomery, Alabama, Murphy designed a powerful and architecturally brilliant memorial dedicated to the African American victims of lynching and oppression. From a distance, the building is low and classical in appearance, with what looks like a series of slender supporting pillars. It is only when you enter the building that you realize that, like Eisenman’s House VI, most of the pillars do not reach the ground. In the case of the memorial, however, there is a different kind of subversion at work. The pillars become a stunning visual, a forest of hanging bodies where structure should have been. The effect is chilling, felt in the gut as much as the mind.
Around the world, architects are creating buildings that interact with both humans and their environment in new and energizing ways. Ross Chapin is building pocket neighborhood communities, clusters of small houses where parking is separated from living, and owners walk along a winding path past front porches, greeting their neighbors as they go. Moshe Safdie is reinventing the concept of high-rise apartments
, designing structures that have light and green space, community areas, rooftops gardens, and walkways. And Keren Brown Wilson changed the way we think of assisted living centers for the elderly, proving that autonomy and control can be their own form of medicine.
* * *
—
A STUDY BY THE ENVIRONMENTAL Protection Agency in 1989 determined that Americans spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors—a number that has almost certainly risen since then. This means that whatever influence our buildings have upon us, they get a lot of time to do it—even if we are not consciously aware of it. We feel it, though. We wander about a cavernous great room and find ourselves unable to settle. Other times, we walk up a wide front porch, and it is as if arms have invisibly opened to us. We make our way through a sunlit house, seemingly drawn from one room to the next. Houses embody their own kind of magic; we just rarely pay attention to the magicians.
During the years I did real estate, I would go on the company tour of new listings every Tuesday morning. It got to the point where I could tell almost without thinking which houses would be problematic to sell. Not because of a neon-orange bedroom, or the pastel-pink toilet in the bathroom, although those things never helped. This had to do with movement, feeling. Thirty agents would descend upon a home, and I would watch them make their way through it, almost like a dye test running through arteries, a living manifestation of energy moving, or not, through the house. Those houses where the agents crowded together at a tight intersection between kitchen and dining room, or spun around, looking back and forth as if they couldn’t remember if they’d seen all the bedrooms—those were probably going to sit on the market for a while.
Flow is a crucial factor in a house. We are most comfortable in homes that start with welcoming entries, a feeling that continues as we move through rooms that gradually shift from public to private, each space having its own defined purpose as well as a transition to the next. This is an organizing principle we unconsciously expect, which explains our confusion when we enter a house to find a bedroom directly off the entry—it’s the equivalent of having a stranger on the street suddenly turn and tell you an intimate secret. But when a house follows a recognizable organizing principle, it achieves a flow that feels natural and comfortable. We settle in.
House Lessons Page 11
