A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  The momentousness of the decision was all I could think about. Wherever I put my building, it would stay, more or less forever. I’d have to live with the consequences of the choice as long as I was around, and others would be stuck with it after that. Charlie had said that key elements of my building’s design, its scale and skin and fenestration, the way it met the ground and the pitch of its roof, would be determined by this first fact. Then there were the views to consider (from the building, and of the building), the fall of light across its floor, the movement of air around it, the ambient sounds, the angle at which it met the late-day sun. Dwell too long on so many soon-to-be-set-in-stone characteristics and the decision is liable to paralyze you. I know, I am only talking about a hut, an outbuilding. Yet I felt that by choosing its site—a single place out of all possible places in which to build—I was setting this great big contingency in motion, rolling it down the steep, one-way hill of personal and local history.

  Faced with any such large decision, my first instinct (if you can call it that) is to look for a book to tell me what to do. But I was surprised to find that the literature of architecture and building contains remarkably little on the subject. Lewis Mumford had complained back in the fifties that the proper siting of houses was a lost art, and I turned up little to suggest it has since been found.

  Mumford pointed me all the way back to Vitruvius, whose famous treatise on architecture, written in the first century B.C., offers some sensible advice on the siting of cities, dwelling houses, and tombs, all of which, he maintained, should be located according to the same principles. Vitruvius advises the prospective builder to seek a spot that is neither too high (where exposure to wind is a problem) nor too low (where it may be subject to the “poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes”). He cautioned that a site can be intrinsically unhealthy and recommended that the builder slaughter an animal that had grazed on it and examine its liver for signs of disease. But nothing deserved closer consideration than a building site’s position with respect to the sun, and Vitruvius spelled out principles of orientation that have not been improved on (which is not to say they have always been heeded): Buildings should be laid out on an east-west axis, with their principle exposure to the south. This means that in the Northern Hemisphere the low angle of the sun in winter will keep the building warm, while during the summer, when the sun passes overhead, direct sunlight will enter only in the morning and evening, when it will be welcome. For the same reason, he recommended an eastern exposure for bedrooms, western for dining rooms.

  Remarkably, American architecture had to rediscover these simple rules in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargoes suddenly made heating oil precious. For a long time before that, our houses had been plunked down pretty much anywhere a developer’s lot-lines dictated. According to Mumford, Americans have never been particularly sensitive to site, a fact he attributes partly to cheap energy and partly to the eighteenth-century scheme, promoted by Thomas Jefferson, to impose a great Cartesian grid over most of the nation’s land, with no regard for topography, drainage, or grading, let alone aesthetics or convenience. This division of the country into equal, square parcels of land may have made for easy surveying and speculation, but it discouraged the sensitive siting of buildings.

  Of course there is more to choosing a site than orientation to the sun. For example, what sort of topography was I looking for? How should the new building relate to the house? How do you go about judging the relative hospitality of a patch of ground? What exactly was my place in this particular landscape? As far as I could tell, the Chinese had been the only culture to devise a systematic method of site selection. But fêng shui sounded very arcane to me, if not kooky, and for a long time I avoided reading anything about it. I eventually found myself turning to the garden designers, who seemed, at least in the West, to have thought more about how architecture should fit into the landscape than the architects had.

  The most pertinent advice I found was in the garden literature of the eighteenth century in England, when for a brief moment, some of the best minds of the culture, from Alexander Pope to Horace Walpole to Joseph Addison, turned their attention to landscape design. These writers had thought long and hard about exactly what constituted a “pleasing prospect,” as well as about the aesthetic and psychological experience of landscape, and since the picturesque gardens they promoted made abundant use of small outbuildings, which they called follies—a word I strove to keep as far from discussions of my project as possible—there seemed to be a lot that applied.

  Since the original impetus for my building had begun with the notion of improving the view from our new bedroom window, the romantic designers—who were among the first people in the West to develop a taste for natural scenery—seemed ideally suited to the project. They worked to make every prospect in their gardens look “natural.” What they meant by this was that a landscape should look not like nature as we commonly find it, and as I had found it outside my window, but as it appears in landscape paintings—“works of Nature [being] most pleasant,” Addison wrote, “the more they resemble those of art.” In the landscape paintings the Romantics revered, nature tends to be well-composed (divided into foreground, middle ground, and background) and pleasingly varied (particularly in terms of light and dark). It also offers the spectator’s eye an inviting path to follow from one element to another, but especially from the foreground to the distant horizon.

  Without being conscious of it, the dissatisfaction Judith and I had felt with the new view from our bedroom window probably owed something to our picturesque expectations, which most of us acquire growing up in this culture. All the elements of a pleasing landscape were present—fields and trees and even, now that we’d dug a small pond, water—yet there was something wrong with the picture. It was uninviting. Specifically, the scene offered the eye no reason to travel from the foreground to the background, or any path on which to do so. By adding what the Romantic designers used to call an eye-catcher, we were hoping to tie the little fortress of cultivation down by the house into the broader landscape above.

