A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder
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A quarter century before Peter Eisenman imported deconstruction to American architecture from Paris, Robert Venturi had imported semiotics, also from Paris. In Learning from Las Vegas, the immensely influential manifesto the Philadelphia architect and theorist published in 1972, he argued that architecture was not really so much about the articulation of space, as the modernists had believed, but about communication by means of signs, or symbols. Buildings constituted a form of media; they were cultural texts to be read. Venturi urged architects to recognize that what they were really doing was making “decorated sheds,” and that it was the decorations, or symbols, that mattered most. The offspring of this theory was a slew of often very witty buildings self-consciously decorated with exaggerated (for ironic emphasis) columns, keystones, pediments, and, in Venturi’s case especially, actual signs with words on them.
Working my way through recent architectural theory, I felt like I was back on familiar turf. In fact, Charlie’s wordless little booklet about my hut was a lot more daunting than most of the buildings celebrated in the pages of Progressive Architecture, if only because the buildings in the magazine were based on texts with which I was at least glancingly familiar. But even if you didn’t know the printed sources, with the help of the captions and manifestos you could read your way through them without too much trouble. They might be brick-and-mortar buildings, but they were also rivulets in the same information-age waters I’d always felt comfortable paddling around in.
And yet it hadn’t been familiar waters I’d come to architecture looking for. I’d come because I wanted out of the tub. I’d come looking for something meatier than discourse, something nearer to the “views, sounds, and smells” of the material world that Hannah Arendt had celebrated. Buildings, I’d always assumed, had an especially strong claim on reality. Weren’t they supposed to be one of those things in the world that gets pointed to, and not just another of the things that point? Yet it is precisely this quality that contemporary architecture seemed eager to deny.
I knew Charlie well enough to have a fair idea where he stood on these questions. He’d given me the subscription to Progressive Architecture as a way to define himself to me by counterexample: This is everything I am not. But he wasn’t going to get into any arguments about it, because even to argue was to let himself be drawn onto the ground of words and theories, where he evidently had no wish to go. Of course this was my ground too, and Charlie’s hesitance about me watching him work may have reflected a reasonable worry that I was going to somehow maneuver him out onto it. Only now did I understand that the exasperating wordlessness of his booklet, coming at the same time as the gift subscription to PA, had been meant as a gentle challenge. Charlie was asking me to choose, between the words and…what, exactly?
2. DRAWING
I drove up to Cambridge on a morning early in May to meet with Charlie about my building and, I hoped, to watch him begin to draw it. We met in his office, half a floor of a clapboard townhouse in Harvard Square, above a copy shop. His practice consisted of himself and a couple of freelance draftsmen, recent graduates of MIT’s architecture school who came in, or not, depending on how much work was in-house. The undivided workspace was informal but orderly, a horseshoe of drafting tables set out beneath bookshelves stacked with cardboard models and large-format books. The designers I met looked like graduate students (blue jeans, sweaters, and sneakers), except for the stylish $300 eyeglasses.
At the time of my visit, the architecture profession was mired in a recession that had hit Boston-area architects particularly hard. The city’s real estate market had collapsed, nobody was building, and with two local architecture schools continuing to graduate dozens of new architects each year, there simply were not enough commissions to go around. Charlie seemed to be getting by, however, with commissions for a couple of houses, a handful of residential renovation jobs, and the conversion of a building for an elementary school in Cambridge.
I had brought Charlie’s book of images with me, and we started by working our way through it, sipping containers of coffee from the croissant shop downstairs. As Charlie talked over the pictures, often with a catching enthusiasm, they immediately became less opaque. For one thing, I realized I had overcomplicated their import. I’d be puzzling over what a sprawling New England farmhouse could possibly have to do with my little shack when all he had wanted me to notice was the vine-tangled trellis over the porch, which he thought we might want to try on the window facing the ornery neighbor.
“That’s a great solution for a place where you want light but the view really stinks. The vines filter the sunlight nicely, too, since the leaves are always moving.” Charlie could be fervent talking about a window, describing the tone of the light it admitted to a room, or how flinging it open was apt to make you feel about life. He seemed so much more articulate in person than on the phone, and as I watched him talk about these images, hands and brows and even shoulders in almost constant motion, I realized that Charlie’s is a kind of full-body eloquence.
Only a few of the images were meant to be taken as literally as the vine-covered window. The reason he’d included the European townhouse that resembled a cat, for example, was because he felt my building should have an anthropomorphic façade. “It makes sense for our guy to have a strong face, since this is going to be a one-man house.” Okay, but a cat? “Hey. Don’t be so literal,” Charlie grinned. “This is just a reminder to me, something to think about when I’m drawing the elevation.” He explained that many of the images in the book had a similar purpose: They were cues to help him focus on issues he might otherwise lose track of in the design process—ways of thinking about windows, doors, ceilings, and roofs, the various ways a building can meet the ground.
