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

by Michael Pollan

  We had talked about the Golden Section earlier, when we’d come to that section in the book of images. Charlie told me he often resorted to the ratio when he had to make a decision about the proportions of a space. He’d devoted a couple of pages to it in the booklet because he thought the Golden Section seemed particularly fitting for this building, since it was to house someone who liked to write about nature. When I offered a puzzled look, he explained that, among other things, the Golden Section is a bridge joining the worlds of architecture and nature. “The same proportioning system that works in buildings also shows up in trees, leaves, in the spirals of seashells and sunflowers, and in the human body.” He hoisted his eyebrows, lowered his voice: “It’s everywhere.”

  But wasn’t this an awfully mystical way to determine the proportions of my building?

  “Hey. It works. More often than not, rooms with Golden Section proportions feel right.” Charlie stressed that he’s not a slave to the system; should he find he needs a couple more feet in the length of the building, for example, he’ll dispense with it. “But all other things being equal, I’ll use it, because I’m convinced there’s something there.”

  I was surprised that such an occult proportioning system hadn’t gone out with the Enlightenment, or modernism, but Charlie rattled off a long list of modern architects who’d sworn by it, including two as different as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Even to contemporary designers not at all given to mysticism or numerology, the Golden Section seems to retain some value as a pattern, or type—something to fall back on when faced with a decision about proportions, providing a bit of shelter, perhaps, from what Kevin Lynch, the writer and city planner, once called “the anxieties of the open search.”

  For the next hour, Charlie worked variations on this basic rectangle, now moving the daybed from the east wall to a bay on the south wall, now switching places between the daybed and the stove. At one point he experimented with the idea of turning the front of the building into a screened-in porch, while moving the desk to the north wall. But that meant it would look right out on the giant boulder, and when I mentioned that this seemed like a good recipe for writer’s block, he quickly dropped that idea.

  Sheet after sheet, Charlie moved around the elements we’d settled on—desk, daybed, porch, stove, bookshelves, chair—like pieces on a chessboard, talking the whole time as if we were inside the game and the pieces were animate. “This guy here,” he’d say, pointing to the chair, “really wants to be over there by the stove, but if we move him, like so, then the daybed can’t go on the same wall because code says you need at least three feet of clearance to a combustible on either side of your stove.” He started to draw it anyway. “Unless, that is, you decide not to bother with a building permit—” he looked at me hopefully; this wouldn’t be the last time Charlie tried to keep on going after one of his ideas ran up against some practical consideration. I told him to stick to code. “Okay, okay, so…”—he tears off another length of tracing paper—“let’s move the bay window for the daybed to the south wall, where it’s really going to want that shady trellis”—he scribbled a dense tangle of lines over the window—“and then put the door on the east end, the stove back over here…This just might work.”

  As he tested each new arrangement of elements in plan, Charlie would narrate a procession through the imaginary space taking shape at the end of his felt-tip. “Now I approach the building this way, turning right up here past the rock, which is hiding the big view from me, that’s perfect, and then I step into the building, passing through our thick wall here…Good.” Thinking, narrating, and drawing seemed to proceed almost in lockstep, the process now pushing, now following, the prow of black ink over the sheet of paper. His line danced across the page with a quality that managed to look both sure-footed and provisional at the same time, doubling back on itself to correct an angle or try out a new dimension, then flying off to scribble a shelf full of books while its author contemplated his next move. Swift, buoyant, heedless for now about being neat or right, it was a line that seemed to say, “Okay, so how about this?” Charlie’s words hustled to keep pace with its improvisations.

  “So now I’ve arrived,” he continued, his pen swinging a door open to the left. “And right there in front of me is the daybed with the bay window behind it, looking out through our clematis vine, all that filtered south light. Good, good, good. Then I turn to my right, and boom, there’s the big view down to the pond—that’s very strong, the surprise as I turn into that view. So let’s make the most of it, carry that window wall to wall like this, run it the entire length of the desk. Nice. Uh-oh”—he flashes a panicked look, eyebrows rocketing—“I don’t see the porch! Where am I going to put that guy? And it looks like that stove and chair are going to be in my way as I move toward the desk. It’s starting to get a little crowded in here.” He tore off another length of tracing paper.

  Now Charlie seemed stuck, and while he sat there rubbing his chin, a half-dozen rejected schemes spread out in front of him, I opened the booklet to the photograph of the miniature bungalow with the glassed-in room squatting over its front porch. Maybe we could go up, like this, I suggested. Charlie told me a little about the house in the picture, evidently a favorite. It was in a campground on Cape Cod called Nonquit, a summer community his grandparents had been members of, where Charlie had spent time as a child. He spoke affectionately of the place, and especially of the strong, eccentric architecture there, which he still sometimes returned to admire and, occasionally, borrow from. Every house was different, Charlie said, idiosyncratic but without straining to be. They’d been built at the turn of the century by Beaux Arts—trained architects working in vernacular American idioms—stick, shingle style, bungalow. What he admired most about these buildings was their simultaneous inventiveness and unpretentiousness, qualities not easily combined.