  But exactly where in the picture should my eye-catcher go? My first impulse had been to put the building somewhere along an imaginary line extending out from the main axis of the garden. For many years, this line, after following the fieldstone wall and the perennial border, would pass through the arbor and then lapse into an impassable tangle of boulders and brush. This particular no-man’s-land occupied the space between a pair of fine but inaccessible trees, one a white ash and the other a great, leaning white oak. The situation was somewhat improved after we dug the pond and used the spoils from the excavation to regrade the rocky area between the two trees. Today, the path journeys out to the pond, skirts its north bank, and then climbs what is now a gentle, grassy rise between the ash and the oak before settling in a small, circular meadow drawn around a stunted old swamp maple.

  It seemed to me there were a couple of possible building sites along this axis, the most obvious being the bank of the pond. And for a while a pond-house seemed like an appealing idea. I could picture a little shingled shack with a dock out front jutting over the water. Though I eventually discarded this idea (it seemed too cute), it did help me appreciate how a particular site could shape my image of the building. I also rejected the site beneath the oak; the tree branched so high overhead it didn’t look as though it would afford a building much sense of shelter.

  But I’d also begun to doubt the wisdom of building right on the main axis of the house and garden, and in this I found strong support among the picturesque designers I consulted. They detested straight lines on aesthetic as well as political grounds—axes being closely associated with “the formal mockery of princely gardens” on the continent—and made sure their paths always curved. A path that eventually relinquished its geometry seemed in keeping with the character of this landscape, which is to grow progressively less tended the further you travel from the house. There was also something a little too obvio
us about a building that confronted you at the end of such a straight line. Putting it on axis would make it seem closer too, when my goal, I’d begun to realize, was to make these few acres feel more like a world. But if instead I situated the building at an angle to the main axis, and then made the approach to it slightly roundabout, the workings of perspective and psychology would make it appear that much farther away—and make the property seem that much larger.

  Now I was approaching the problem as a picturesque designer might, deploying a bit of pictorial illusion to “improve” the landscape and entice the viewer into the scene. I imagined that a Capability Brown or William Kent would have objected to my original plan to site the building in the sun-filled center of the view on the grounds that it would rob the scene of mystery; better to tuck it into a corner of the frame, preferably in a spot where it would be partially obscured in shade. The site should be visible from the house, they would recommend, but only just. The idea is for it merely to catch the eye, to pique the viewer’s curiosity without satisfying it. The location of an eye-catcher should make the viewer want to venture out to the building, there to experience an entirely different sort of mood than the one on offer near the house.

  This was no small point, for the picturesque designers were interested in much more than composing pretty pictures. They were concerned with time and movement too, and conceived of their landscapes in three dimensions, striving to make them work as narratives as well as paintings. Follow the path through a picturesque landscape and you will come upon a succession of distinct places, each designed to evoke a different emotion.

  I didn’t have anything so fancy in mind, but I did like the idea that the site for my building would offer a different kind of experience than the rest of the property, as well as a new perspective on things. Of course this vastly complicated my site selection. For now I needed not only to find a spot that would add something to the view from the house, but one that would offer its own interesting views, a good place in its own right.

  The time had come for me to climb down from my second-floor perch and walk the land. Apart from the turning of pages, I hadn’t yet lifted a finger to bring my building any closer to reality. But thinking picturesquely had taken me some distance, narrowed my search. Now at least I knew the frame in which the site had to fit and where in that frame the site should not fall: the too-obvious middle. That still left a lot of ground to cover, however. I called Charlie to see if he had any advice. He did, though at the time it seemed too glib to be of much use. “Think about it this way,” he suggested. “You’ve been hiking all day, it’s getting late, and you’re looking for a good campsite—just a comfortable, safe-feeling place to spend the night. That’s your site.”

  “At a certain season of our life,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, “we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.” Now I entered my own such season, though I didn’t manage to approach it quite as lightly as Thoreau. (Of course Thoreau was never serious about settling; I was.) The first time I walked the land was a bright June afternoon, the sun directly overhead, and I quickly lost myself in my perambulations. I traced patterns across the property that would have looked antic had Judith or some neighbor happened to notice me, pacing first this way, then that, doubling and then tripling back again, before stopping to appraise a view, a deliberative process that involved a long, slow pirouette through 360 degrees. The second time out, I brought along a chair, planting it in a succession of auspicious-seeming spots, the better to rehearse inhabiting them and observe the landscape’s constantly changing face.