“Like this door here—” He pointed to a picture of a formal Edwardian townhouse entrance. “Now this is obviously completely wrong for our building, but it’s such a fantastic example of doorness. It’s a reminder I need to deal with the whole issue of just what kind of experience the entrance to our building is going to be—should it be a public or a private kind of thing? Do we want to be inviting people up here with some kind of ceremonial front door like this one here, or do we want to maybe put them off a bit with something more backdoorish?” We talked about that for a while, and agreed the door should definitely be around back, where you wouldn’t see it until you’d stepped around the big rock. Then Charlie suggested we try to place the door on one of the thick walls: “That way, the entrance to the building becomes a real passage. As you walk in you’ll feel the great mass of that wall of books surrounding you.” He hunched his shoulders close, as if he were squeezing through the stacks in a library.
Paging through the book with Charlie, I began to see that the real subject of these pictures was not architectural ideas or styles so much as architectural experiences. Each picture evoked what a particular kind of place or space felt like, they were poetic that way, and it was the sensual nature of each experience, more than any purely visual or aesthetic details, that Charlie meant to call my attention to.
Turning to the picture of the Caribbean porch with the thatched roof and nonexistent walls, he talked about the sharp juxtaposition of the low, sheltering roof line and the wide open spaces underneath it. “Isn’t this fantastic? It reminds me of putting the top down on a convertible, that explosion of light and space you get the moment the roof flies up, only here it’s the walls that vanish. Makes me think of Frank Lloyd Wright, too, the way his strong roofs meet those light, dematerialized walls so that the space seems to race outward, right through them. We could do something like that.” I realized that the reason vernacular shacks and barns could cohabit so happily in Charlie’s booklet with examples of sophisticated architecture is that, for him, when they work, both draw on the same elemental feelings about space.
I asked Charlie about this. “People do seem to have some very basic responses to places and kinds of spaces,” he said, picking his words with care as he stepped gingerly out
onto the ice of architectural theory. “I do happen to believe that there’s a basic vocabulary of ‘buildingness’ that we all share. This is what I try to work with—they’re my tubes of paint. And that’s really all this little booklet is about: singling out a handful of strong spatial experiences that might belong in your building.” Charlie used the word “vocabulary” to describe these architectural elements, but it seemed to me they could scarcely be less literary. He wasn’t talking about our interpretation of architectural conventions so much as our unconscious experiences of space—the sort of immediate, poetic responses to place that Bachelard chronicled in The Poetics of Space, a book that turned out to be close to Charlie’s heart.
I asked him if anyone else had written about this face of architecture, which seemed such a long way from the world I’d been reading about in PA. He mentioned Christopher Alexander, a somewhat unorthodox Bay Area architect who has tried systematically to analyze and catalog all the forms in architecture’s vocabulary, almost as if they were parts of nature and he were an obsessed naturalist.
Alexander calls these forms “patterns,” and his best-known book, A Pattern Language*, published in 1977, is essentially a compilation of 253 of them in a phone-book-thick volume that reads like a vast field guide or encyclopedia. Each pattern is numbered and named (“159: Light on Two Sides of Every Room”), defined in a sentence (“People will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit from one side unused and empty”), and illustrated with a photograph or drawing. Charlie hadn’t exactly read A Pattern Language, he admitted, but he’d browsed around in it enough to decide that the definitions and illustrations were apt and even useful, and he suggested I have a look.
My first impression of A Pattern Language was that it reminded me of Charlie’s booklet a bit, except that there were long, interesting captions to accompany the photographs, as well as an overarching theory. Like the pictures in Charlie’s book, Alexander’s were strongly evocative of the experience of place: One showed a casement window flung open to embrace an early-morning street scene that reminded me of Paris readying to greet the workday; another, a trellis of bean vines that filigreed the sunlight coming through the window of a shack. There were big pine-plank tables in farmhouse kitchens you wanted to pull a chair up to, and front porches that seemed to say, here’s a sweet place to watch the world go by.
The images were well chosen and immediately appealing, yet the text made clear that there was something more here than a collection of nice places. We were told, in fact, that the “patterns” depicted in these images revealed profound truths about the world and human nature. Indeed, Alexander states that the discovery of any one of these patterns—of something like “light on two sides of every room” or “entrance transition”—is “as hard as anything in theoretical physics.” In a strange and wonderful way, A Pattern Language manages to combine a rich poetry of everyday life with the monomania of someone who believes he has found a key to the universe. I suspect Charlie had soaked up the former and skipped over the latter.
