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

by Michael Pollan

  Charlie was also on hand, and Joe was due but running more than his usual couple of hours behind schedule. (The man might be a master of space, but time is another matter altogether.) On this occasion, though, there may have been extenuating circumstances. For this was to be Joe and Charlie’s first face-to-face, a prospect neither of them relished.

  Before Joe arrived we worked on the foot-wide Doug fir plank that Charlie had spec’d to span the tops of the corners posts and tie all four walls together. Like a great many components of the building’s frame, this one performed several distinct functions at once, some structural, others formal or ornamental. Structurally, the plank functions as the top plate of the walls, stiffening the frame all around while providing a header for the windows and a seat for the rafters. Inside, the same member serves as the topmost bookshelf, articulating the depth and height of the thick walls that run the length of the building’s long sides. Then, at either end of the building, three inches of the plate extend through the wall, jutting out to form a ledge, or lip, on the front and rear elevations, which crowns the corner posts much like a slender cornice. This is its formal role: by establishing a strong, crisp line across the face of the building and defining the base of the pediment, the plank (in combination with the visor in front) gives all the columns something to “die into,” thereby resolving the problem of how to terminate the two inner posts. Charlie prepared an axonometric drawing to show us how the cornice plate was supposed to work:

  The cornice is exactly the sort of elegantly economical detail I might never have appreciated had I not worked on it directly. With the cornice Charlie had pushed the possibilities of “articulated” structure as far as he could, enlisting the building’s frame in the structure of its thick walls and then bringing that interior element out into the design of the exterior elevation. (Though I hasten to add that this is strictly an architect’s concept of economy: Since the detail was so important, Charlie had insisted we build the cornice using the clearest, and very dearest, grade of fir.)

  As we waited for Joe to show up, Charlie climbed up into the frame to help me lay out our four planks, a procedure that very quickly brought him up to speed on the whole squareness issue. He was doing his best to be nonchalant about it too, though I could see that so messy and steep a declension from the structure he had drawn clearly disturbed him. From an architect’s point of view, our two-degree lapse outraged acceptable practice, and I was grateful to Charlie for not giving me too hard a time about it. But that did not mean he was prepared to let our mistake compromise the appearance of his building, no matter what the cost in effort or aggravation.

  It had been Joe’s and my plan all along to block the spread of out-of-squareness right here, at the plate. By cutting the planks square and then “floating” that perfect rectangle above the imperfect rectangle of our frame, we would “lose” the problem at the top of the walls and thereby preserve our roof from the spread of geometrical imperfection. The advantage of making the cornice square is that it would give us a perfectly symmetrical base on which to erect our two gables, vastly simplifying the job of cutting rafters and framing the roof. But Charlie contended that to do this would be a big mistake. The slight discrepancy between the plane of the walls and the plate above them would “wreck” the cornice, he explained, since its depth (and therefore the conspicuous line of shadow it cast) would vary at every point along its length. “It’s really, really going to bother you,” Charlie said. By “you” he of course meant himself; Charlie had become fully as proprietary about the building as Joe and I were. I couldn’t decide whether it was a good or a bad thing that Joe wasn’t around to argue the point with him.

  Charlie wanted us to cut the plates to match the imperfect frame, thereby pushing the squareness problem up into the rafters, where it would be more or less out of view. “I’m not saying it won’t be a headache,” he acknowledged. “You’re going to be cutting every pair of rafters individually, each to a slightly different length. But then—I promise—it’ll be over, the problem won’t go any further than that.” How could it? The building didn’t go any further than that. But it seemed to me that if Charlie felt this strongly about the cornice detail, it was probably wise to go along.