  “The houses have a certain propriety I’ve always associated with my grandparents.” These were the Quakers on his mother’s side. “They’re very sophisticated buildings—a dozen different ideas in each—yet they’d much rather be thought of as plain than risk seeming the least bit affected. But there are layers upon layers here if you look. You’re welcome to uncover as much, or as little, as you want.” Charlie seemed to prize this notion of propriety in people and buildings equally.

  Now he seized on the idea of a small second story, and set off in a whole new direction, drawing a square, about five foot on a side, in the middle of our rectangle—a tower, essentially, that would rise above the main room and accommodate either the daybed or the desk. I told Charlie about my tree house, which the tower he was drawing reminded me of. We were suddenly on much trickier ground, having now to factor in a half-dozen new and relatively inflexible elements, like the clearance beneath the second story (“How tall are you? Let’s see if we can get away with seven feet under here”) and some means of access to it that wouldn’t eat up too much space downstairs. A staircase would take up nearly as much square footage as we were adding, so we played with the idea of using a library ladder on a track, which would slide right into the thick wall and out of the way.

  The rest of the morning was taken up elaborating the tower scheme. After we had settled on what seemed to be a workable arrangement in plan—my desk lining the glazed walls of the tower, the front of the house below becoming a porch, with the stove and sitting area directly beneath the tower, and the daybed still occupying a bay window curving out from the south wall downstairs—Charlie declared that the moment of truth had arrived. It was time to see what this thing was going to look like in elevation.

  Still working in ink, Charlie sketched what looked like a miniature bungalow with a boxy tower rising up through the middle of its roof to form a second, parallel gable above it, like so:

  “Well, he’s definitely his own guy,” Charlie said, drumming his Uniball fine-point on the edge of his drafting table as he appraised the elevation. It did seem vaguely anthropomorphic, with the makings of a stro
ng face. But I wondered if maybe it wasn’t too public a face—the kind you’d expect to meet in a village, or in a campground like Nonquit, but perhaps not alone in the woods.

  Charlie said it was too soon to tell. “At a certain point, you have to start getting real about a scheme—start drawing it in elevation with actual dimensions and roof pitches. That’s when an idea that might seem to work in a rough drawing can take on a whole new personality—or fall apart.” Now Charlie switched to pencil, drawing to scale a very precise set of parallel roof lines, one directly above the other. First he tried the same fairly shallow thirty-degree roof pitch our house had, thinking that this might set up a dialogue between the two buildings. But it soon became clear that this pitch would not give me enough headroom upstairs without making the tower so tall as to overwhelm the rest of the building. Charlie chuckled at the monstrosity he’d drawn.

  He tried a few other roof pitches, subtracted a few inches from the clearance beneath the second story (“Just for an experiment let’s try six-six, make it nice and cozy under there”), and lengthened the eaves below in order to beef up the lower section relative to the tower. Drafting now was a matter of feeding new angles and measurements into the scheme and then seeing what kind of elevation the geometry came back with; it seemed as though a certain amount of control had passed from Charlie to the drawing process itself, which was liable to produce wholly unexpected results depending on the variables he fed into it. At a pitch of forty-five degrees, for example, the interior of the tower suddenly began to work. “You know, this could be kind of fantastic in here,” Charlie said, brightening as he drew in plan a three-sided desk commanding a 270-degree view. “Sort of like being up on the bridge of a ship—or in your tree house.” But when he turned to the elevation it seemed to have undergone a complete change of personality. No longer a funky campground bungalow, the building had gone back in time half a century and acquired a somewhat Gothic-Victorian aspect, with its steeply pitched roof and slender, upward-thrusting tower. A woodland setting now seemed to suit this house, it was true, but unfortunately it was the woods of the Brothers Grimm: The elevation now suggested a gingerbread cottage. It had gotten cute. Charlie scowled at the drawing. “It’s a hobbit house!”

  But the tower scheme had its own momentum now, so Charlie kept at it, playing with the elevation while trying to keep the plan more or less intact, deploying a whole bag of tricks to rid the building of its fairy-tale associations and balance the relative weight of top and bottom. He abbreviated the eaves, beefed up the timbers below while lightening them above, overthrew the symmetry of the façade, and drew in a series of unexpectedly big windows, all of which served to undercut the house’s “hobbitiness.” By the time we decided to break for lunch, the elevation had lost any trace of cuteness, which Charlie clearly felt was the peril in designing such a miniature building. “This is starting to look like something,” Charlie declared at last, by which of course he meant exactly the opposite: The building no longer looked like anything you could readily give a name to—neither bungalow nor gingerbread cottage. The building was once again its own guy. Whether it was my guy neither of us felt quite sure. So we decided to put the drawing away for a while, see how it looked to us in a few days.

  By now, Charlie and I had traveled pretty far down this particular road, having invested so much work in the tower scheme. But as I drove home to Connecticut later that afternoon, I began to have doubts about it. Mainly I wondered if the building wasn’t getting too big and complicated. My shack in the woods had turned into a two-story house, and I wasn’t sure if it was something I could afford, much less build myself; it certainly didn’t look inexpensive or idiot-proof. When I got home that evening, I walked out to the site, and recalled Charlie’s remark about propriety as I tried to imagine the building in place. Out here on this wooded, rocky hillside, in the middle of this fallen-down farm, it seemed clear that the building he’d drawn would call too much attention to itself. In this particular context, it lacked propriety. Charlie had devised a scheme that would give me everything I’d asked for, it was true, but perhaps that was the problem. Somehow, the building seemed to be getting away from us.