  From out here the whole problem of site selection looked somewhat different. I realized I wasn’t just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that—a point of view. What would be my angle on things when I sat down to work? Some spots where I put my chair implied an oblique angle on the world, while others met it more forthrightly. I could see that I was going to have to decide whether I was a person more at home in the shadows, or out in the sunny middle of things. How important to me was the company of a tree, or the reflection of water? Just how available to the gaze of others—on the road, in the house—did I wish the face of my building to be? Some sites I considered offered what seemed like the geographical correlative of shyness, others self-assertion. It was as though the landscape were asking me to declare myself, to say this place, and not that one, suited me, in some sense was me.

  And not just for the moment or month or year. (“And there I did live,” Thoreau wrote of the sites he surveyed, “for an hour, a summer and a winter life…”) No, this was for keeps, and there were times when I felt that choosing a site had become a metaphor for every other fateful decision I’d ever had to make, but especially all those ones that went under the decidedly un-Thoreauvian rubric of Settling Down: buying the house, signing the note, getting married, deciding to have the baby, taking the job, giving up the job. (Had Thoreau done any of these things?) None of these decisions had come easy, and yet it helped to remind myself that not one of them had ever given me a moment’s regret either. Maybe I’m the kind of person who just needs to think all his second thoughts in advance. As Thoreau pointed out in Walden, there’s freedom in deliberation (literally: “from freedom”); once that’s over, though, things start looking a good deal more fatelike. Odd as it sounds, there were moments when I felt as though I was picking out not a building site but a cemetery plot—when I felt that sort of bottomless claustrophobia in time.

  Which is why I took my sweet time about it, spending uncounted hours walking the property, at every time of day, in every weather, by every conceivable route. I planted my chair in two dozen places, cataloging their qualities, cataloging my responses to their qualities, until I found myself beginning to doubt, in the same way saying a word over too many times can make you doubt its sense, whether I could even say what a place was any longer, what it was that made a place a place. Was I really cataloging their qualities—shyness, forthrightness—or was I inventing them? Was a place something made, in other words, or was it something given?

  “Wherever I sat, there I might live,” Thoreau had written of his own less-fraught wanderings in search of a house site, “and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.” And it was true that the landscape did seem to reorganize itself around me and my chair as I imagined inhabiting each site in turn. What had one moment seemed an undistinguished corner of second-growth forest, or an indifferent section of meadow grown up in goldenrod, would all of a sudden become the center of the world. My chair reminded me of the jar in the Wallace Stevens poem, an ordinary bit of human artifice that “took dominion everywhere” and ordered the “slovenly wilderness” around it. This seemed to suggest I could build just about anywhere, since anywhere I raised four corners and a roof would perforce become a place, almost as if by fiat. What is a place after all but a bit of space that people like me have invested with meaning?

  And yet not everywhere felt equally right. Tested against Charlie’s advice, the area within the round meadow, for example, did not feel like a very comfortable place to set up camp. It was too easy to imagine eyes in the encircling trees. Also, a spot like that was always going to feel a little arbitrary. Why not pitch the tent ten feet this way, or twenty that? I might have succeeded in making a good place there, but I would be starting virtually from scratch. Perhaps my landscape, or my sense of landscape, was not as democratic as Thoreau’s, or Stevens’s, because certain spots proclaimed themselves more loudly to me as places already—the landscape seemed to radiate out from them, as it were, even before I happened to plant my seat there.

  There was, for example, this one particular area—right away I want to call it a place—that seemed almost to exert a kind of gravitational pull whenever I drew near it. It was a small, unexpected clearing on the south side of a boulder easily as big as a sub-compact car. I recognized the rock from one of Judith’s paintings; she’d spent the better part of one summer working in this clearing. I kept returning
to this spot in my wanderings, something it occurred to me my predecessor’s cows had probably also once done, for the clearing opened right onto the shady path they trudged from the barn each morning on their march to the upper pasture.

  The floor of the clearing, which is hidden from the cow path by the big rock, is pitched, but at a much gentler angle than the path, making it feel almost becalmed, like a small, placid eddy shunted off to the side of a rushing river. I remembered Judith mentioning what a pleasant place it had been to work. It’s not hard to imagine cows stepping off the path to rest here, lying down with their broad sides to the boulder’s south face, which would hold the sun’s warmth when the leaves were off the trees. But they’d pause here in summer too, since the clearing then is shaded and cool. The “placeness” of this spot seemed unmistakable, even to cows.

  A half-dozen young trees rise along the base of the rock, white birches and choke cherries mostly, with long flexing trunks that arc out over the clearing and open their thin canopies directly above it. Overhead, they interlace their leaves and branches with another rank of trees that lean over to meet them from the far side of the clearing, joining to form a high, almost Gothic arch. This second group of trees, which contains more cherry and birch as well as some white ash and silver maple, forms a rough hedgerow, strewn with boulders, that divides the clearing from the lower meadow. The farmer probably dug out and dragged these boulders from this field when he first plowed it, and the trees grew up among them, colonizing any spot his tractor couldn’t reach. From the clearing you can peer through their silhouetted trunks into the sun-filled field.