  Charlie and I were already nailing down the untrued cornice planks when Joe finally appeared, trudging up the hill to the site elaborately festooned with power tools and extension cords. He had on red, white, and blue suspenders, circa 1969, and a pair of trousers, which immediately set him apart from the weekend carpenters on hand in our shorts. Charlie and I came down off our ladders for the introductions, and the two of them shook hands—carefully. Charlie launched an initial foray into geniality, complimenting Joe on his craftsmanship, but when the gesture wasn’t reciprocated, he promptly chomped a few nails between his teeth, climbed back up his ladder, and returned to the plank he’d been spiking. It was not a comfortable moment, and the news I had for Joe about the planks did not promise to improve it. I remember thinking: Men!

  When I told Joe how we’d decided to handle the cornice plate, he gave a shrug of what I knew to be feigned indifference: the two of us had been going back and forth about whether or not to square these planks for weeks as we framed up the side walls, so I knew he had strong feelings on the subject. “Mike, it’s your building,” he now mumbled, by which I was meant to understand, and not Charlie’s. Then he looked up at the architect, swinging his hammer on top of the wall, and invited him to come back and help out again the following weekend, and all the weekends after that, when we’d still be custom-cutting rafters. “Because framing this roof is shaping up as a real good time!”

  Charlie laughed off the barb and, to my enormous relief, set to work mollifying Joe. You could see the years of experience smoothing the feathers of all those prickly contractors Charlie’s drawings and directives and punch lists had propelled into orbit. By turns self-deprecating, appreciative, and deferential, Charlie managed within moments to assure Joe he had no intention of challenging his authority on the job site. And by the end of the afternoon, Joe was abundantly himself again, handing out orders to everybody, holding forth on politics (the mendacity of government, the people’s Second Amendment right to bear arms), and offering design suggestions that Charlie accepted with exceptional good grace.

  Later that afternoon, after the architect had headed back to Cambridge, Joe told me Charlie was not at all what he’d expected. “He’s almost a regular guy,” Joe said. He seemed genuinely astonished.

  The episode of the cornice did not mark the cessation of hostilities between Joe and Charlie, however. A certain tenseness would color all their dealings right to the end, now and again flaring in such a way as to strand me uncomfortably in between. I soon learned never to cite Charlie or his plans as a final authority on any question, and always to claim any suggestion from the architect as my own. But Joe wasn’t the only party intent on jealously guarding his prerogatives. If I had occasion to mention to Charlie that Joe and I planned to decide on our own some detail left unclear on the blueprint (the framing of a window, say, or the precise depth of the bookshelf walls), he’d urge us to hold off and then, within hours, fax me a drawing in which Joe would then proceed to poke holes.

  What was going on here? The project represented only the tiniest of commissions for Charlie, and for Joe it was only fill-in work, a short-term weekend job. Yet both were behaving as if something much more important were at stake.

  Of the two, Joe’s investment in the project was somewhat easier to fathom. For one or two days every week, and provided Charlie stayed in Cambridge, Joe enjoyed a measure of freedom and authority he had probably never known on the job. He was the foreman, the brains of the operation, the mentor—and I met the payroll. Plus he got to give an architect a hard time whenever he felt like it, evening an ancient score on behalf of carpenters everywhere. You don’t find too many deals quite this sweet.

  On most construction sites today, the battle between architects and contractors i
s largely past, if not forgotten. Carpenters may still grumble, but only among themselves, and rarely to any effect; everyone understands that, really, the game is over, and it was the architects who won. Carpenters might still possess a greater degree of autonomy than other workers in an industrial economy, but their authority is a ghost of what it was. In many respects my job was a throwback. The complexity of the design combined with my own inexperience put Joe in a position of unusual power, and never more so than during the work of framing. His role was much like that of the housewright of old, who was typically the only “expert” in a house-raising, directing a crew of amateurs nearly as rank as I. To watch Joe up in the frame, moving from beam to beam with a simian agility, barking orders, galvanizing a crew of incompetents in a procedure as intricate as the raising of a roof, was to watch a carpenter in his glory—and to have some idea what the glory days of the trade must have been like.

