When Charlie stopped by one afternoon late in August, I was up on the roof working by myself, nailing down the last couple of straps in preparation for shingling. After showing off the progress Joe and I had made since his last site inspection, I asked him whether or not he considered my building to be postmodern. I understood this was not a polite question. No architect ever likes to be pigeonholed, or to acknowledge a debt to another architect, at least to one not yet dead. I also knew that the postmodern label covered a lot of architecture Charlie couldn’t stand.
“My knee-jerk reaction is, No, your building isn’t at all postmodern.” “Knee-jerk” suggested a more considered reaction might be on deck, so I persisted. But wasn’t there something postmodern about his use of classical proportions? And didn’t the pitch of the roof, along with the corner columns and the cornice, give the building a passing resemblance to a Greek temple—exactly the sort of reference a postmodernist might make?
“Well, in that sense, yes, I guess… Oh, I don’t know—” Charlie hates to find himself in even the most shallow theoretical waters. But after flailing around for a moment, he realized the only way back to shore was to start swimming. “Okay, look. To the extent that postmodernism made it okay to use historical elements again, I suppose you could say this is a postmodern building. And I guess I do think of it as a kind of temple. But it’s not like I went and arbitrarily stuck a classical temple top on an office building out on Route 128!” He was referring to a Robert A.M. Stern building near Boston.
“So then is it a question of attitude?”
“Of conviction, yes. Look, an architect can employ a historical reference in an ironic or mannerist way, which is what I think of postmodernists as doing, or you use it because you think there’s still something great about it, that it still has some value in a particular context. Those straps are a perfect example.”
As we were talking, I was applying a second coat of chicken fat to the lath with an old paintbrush. Charlie’s plans had called for the straps, which were spaced about five inches apart, to extend several inches beyond the first and last rafter, creating a reveal that had the effect of adding dentils to the façade of the building—another classical detail. Named for the teeth they resemble, dentils are the small square blocks that appear in series beneath the roofs of Greek temples, either directly above the cornice or along the slope of the pediment.
Charlie explained that the dentil is one of several classical ornaments that the Greeks derived from the timber framing on which they modeled their architecture; dentils were inspired by the exposed tips of the lath used to support the roofing material—which was precisely what the ones on my building were going to do.
“Now, a card-carrying postmodernist might use dentils too, but he’d do it in such a way that they were clearly mannerist or iconographic. They’d be purely and obviously decorative, for starters—pasted on, not structural. And then he’d either use lots and lots of really tiny dentils, or a handful of gigantic ones, to make absolutely clear the reference was playful or ironic. He’d probably want to paint them, too, for the added emphasis.
“But look at the straps on your roof. This is not a skin job. This is not irony. Those are real dentils! Oh, sure, they’re a classical reference, too. But the reason I used dentils on this roof is because they still happen to work—they’ll do a good job holding up our shingles, and explaining how our roof works. They’re still alive, is what I guess I’m trying to say.”
Charlie pulled a shingle from one of the bundles stacked on the floor and brought it to his nostrils. “Don’t you love the smell of fresh cedar? I could just about eat this stuff.” He passed the shingle to me as if it were the cork from a bottle of wine.
“Very often architects seem to be afraid to just come out and say they like something, they think they’ve got to take it back a little. So they’ll use some element they like—these dentils, say—but they’ll do it ironically as a way of protecting themselves. I suppose it’s partly a matter of audience: Is your audience your client, or is it really New York and L.A. and the magazines? Because if that’s who it is, then you’re going to want to somehow announce you’re a sophisticated, postmodern guy, that all this is just theater, instead of being willing to come out and say, ‘This is not theater. It’s here, it’s real, and I happen to like it.’
“So does that make me a postmodernist or not?”
Yes and no, I decided later. It seemed as though the postmodern movement had opened a door through which a lot of people like Charlie might slip, under the cover of their more ironically inclined colleagues. What separated the two groups was their demeanor as much as anything else. Charlie had seized the license offered by postmodernism, but he hadn’t bothered with the attitude that was supposed to go with it, the small print of pastiche on the back.
Charlie wasn’t the only one. Out beyond the increasingly rarefied world of academic architecture, there didn’t seem to be many other people paying attention to the small print, either. Postmodern architects might wield their historical reference in the correct ironic spirit, but how many people outside of architecture were really getting it? Because if somebody hadn’t read the accompanying texts, and didn’t know enough to spot the cardboard, he was apt to miss the signs for the irony exit and find himself driving shamelessly down the road of “nostalgia” (perhaps the dirtiest word in architecture today), reveling in the unself-conscious pleasures of old-fashioned pitched roofs and divided-light windows and stone façades. Right here lies an important reason for postmodernism’s success (another is the fact that faux tends to be cheap): The architects might be selling signs, but the corporate patrons and the individuals commissioning postmodern buildings were often buying the old-fashioned, beloved, and sorely missed symbols.*
But historicist architecture was only one current released by postmodernism, even if it was the most visible and popular one. Having freed architecture from its traditional obligations to space and structure and symbolism, postmodernism also opened the way to a series of increasingly radical experiments in formalism. These aloof, relentlessly abstract buildings may have looked quite different from Venturi’s, but their designers shared with him the conviction that architecture was a language; they just used different vocabularies to say different things. No longer driven by the exigencies of program or site or client or material or method of construction, the architect was now free as a sculptor, poet, or literary theorist, and he could enlist any set of metaphors or intellectual vocabulary he liked to drive his design. This might be architectural history, but it could just as easily be Boolean algebra, Chomskyan linguistics, inside jokes, conceptualism, cubism, pop culture, and, of course, deconstruction.
