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

by Michael Pollan

  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 t
ime 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 rig
s), 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.