With my own well-established weakness for theories, I wasn’t about to do anything of the kind. I dug in. Alexander contends (in both A Pattern Language and a more theoretical companion volume called The Timeless Way of Building) that the most successful built forms share certain essential attributes with forms in nature—with things like trees and waves and animals. Both natural and man-made forms serve to reconcile conflicting forces (a tree’s need to stand up with the fact of gravity, say, or a person’s conflicting urges for privacy and social contact); the forms that do this best are the ones that endure. You might say that Alexander is an architectural Charles Darwin, since he believes that good form represents a successful adaptation to a given environment.
Consider the living room of a house, Alexander writes. Here the conflicting forces are not physical but psychological: the desire of family members for a sense of belonging and the simultaneous need of individuals for a measure of privacy and time apart. The pattern that will resolve this basic conflict (which Alexander says lies at the heart not only of family life but of social life in general) he calls “Alcoves”: “To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in one’s and two’s in the same space.” This is accomplished by creating “small places at the edge of any common room…. These alcoves should be large enough for two people to sit, chat, or play, and sometimes large enough to contain a desk or a table.” The pattern of an alcove off of a communal space (which also shows up in libraries, restaurants, and public squares) is as natural and right and self-sustaining as the pattern of ripples in a patch of windblown sand.
It follows that architectural beauty is not a subjective or a trivial matter for Alexander. “Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them,” he declares in the pattern “Window Place,” which follows “Alcoves” in A Pattern Language. A room lacking this pattern—even if it has a window and comfortable chair somewhere in it—will “keep you in a state of perpetual unresolved conflict and tension.” That’s because when you enter the room you will feel torn between the desire to sit down and be comfortable and the desire to move toward the light. Only a window place that combines the comfortable spot to sit with the source of sunlight can resolve this tension. For Alexander, our sense that rooms containing such places are beautiful is much more than “an aesthetic whim”; rather, a window place, like an alcove off a common room, represents an objectively successful adaptation to a given social and physical context.
Whether or not you are willing to travel quite this far with Alexander, his book fairly brims with patterns that seem sensible and ring with a certain poetic or psychological truth. I’d never thought about it before, but having windows on two sides of a room does seem to make the difference between a lifeless and an appealing room. The reason this is so, Alexander hypothesizes, is that a dual light source allows us to see things more intricately, especially the finer details of facial expression and gesture. Similarly, there is something vital about the experience of arrival captured in the pattern “Entrance Transition,” which calls for a transitional space at the entrance to a building—a covered porch, or a curving path brushing by a lilac, or some other slight change of view or texture underfoot before one reaches the door. Alexander suggests that people need this sort of transitional space and time in order to shed their “street behaviors” and settle “into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house.” Sometimes Alexander sounds less like an architect than a novelist. I say that not only because he is a good student of human nature, but because he brings a sense of narrative—of time—to the design of space.
I realized that Charlie and I were sensing the need for just such an “entrance transition” when we decided to locate the door in back. Stepping around the big rock and turning into the site would create the very interlude Alexander is talking about, offering a change in perspective and a moment to prepare before coming inside. It was startling to see just how many of the things I asked for in my letter, and how many of the images in Charlie’s book, show up in A Pattern Language. “Thick walls,” for example, turns out to be an important pattern: “Most of the identity of a dwelling lies in or near its surfaces—in the 3 or 4 feet near the walls.” These should be thick enough to accommodate shelves, cabinets, displays, lamps, built-in furniture—all those nooks and niches that allow people to leave their mark on a place. “Each house will have a memory,” Alexander writes, and the personalities of its inhabitants are “written in the thickness of the walls.” So maybe I hadn’t been that far off, imagining the walls of my hut as an auxiliary brain.
After we had spent a couple of hours going through the book of images, using them to narrow my choices and refine our idea of the building, Charlie took out a roll of parchment-colored tracing paper, drew a length of it across his drafting table, and began to draw. He worked in ink to sta
rt, sketching rapidly in rough, scribbly lines, discarding a drawing and tearing off a new length of paper any time he didn’t like what he was seeing. If there was anything in a sketch worth saving, he’d start the new drawing by loosely tracing over that part of the rejected one; in this way a process of trial and error unfolded swiftly and smoothly, the good ideas getting carried forward from one generation of drawing to the next, the bad ones falling by the wayside.
At first, Charlie worked exclusively in plan, ignoring for the time being what the building might look like from the outside. He started with my desk, which we’d decided should carry all the way across the front of the building, where it could overlook the pond and the house. To determine its dimensions, Charlie inventoried the things I liked to keep on my desk and then asked me to extend my arms out to the sides. To that wingspan (six feet) he added the depth of a bookshelf on each end (two feet): this gave us the width of the building. Charlie now turned to the Golden Section to obtain its length, multiplying eight feet by the factor 1.618, which comes to 12.9. He sketched a rectangle eight feet by thirteen, roughed in the big rock to its right, and declared, “There it is: your ur-house.”