  But if the carpenter lost out in the war with architects, then what exactly had the architects won? This question helped me to at least begin to understand what my building meant to Charlie. Certainly an architect wields far greater authority than a carpenter. Yet unless he happens to be one of a small handful of stars, his authority too is heavily checked and compromised—by the whims of clients, the imperatives of the marketplace, the dominion of the building code, the rule of popular taste. To the extent that money is a measure of power, the fact that architects are frequently the poorest paid of all the trades on a construction site indicates that the victory of the profession might be, if not hollow, then certainly less resounding than the popular image of the autonomous architect-artist would suggest. The architect as romantic hero has been a powerful stereotype for most of this century, but I think most architects today understand it as the myth that it is. To an architect of Charlie’s generation, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, a character whose name you can’t pronounce without hearing the word “heroic,” is a figure of fun.

  And yet that figure—solitary and utterly uncompromising as he bends the world to his visionary purposes—is perhaps more alluring to architects than they can safely let on. For who wouldn’t want the career of the romantic hero-artist, breaking free of the shackles of budget and client and marketplace? It’s one thing to know better, to understand that architecture is in fact—as it should be—an impure and collaborative art form, but it’s quite another to give up completely such a seductive image—the very image, in all likelihood, that attracted you to architecture in the first place.

  Maybe I shouldn’t speak for Charlie, but I imagine that the “writing house” commission stirred whatever romantic inclinations he might still harbor. In a practice demanding more than its share of prose, the writing house offered at least the chance for poetry. The client had pretty much given the architect his head, the program had an unusual simplicity to it, and there were so few of the usual earthbound considerations to worry about: no plumbing, no insulation, and not a whole lot of building code. In a more conventional project, a detail as elegant as a cornice that passes through the building’s skin would almost certainly have been sacrificed to the prosaic need for thickly insulated walls. Freed from such mundane considerations, Charlie could articulate whatever of the building’s structure he wanted to, and in doing so design an uncommonly pure work of architecture, his own personal interpretation of the primitive hut.

  From one perspective Charlie and Joe would appear to have much in common here—not in their interests, which were bound to clash, but in their motives and aspirations. Both had found in the writing house a degree of freedom and authority, of power really, such as their workaday lives rarely afforded. On this tiny stage, both could play the hero. (And at my expense, in every sense of the word.) The only problem was, the heroism of one had to contend with the heroism of the other.

  Leaving aside these conflicts, as well as my own junior status, the project offered all three of us many of the same satisfactions. There was a measure of poetry in the work itself, if only in the sense that we were doing it freely and for ourselves, with no thought to the marketplace. And this was real work too, something more than mere labor—time put in for pay. It was work with a clear beginning, middle, and end. At the end we would have something to show for it, would have added something to the stock of reality—to what Hannah Arendt once called the “huge arsenal of the given.” In The Human Condition Arendt writes of the privileged position of homo faber, man the maker of things, whom the Greeks believed stood not only above the laborer, but above even the man of action and the man of thought, or words. The laborer produces nothing lasting he can call his own, and both the man of action and the man of thought are ultimately dependent on other people, without whose regard and remembrance their deeds and creations do not matter or endure. “Homo faber is indeed a lord and master,” she writes, “not only because he…has set himself up as the master of all nature but because he is master of himself and his doings.” At one time or another I think all three of us felt a glimmer of that mastery; we just had to take turns.