Peter Eisenman, whose own career describes an arc passing through a succession of these isms, is largely responsible for bringing this last and supposedly most subversive intellectual vocabulary to architecture. In the same way that Jacques Derrida sought to identify and then “deconstruct” a series of central metaphysical concepts in Western culture—humanism, phallocentrism, presence, truth—Eisenman and his colleagues set about deconstructing what they took to be architecture’s own set of fundamental assumptions. The big four were shelter, aesthetics, structure, and meaning. Also ripe for deconstruction were all those other things about buildings people take for granted: that form had some organic relationship to function, that inside was intrinsically different than outside, that right side up was the way you wanted a building to be, that the roof went on top. Derrida had attacked writers and philosophers for borrowing metaphors of solidity and presence from buildings; now the architects were going the great philosopher one better, attacking the solidity and presence of the buildings themselves.*
Beginning in the 1970s Eisenman designed a series of houses that “attempted to destabilize the idea of home”—apparently another dubious social construction. Perhaps the most famous of these houses to actually get built (most didn’t) was House VI, which happens to be in the town where I live. While
I was roofing my own building, I read an article in the local paper about the travails of its owners and phoned them to ask if I could come by and see their famous house. The visit gave me my closest encounter with some of the astonishing feats of which architects are capable once they’ve put aside their usual concerns about client, site, materials, structure, place, and time. It took me deep into the very heart of architectural unreality.
Pulling into the driveway on a hot summer afternoon, my first impression of the house was that it resembled some sort of spiny gray-and-white spaceship hovering several feet above the lawn. The architect had recessed the foundation from the intersecting planes that comprise the house’s walls, and this made it appear as though the building never quite touches down on its site. There’s no façade to speak of, and no visible means of entry. Eisenman’s idea, I read later, was to overturn the usual relationship between inside and outside, in which the façade of a building inaugurates the process by which we make sense of it; here, sense-making (such as it is) was deliberately frustrated until you were inside.
Eventually I located the entrance, a gunmetal steel fire door hidden around a corner, and met the Franks, a friendly couple in their early sixties (Dick is a food photographer, Suzanne an architectural historian) who appear to have done more than their fair share for the glory of contemporary architecture. Suzanne has written an illuminating book about the house, Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response, that details both the satisfactions and the trials of living in a work of art. The book recounts the time Eisenman called to say that he was bringing Philip Johnson over to see the house. Apprehensive about the great man’s reaction, Eisenman asked the Franks if they wouldn’t mind removing the baby’s crib from the house so Johnson could experience the building in its pristine form; the Franks obligingly put their baby’s crib out on the lawn. There’s a picture of Eisenman in the book, visiting the construction site; the architect looks like the hippest professor you had in college: bushy, well fed, bespectacled, and smoking a pipe.
Asked at the time why he took what appeared to be a cavalier approach to his clients’ needs, Eisenman patiently explained that his goal was to “shake them out of those needs.” That may explain why the single bathroom is accessible only by walking through the Franks’ bedroom. Or why, in deference to the complex geometrical system that governs the design, the floor of the tiny master bedroom has a gaping slot cut through it in such a way as to rule out a double bed. (There’s one need the architect had presumably shaken his clients out of.) One column, its location dictated not by the structure but by the geometry, awkwardly divides the dining area in such a way as to frustrate conversation at the dinner table.
As for the roof, it too has been “destabilized,” and in more ways than one. Originally punctuated by flat “windows,” the roof is designed to look all but indistinguishable from a wall. This is apparently because the architect wanted to invert the “conventional” relationship of roof and wall, as well as up and down; there’s also an upside-down staircase suspended over the dinner table, and a column suspended from the roof that fails to reach all the way to the ground. In theory the house should look pretty much the same if you were to rotate it in space. But the flat, fenestrated roof leaked so badly that the frame of the house rotted out within just a few years of construction.
When the Franks decided that they would replace a section of their flat roof with a gently sloped one, Eisenman, an old friend, publicly attacked them for spoiling the lines of his design, and the Franks found themselves accused of “cultural vandalism” in the pages of Art in America. A few years later the Franks drained their savings to have the house almost entirely rebuilt. This time they were able to work out a few compromises with Eisenman, who signed off on conventional bubble skylights, a slight pitch in the roof, and even a double bed that bridges the slot in the floor.
