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

by Michael Pollan

  I tried it first, approaching and entering the building the way we were meant to, and the experience took me aback. Now that the building was clad, its bulk blocked the view down to the pond as you came around the big rock and turned into the site. What I saw before me was the body of the building to my left and the mass of the boulder on my right, two hulking forms separated only by a triangular wedge of space that closed down to a point where house and rock almost touched. Stepping through the narrow doorway, beneath the overhanging eave (inches above my head), then under the low cornice plank and between the two fin walls, the sense of constricted space suggested by the narrow wedge of ground outside seemed momentarily to intensify. But as soon as I had arrived inside and stood there on the upper landing, I could feel the space begin to relax around me.

  Now I turned to my right and stepped down into the main room, drawn by the flood of light and landscape coming in through the big rough opening on the west wall where my desk would go. Two things seemed to happen simultaneously as I stepped down into the main space. This bright sense of broad prospect all but exploded right in front of me—the shimmery pond framed now not only by the oak and ash outside, but by the thick, vertical corner posts inside as well—and the weight of the ceiling, this canopy of shingles layered like so many leaves against its frame of lath and rafters, was lifted right off my shoulders as if I’d been suddenly relieved of a heavy winter coat. I noticed how, on turning into the light-filled opening beneath the lifting-off ceiling, you could not help but let out a chestful of air, as your body perceived and then entered into this most welcome release of space going on all around it.

  And yet not all around it, for this was no glass house, after all. On either side of me an arm’s length away stood these two tall, thick, companionable walls that lent the space an unmistakable sense of refuge; I felt as though I captained this broad prospect from the safety of a sturdy enclosure. The tall walls so near at hand did something else too. They gave the building a pronounced trajectory, funneling the space coming down from the hillside behind it straight through this stepping-down wooden chute (through me, it almost seemed, standing directly in its path) and then out again, firing it between the trees and down into the pond below. There was something buoying about this, in the way the prospect said “Ahead!” and seemed to join the two senses of that word—prospect as seeing and prospect as opportunity. The building’s interior seemed to underscore, or re-present, certain qualities of the landscape outside it: the powerful flow of chi running through it that I’d sensed back when I sited it, the delicateness of the overhanging canopy (reproduced in the leafy shingles and boughlike rafters), the counterpoised senses of prospect and refuge. Coming in from outside, these qualities of the site seemed more available, not less.

  So here it was, this place of my own that I’d been working on for so long, and now I could feel it working on me. And “feel” was the right word for it too, for my experience of the room was a matter of so much more than just the eye; sure, the view was a big part of it (and the easiest to describe), but the experience of the space was at least as much a matter of the shoulders, of whatever that whiskery sense is that allows us to perceive the walls around us even in the dark. Even with my eyes shut tight I know I could have sensed that constriction of space followed by its sudden release, my brainstem performing some ancient animal calculus on the sense data streaming in, measuring the slight but perceptible changes in the properties of the air, subtle swings in its temperature and acoustics, even in the shifting scents of the different woods all around me. Our vocabulary for describing the work of the senses may be impoverished (one reason, perhaps, they don’t get much play in the architectural treatises), but that doesn’t mean the senses aren’t always at it, giving shape to our sense of place, making the experience of space just that: a fully fledged experience, something greater than the sum of what you can read about or glean from the photographs in a magazine.

  Joe was outside, gathering up his tools and getting ready to go, when I called him in to check out the new room. Plainly it worked on him too, because he gave a tremendous smile of satisfaction as he stepped down into the room and drank in the view. “Cool” was as much of an observation as he managed at first, and then: “It feels like I’m standing in a wheelhouse. On the bridge of the Mothership Organic! Mike, I think we built a goddamn boat.” And there was definitely something to that. The ceiling did recall the ribbed hull of a sailboat, and the walls and windows left no doubt as to which way the prow lay, but what really made you feel that this might be the bridge of a ship was the sense of command you felt standing at the window, riding high over the landscape spread out before you, a fine, beneficent breeze of space (of chi?) at your back.

  Perhaps what makes the experience of space so difficult to describe is that it involves not only a complex tangle of sense information (hard enough to sort out by itself) but also the countless other threads supplied by memory and association. As soon as you’ve begun to register the sensory data, the here-and-now-ness of the place, there arrives from somewhere else all the other rooms and landscapes it summons up—and in this particular case a couple of boats (and perhaps a tree house) as well. Even so, describing the experience of this room now, while it is still not much more than a thin shell of space, is probably as easy as it’s ever going to get, for as Joe and I add to it the layers of finish and furnishings and trim, each carrying its own valence of memory and allusion, the complexity of the experience will only thicken. Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be.