  The culmination of timber framing arrives with the raising of the ridge pole, a moment of high drama that Joe approached as one of his biggest scenes. For weeks now, I’d been asking him how we were going to do it—should I be lining up some sort of crane for the day?—and for weeks Joe’d been telling me not to worry, that he’d figure out something when the time came. But it was definitely on his mind. During breaks, I’d follow his gaze as it slowly traveled up from the wall plate to the overhanging trees only to suddenly plunge again; I guessed he was testing out scenarios (a block and tackle? Maybe a pulley?), running calculations on what it would take to lift a four-by-ten ridge beam sixteen feet overhead. What I wanted to know was, did the rafters come first, or the ridge beam? It looked like a classic chicken-and-egg problem to me: Without a ridge beam, what’s to hold the rafters in place? And without rafters to hold the ridge beam up, it seemed like you’d need to temporarily levitate the thing. To me, it looked like another pyramid deal: inconceivable without a really big rig and a lot of guys. But if Joe was nervous about it—and I think he was, a little—he did a good job of hiding it, all the while building suspense in his rapt audience of one.

  On the July Saturday we proposed to raise the roof beam, Joe showed up before eight, brimming with determination and confidence. We began indoors, framing the two end gables. Joe worked his pencil, calculating lengths and angles, then called these out to me; I manned the table saw. Before a single nail was driven, we laid the whole assembly out on the floor. Each gable was an isosceles right triangle consisting of a four-by-six rafter on each of two sides, a cross beam of the same dimension (known as a collar tie) along the base, and a four-by-four king post down the middle.

  At the apex of this triangle we left a 31½?-by-9? gap between the two rafters and above the post: This was the slot in which the four-by-ten ridge pole would ultimately sit. The one-word answer to my chicken-and-egg riddle was “plywood”: we nailed a triangle of half-inch ply to the back of these members to keep them fixed in place until the ridge pole was up. Joe at last unveiled his plan: We would raise the gables into place at either end of the building and then drop the ridge pole into their two pockets. Only after that would we nail the rest of the rafters into place. It sounded to me as though you still wanted the crane (the gable ends themselves weighed several hundred pounds a piece), but Joe said all we would need was one more pair of hands, no particular skill required. So I arranged for an exceptionally tall friend named Don to come by later that afternoon.

  The gable ends themselves presented a complicated bit of framing. Owing to our squareness problem, the rear gable had to be an inch and a half narrower than the front, which meant we had to cut the bird’s mouth, or notch, on each of the two pairs of rafters at a slightly different spot in order to maintain the same pitch from one end of our roof to the other. (The precise location of these cuts was determined by a complicated formula that Joe worked out to his satisfaction on a scrap of plywood but fail
ed to make intelligible to me.) Then we doweled the joints where the rafters and king post each met the cross beam, pounding a cylinder of hardwood through holes drilled into each member; the dowels would help prevent the roof from splaying outward under the weight of snow.

  Typical of this building’s design, the gable mixed traditional and modern stud-framing techniques. For nested within the beefy timbers forming the three sides of the gable was a second pattern of lighter members, two-by-fours that held the wall rigid and framed the pair of boxes that would eventually hold the little windows under the peak. Once we had mitered and nailed together these pieces, the gable assemblies were ready to be raised. Somehow.

  We carried the first gable out to the site and laid it down on the subfloor. Joe spent a long time just staring up at the top of the wall and then down at the gable. The assembly was far too heavy to be simply passed up onto the wall plate without a small army of helpers top and bottom. Joe now carefully arranged a pair of ladders and set a two-by-ten plank across the tops of the walls; I could see that the trees overhead no longer figured in his calculations.

  “Okay, Mike, here’s the plan. First we turn the gable upside down and backwards. Then, together, we lift the thing just high enough so that this rafter tail here hits that spot there on the plate. You’re going to have to balance everything right on that point just long enough for me to climb up onto the top of the wall. Then we pivot the whole assembly this way until the other rafter tail hits that point over there, and then slide the two-by-ten under the peak to hold it up. Follow me? Then I steady the assembly while you get up on the second ladder there, and together we flip the thing around, shimmy it into place, and then get under and lift it to vertical.” No, it made no sense to me either, none whatsoever. I told Joe following his plan was like trying to learn origami over the radio. He wasn’t smiling, and I realized then that what we were about to attempt was not without danger. I said to Joe that maybe it would be better if he just told me what to do one step at a time.