After I’d signed the guest book, adding my name to an impressive roster of some of architecture’s leading lights, I thanked Suzanne and Dick for their hospitality. On the drive home it occurred to me that the best way to understand the Franks’ strange home was as a kind of antiprimitive hut for our time. For House VI offers the precise negative image of the old hut ideal, an alternative myth that denies point by point everything about architecture that the canonical hut had claimed about nature and structure and material and shelter.
The primitive hut had said that the forms and meaning of architecture were derived from nature; House VI was a virtuoso display of architecture as the pure product of culture—of whatever sign system the architect chose to deploy. The primitive hut said that architectural structure was an expression of its materials and how it was made; both the structure and materials of House VI were perfectly silent; there’s no way to tell that there’s a conventional balloon frame under the building’s “dematerialized” surface, a surface that at various times has been clad in stucco and acrylic. The purpose of the primitive hut was to shelter us, to minister to our needs; House VI seeks to destabilize the notion of shelter, to shake us out of our needs.
In fact these two contending dreams of architecture were equally unreal; this much now seemed clear. To claim that nature was the source of all architectural truth was just as absurd as the postmodernist’s claim that architecture rested on no foundation whatsoever, that it was culture all the way down. No doubt the truth lay somewhere in-between. The old hut designers and the new ones, I understood after visiting House VI, are equally deft cartoonists of what is surely a more mixed reality.
Eisenman and architects like him are hell-bent on liberating architecture from every conceivable earthly bond: from program, function, history, home, the body, and nature itself. It is, to be sure, a daring project, provocative as art, or philosophy. It’s a poignant one too, for as the revenge of nature, and client, on House VI suggests, it is probably doomed. Looking around House VI, trying to make sense of its geometrical inversions, of the elegant There its architect wants me to dwell on, I found my attention kept snagging on the banal, neglected Here of the place: the cracks in the paint job on the upside-down staircase; the way my head grazed a beam as I climbed the right-side-up one; the dust balls collecting in the corners of the slots in the walls; the smell of the Franks’ spaniels; the mildew already starting to stain the space-age acrylic that had been sprayed on the exterior when it was rebuilt. Nothing more than the usual wear and tear, but here it leapt out rudely, offering what seemed like a kind of rebuke. What it made me understand is that House VI was never so perfect, never so true to itself, as the day before the day the Franks moved in. Or perhaps you have to go back further still, to the day it was first drawn. Ever since, the house has been in a steady process of decline, as the ordinary frictions of reality and everyday life, the dogs and the people and the rain, have taken their incremental toll, sullying Eisenman’s dream of pure architectural Idea. Architecture might be done with nature, but the experience of House VI, now on its third roof, suggests that nature will never be done with architecture.
I know, I promised I wasn’t going to make too much here of leaky roofs. But I was thinking about leaks all the time that summer, since so much of our work on the roof was aimed at preventing them. Charlie had sent me a brochure issued by the Cedar Bureau, a trade organization to which he accords an almost papal authority. The bureau advises builders on the correct handling of cedar shingles (by far the best kind for wood roofs), and we followed their counsel to the letter. From the bureau we learned such things as the proper grade of cedar to use on a roof, the best kind of nails to secure them with, the optimal gap to leave between adjacent shingles (they need room to expand in the heat), how to overlap all the seams on one course with the shingles of the next, and precisely how much of every shingle should be exposed to the weather (no more than 5½? on a roof of our pitch).
There was a lot to it, which is why Joe and I found ourselves taking far greater pains with our roof than with, say, our walls. Though the whole building was to be skinned in shingles,
we were using white cedar on the walls and red on the roof; red was considerably more expensive, but you wanted its superior stability and weather resistance on the roof. Everything I was learning about how to make a roof impressed on me that the roof was, well, different. You couldn’t possibly work on one and still seriously entertain the idea that roofs and walls might be handled in the same manner. From up here, that was strictly a drafting-table conceit. Am I starting to sound like a cranky carpenter ragging on ivory-tower architects? Maybe, but the work of roofing does little to encourage a belief in the arbitrariness of roofs, or their deep linguistic nature.
Joe would watch me carefully as I lapped my shingles, letting me know when a seam in one course edged too close to the seam in the course below. He taught me how to notch the handle of my hammer 5½? from the end; this way I merely had to flip the hammer over to set each shingle’s proper exposure to the weather, instead of having to reach for my tape. (Working up on the roof, you want as few tools to worry about dropping as possible.) He taught me the proper way to cut a shingle: how you scored the shingle with a utility knife, then broke it cleanly along the grain. And he taught me how to cultivate randomness in the widths of my shingles by reaching into the stack without looking. Shingling, Joe would travel methodically across one face of the roof as if it were an ear of corn, then move up a course and return, shingling his way in the opposite direction. At first I moved haltingly across the roof’s opposite slope, but after a few courses I absorbed the rhythm of the work—reach for a shingle, slap it down on the one below, adjust its exposure with my handle, flip the hammer, nail it down, reach for another—and began to match his swift and easy pace.
A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder Page 21