  And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does in fact speak to us, and that we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left-brained talk about signs and conventions would have us think. I would venture, in fact, that we respond to it rather more like a wood duck than a deconstructionist. For whatever else you can say about it, the experience of coming into my building for the first time was not foremost a literary or semiological experience, a matter of communication. This is not to say that the experience wasn’t rich with meanings and layered with symbols; it was, but the meanings and symbols were of a different order than the ones the architectural theorists talk about: no key was required to unlock their meaning.

  Well, actually there is one key needed to unlock the experience of this room, though it is not a textual key and it is a key all of us possess. I mean, of course, the human body, without which the experience of the room as I have described it would be meaningless. For only a body like our own (upright, and of more or less the same scale) could have fully registered the pleasing sequence of constriction and release I felt upon walking into the building or the expectant forward trajectory I’d sensed standing at the window, or been moved by the sense of prospect and refuge created by the juxtaposition of those thick walls and big windows—the window exactly wide enough to fill your field of vision completely, the walls almost close enough to give a reassuring tap.

  So you don’t have to take my word for it, or think my building unique in this regard, let me offer another, more well-known example: Grand Central Station, in Manhattan. As an architectural space, Grand Central is of course loaded with signs, literal as well as semiotic, having to do with the significance of arrival and departure, the rich symbolism of a railroad station in the heart of a great city, the whole complex of social meanings woven into that great cosmopolitan thrum. But anyone who has ever strode through this space recognizes that it works on us at a very different level as well. This is how J. B. Jackson describes it in an essay called “The Imitation of Landscape”:

  …to the average man the immediate experience of Grand Central is neither architectural nor social; it is sensory. He passes through a marvelous sequence; emerging in a dense, slow-moving crowd from the dark, cool, low-ceilinged platform, he suddenly enters the immense concourse with its variety of heights and levels, its spaciousness, its acoustical properties, its diffused light, and the smooth textu
re of its floors and walls. Almost every sense is stimulated and flattered; even posture and gait are momentarily improved.

  What Jackson is describing here sounds very much like the experience of constriction and release one feels passing through a dense forest and then stepping out into a broad clearing or meadow, the close, shadowy canopy of trees suddenly yielding to the soar of sky. Jackson writes that Grand Central, like many great architectural spaces, is among other things “an imitation of landscape”—of the various familiar forms of nature that precede architecture and have always supplied it with an especially rich trove of symbols. Owing to its scale, Grand Central is a particularly dramatic example of such an imitation, but the sequence of constriction and release we feel stepping out of a forest into a clearing is probably one of the most common spatial gestures, or tropes, in all architecture; even my little building contains it. It seems to me that spatial tropes of this kind—prospect and refuge is another—speak to us more deeply, more physically, than mere signs do, since our sense of their meaning depends on nothing more than the fact of our bodies and those forms of landscape with which everyone has had firsthand experience.

  But if these examples seem too speculative, consider an even more elemental symbolism of space: vertical and horizontal, up and down, forward and back. Contrary to the teachings of Euclidean geometry, we don’t really exist on an indifferent Cartesian grid, one where all spaces are alike and interchangeable, their coordinates given in the neutral terms of x, y, and z. Our bodies invest space with a very different set of coordinates, and these are no less real for being subjective. As Aristotle noted, up carries a very different connotation than down, front than back, inside than outside, vertical than horizontal. Vertical, for example, is more assertive than horizontal, associated as it is with standing up and the dominance such a posture affords, and though many of the meanings we attach to the vertical have grown more complicated than that (pride, hierarchy, aspiration, hubris, and so on), all are at bottom related to certain natural facts—specifically, to the upright stance of our species. Though something like verticality has been embroidered extensively by culture and history, its moral valence revised again and again (think of the fresh prestige Frank Lloyd Wright invested in the horizontal), its very meaningfulness—the basic terms on which an architect such as Wright could work his changes—is something given to us, not made. And it came into the world at the moment when our species first stood erect. Our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to.

  Our bodies are of course what get left out of a theory that treats architecture as a language, a system of signs. Such a theory can’t explain the physical experience of two places as different as Grand Central Station and my little shack, because the quality of those experiences involves a tangle of mental and physical, cultural and biological elements that the theory can’t account for, blinded as it is by old Western habits of regarding the mind and body as separate realms. Taking the side of the mind in the ancient dualism of mind and body, this theory can only explain that part of architecture that can be translated into words and pictures, published in magazines and debated at conferences. An architecture that ignores the body is certainly possible: the proof is all around us. But I doubt it will ever win our hearts.

  It was to the body—to my body—that I owed the happy discovery that some of the reality I’d taken up a hammer to find was indeed still out there, and still available to me. I owed it to the body at rest, which had sensed in its shoulders the squeeze and release of the space in that room, but also to the body at work, sinking a chisel into the flesh of a Douglas fir, negotiating gravity in the raising of a roof beam. Not that I can ever hope to sort out all the different threads of sense and thought, body and mind, that have gone into the making of this experience (and this building), but then, that’s precisely the point. It was only after my hands had woven a shelter from these slender leaves of cedar that my mind could grasp the poignancy of a shingle roof. Only after I’d raised onto its base a Douglas fir post fully as heavy as I am did I really understand the authority of a column.