  Charlie phoned me first. “I’m starting all over,” he announced, much to my relief. “There’s no reason we can’t get the things you want here—a couple of distinct spaces, a desk, a daybed, a stove, and some kind of porch—without going to two stories.” Drawing the tower scheme had been a valuable exercise, Charlie said. It had helped him to think through all the programmatic elements by getting them down on paper. But now he wanted to go back to the basic eight-by-thirteen rectangle, see if he couldn’t figure out some way to condense all the elements and patterns I wanted into that frame.

  “We need to tame this thing—impose some tighter rules. That usually produces better architecture anyway. I can’t lose sight of the basic simplicity of our program here: it’s a hut in the woods, a place for you to work. It is not a second house.”

  He started talking about a four-by-eight-foot playhouse he was building for his boys in Tamworth, New Hampshire, where he spent weekends in a converted chicken coop that had been in his family for three generations. The playhouse, which was in the woods up behind the house, consisted of four gigantic timber corner posts set on boulders and crowned with a gable roof framed out of undressed birch logs.

  “We could do something like that here: a primitive hut, basically, with a post-and-beam frame. That way, the walls don’t bear any load, which gives us a lot of freedom. We could do some walls thick, others thin. I could even work out some sort of removable wall system, or perhaps windows that disappear into the walls, or up into the ceiling, so that in the summer the whole building turns into a porch.”

  Charlie seemed full of ideas now, some of them—like the disappearing windows—sounding fairly complex, and others so primitive as to be worrisome. For example, he wasn’t sure that my building needed a foundation. We could just sink pressure-treated corner posts into the ground, or maybe seat the whole building on four boulders, like his boys’ playhouse. Wouldn’t the frost heave the boulders every winter? That’s no big deal, he said; you rent a house jack and jack the building up in the spring. Charlie was bringing a very different approach to the project now, trying radically to simplify it, to get it back to first principles after the complications of the tower scheme. Which was fine with me, though I told him that I definitely did not want a building that had to be jacked up every April.

  From our conversations, I knew that the primitive hut was a powerful image for Charlie, as indeed it has been for many architects at least since the time of Vitruvius. Almost all of the classic architecture treatises I’d read—by Vitruvius, Alberti, Laugier and, more recently, Le Corbusier and Wright—start out with a vivid account of the building of the First Shelter, which serves these author-architects as a myth of architecture’s origins in the state of nature; it also provides a theoretical link between the work of building and the art of architecture. Depending on the author, the primal shelter might be a tent or cave or a wooden post-and-beam hut with a gable roof. More often than not, the architect proceeds to draw a direct line of historical descent from his version of the primitive hut to the style of architecture he happens to practice, thereby implying that this kind of building alone carries nature’s seal of approval. If an architect favors neoclassical architecture over Gothic, for example, chances are his primitive hut will bear a close resemblance to a Greek temple built out of tree trunks.

  Literature has its primitive huts too—think of Robinson Crusoe’s or Thoreau’s: simple dwellings for not-so-simple characters who find in such a building a good vantage point from which to cast a gimlet eye upon society. The sophisticate’s primitive hut becomes a tool with which to explore civilized man’s relation to nature and criticize whatever in the contemporary scene strikes the author as artificial or decadent. The idea, in literature and architecture alike, seems to be that a decadent society or style of building can be ren
ewed and refreshed by closer contact with nature, by a return to the first principles and truthfulness embodied in the primitive hut.

  For Charlie, the appeal of the hut seemed a good deal less ideological than all that. To him, the image bespoke plain, honest structure; an architecture made out of the materials at hand; a simple habitation carved out of the wilderness; and an untroubled relationship to nature. He had told me about reading the eighteenth-century philosophe Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essay on Architecture in architecture school and coming across the etching of a primitive hut on its frontispiece: Charles Eisen’s “Allegory of Architecture Returning to its Natural Model,” which depicts four trees in a rectangle, their branches knitted together to form a leafy, sheltering gable above. “It’s a completely romantic idea,” Charlie said. “But it’s kind of wonderful, too, the image of these four trees giving themselves up to us as the four corners of a shelter—this dream of a perfect marriage between man and nature.”

  A few weeks later, I received a somewhat cryptic fax from Charlie:

  When I reached him late that afternoon, he sounded excited. “So what do you think?” I confessed I didn’t really understand the drawing.

  “Oh. Well, what you’ve got there is the detail for the southwest corner of your building. I’ve been working on it for a week, and this morning it finally came together.”

  The corner detail?

  “No, the whole scheme.”

  I asked when I could see the rest of it.

  “This detail’s all I’ve drawn so far. But that’s our parti, right there—the solution to the problem, in a nutshell. The rest should be fairly easy.”

  I still didn’t get it.