  To manhandle such a post into place, to join it to a beam that holds up a roof, is just the kind of work to remind you that, no matter how much cultural baggage can be piled onto something like a column (for as we’ve seen, it can signify republican virtue, Southern aristocracy, postmodern wit, and even deconstructivist violence), it is at bottom different from a word in a language. Though perhaps a bit muffled by current architectural discourse, the architectural column still speaks to us of things as elemental as standing up, of withstanding gravity, and of the trees that supported the roofs of our first homes on earth. It’s not uninteresting when Peter Eisenman takes such a column and suspends it from the roof of a house so that it doesn’t quite reach down to the ground, but he is wrong to think my annoyance at the sight of it is purely ideological, a matter of seeing a cherished cultural convention upset. Our regard for gravity is not just a question of taste.

  It seems to me that as a metaphor for the process by which architecture comes by its conventions, evolution is much more useful than language. Certain architectural configurations (or patterns, to use Christopher Alexander’s term) survive simply because they have proven over time to be a good way to reconcile human needs, the laws of nature, the facts of the human body, and the materials at hand. Some of these patterns—load-bearing columns, right angles, pitched roofs—appear almost everywhere we are, but there are others that vary from place to place and from time to time. Grand Central’s spatial trope of constriction and release resonates most powerfully in a culture raised on a deeply forested continent, in a place where the moment of coming into a clearing has had a special urgency and savor. The important point is not that these forms are necessarily universal or natural, but simply that they are not arbitrary; they are the by-products of the things and laws and processes of this world.

  This is not a new idea, only a half-forgotten one, a fairly recent casualty of the modern artist’s cult of novelty. In architecture’s first treatise, Vitruvius describes a remarkably similar evolutionary process, and he was writing almost two thousand years before Darwin. Vitruvius recounts the invention of the first building not as revelation but as a gradual process of trial and error involving many, many builders, in which good ideas survived through imitation while bad ones fell by the wayside.

  And since [the first builders] were of an imitative and teachable nature, they would daily point out to each other the results of their building, boasting of the novelties in it; and thus, with their natural gifts sharpened by emulation, their standards improved daily. At first they set up forked stakes connected by twigs and covered these walls with mud…Finding that such roofs could not stand the rain during the storms of winter, they built them with peaks daubed with mud, the roofs sloping and projecting so as to carry off the rain water.

  In Vitruvius’ account good ideas are the ones most closely tuned to the nature of reality, something we only discover after the fact, by observing, and remembering, what works.

  One of the advantages of using a metaphor of evolution like Vitruvius’—or, for that matter, Christopher Alexander’s—to describe architecture is that it can take account of the tangled web of culture and nature we encounter in something like a building or in an architectural convention such as a column. It allows us to walk away from the cartoon opposition of nature and culture that has bewitched all builders of primitive huts, Peter Eisenman included. The human needs and the natural materials that go into the process of generating an architectural form are different from time to time and place to place; culture can enter into the process without rendering the whole thing arbitrary. It’s worth remembering in this context that it was evolution that generated human culture—and language—in the first place, and that culture ever since has been working to modify evolution; notice the emphasis Vitruvius puts on talk—“boasting”—in the evolution of architecture.

  A convention or pattern
such as “windows on two sides of a room,” which Alexander claims we value because it allows us to more readily read expressions off people’s faces, might not work nearly so well in Japan, where shadowiness and reserve are prized more than psychological legibility. What this suggests is that the pattern is cultural without being in any way arbitrary, and that the process that generated it has a certain abiding logic. That logic, which is the same trial-and-error logic by which evolution proceeds, is the path out from the real things of this world to the forms of our architecture. It happens to be a path unavailable to our words; a writer or philosopher would be crazy not to envy it.

  The mystery is, why would modern architecture ever want to turn away from this path, to trade such a distinction for a place in the common tub of images and information where I found it?

  That tub, this culture of ours so steeped in words and signs and images, poses a mortal challenge to architecture. For buildings aren’t very well adapted to life in such an environment, one that puts a premium on mobility and ease of translation. Despite the best efforts of postmodern architects, buildings, unlike signs, don’t travel well; they can’t be digitized, and the good ones are dense with the kind of particularities and sense impressions that can’t easily be summarized, much less sent over a wire or bounced off a satellite. About a memorable building we will often say “you had to be there,” which is just another way of saying that the experience of the place, its presence, simply couldn’t be translated into words and signs and information; the Here of it can’t be communicated There.