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

by Michael Pollan

  You would think architects would cherish this about their work, if only because it makes architecture unique, a ballast amid the general weightlessness of an image culture. At least that’s what I thought going in. As makers of real things that endure (things that get pointed to), didn’t architects have it over the makers of words and images, those things that merely point, and that vanish as soon as the spotlight of our regard moves on? The work of building engaged them in a dialogue with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two cents to the conversation of culture.

  But apparently the prestige of that conversation is so great today that architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society. So with the crucial help of Robert Venturi, who announced to his colleagues in Learning from Las Vegas that “the relevant revolution today is the current electronic one,” architecture set about repackaging itself as a communications medium, playing down undigitizable space and experience—architecture’s old brick-and-mortary Hereness—and playing up the literary or informational angle for all it was worth, until it seemed as though buildings were aspiring to the condition of television.

  This has been a bad bargain, and not just for someone like me, who’d hoped by building to find a Here with which to counter the thrall of There in my life, but for architecture too. By allowing itself to become a kind of literary art, architecture might win itself a few more commissions from the Disney Company, but only at the price of giving up precisely what makes it different and valuable. Not that this troubles Robert Venturi. He has said he can’t see much point in building grand public spaces anymore, now that television makes it possible to watch other people without leaving home.

  As Venturi’s comment suggests, the relationship between the information society and architecture may resemble a zero sum game. The culture of information is ultimately hostile to architecture, as it is to anything that can’t be readily translated into its terms—to the whole of the undigitizable world, everything that the promoters of cyberspace like to refer to as RL (for “real life”). And yet notice how even these people are drawn to architectural and spatial metaphors, as if to acknowledge that, even now, architecture holds an enviable, inextinguishable claim on our sense of reality. Such terms as “cyberspace,” “the electronic town hall,” “cybershacks,” “home pages,” and “the information highway” belong to the great tradition of raiding architecture for its real-world palpableness—its presence—whenever someone’s got something more abstract or ephemeral to sell. Once it was the philosophers, now it is the so-called digerati. The game, however, seems very much the same.

  But architecture would do well to distrust this sort of flattery, because the cyberculture’s interest in place is cynical and ultimately very slight. For what finally is the ultimate architectural expression of the information culture we’re being told is upon us? Try to picture this not-so-primitive hut: a roof, beneath which sits a man in a very comfortable, ergonomically correct chair, with a virtual reality helmet strapped around his head, an intravenous feeding hookup tethered to one arm, and some sort of toilet apparatus below. Think of him as Vitruvian man—the outstretched figure in the circle in the square drawn by Da Vinci—updated for the twenty-first century. All that the information society really needs from architecture, apart from the comforting effect of its metaphors, is a chair and a dry cybershack to house this body. Assuming, that is, the digerati don’t succeed in their dream of completely downloading human consciousness into a computer, in which case the work left for architects, and the space left for these irredeemable bodies of ours, will be skimpier still.

  I’ve built my own primitive hut according to a more old-fashioned blueprint; no doubt a deconstructivist would dismiss it as nostalgic, or perhaps, considering its imperial prospects, dangerously anthropocentric. But don’t get the wrong idea: this is not Thoreau’s crude shack in the woods that Joe and I have been building. The blueprint calls not only for a telephone but a fax machine and a modem and a cubby for my computer; regarded from one angle, mine is a kind of cybershack too, for this building and its occupant are going to be on-line, at least some of the time. (I am not going in for the IV hookup, the VR helmet, or the toilet, however.)

  From what I can tell so far, Charlie has designed me a building that will provide a good counterweight to whatever information and signs will be streaming into it (and my head) over that telephone wire—a credible enough Here with which to meet the There on the line. He’s given me plenty of reasons to gaze up from the flickering screen, whether to check in on the view, scan the bookshelves, or even contemplate the complicated underside of my roof, which already exerts quite a presence in the room. It also manages to keep out the rain, by the way: I checked this out at the first opportunity, which came with a torrential thunderstorm a couple of days after Joe and I had capped it. No roof is really done until it has been tested by a storm; when this one came, I sprinted out to the building as the summer rain slammed down, and nervously poked a flashlight beam up into the rafters, searching the cedar shingles for telltale blotches or stains. There wasn’t a one; my roof was tight as a drum.

  I sat for a while on the step waiting for the rain to subside, watching it strafe the surface of the pond and fall from the eaves in sheets. I think I enjoyed this rain as much as any I’ve been in, listening to it tattoo the shingles overhead, producing an agreeable clatter. Drop by drop it was testifying to the soundness of my roof, reason enough to like it, but there was also the way the din seemed to underscore the ceiling’s beauty, the ear drawing the eye up into the rafters, into that complicated weave of wood and work and meaning that Charlie had dreamed up and Joe and I had actually made.

  I especially liked the way the lucid geometry of rafters and lath set off the rough chiaroscuro of shingles, the one so very human in its order and the other so reminiscent of tree bark and fish scales, forest canopies and fields, of nature working in her best e pluribus unum mode, fashioning something of beauty and consequence from simple slips of wood, leaves, blades of grass, and shadows. The juxtaposition of geometry and variousness set up a rhythm that was pleasing to the eye. It also brought out the character of the different woods, the long, legible grain of the fir throwing into relief the furriness of cedar, and this along with the visual rhythm gave my roof an almost emphatic Hereness.

  Present it most certainly seemed to be. And yet at the same time the ceiling seemed to re-present too, offering up its allusions to boat hulls and leaf canopies, tree houses and classical dentils, a web of allusion fully as complex and layered as the weave of its wood and workmanship. So which was it, Here or There? Not either/or, I decided, but both: Here and There, shelter and symbol, nature and culture at once. And then it occurred to me, as I gazed out at the view down toward my arbor, just then draped in the velvety purple vestments of a clematis jackmanii, that a building was probably less like a text than a garden. For it is the garden that manages, in a way that few things in this life do, to celebrate the here and now (with its full complement of sensory satisfactions) while at the same time summoning the there and then by means of its symbolism. The garden’s mode is not metaphor exactly—one thing for another—but something else: one thing and another. Unlike a painting of a landscape, say, or a poem about nature, behind which stands nothing but pigment or marks on a page, the garden offers us an experience whose power does not depend on codes or conventions or even the suspension of disbelief, though all those things are at work here too, making the experience that much richer.

  So, I guess you could say I liked my roof well enough. Already it had proven itself capable not only of keeping the rain off my head, which you’ll have to take my word for, but also of housing the farflung speculations of its builder, whose soundness you can judge for yourself. Thoreau regretted he hadn’t put a somewhat bigger and higher roof over his head at Walden, since “you want room for your thoughts to get into sai
ling trim and run a course or two before they make their port…Our sentences [want] room to unfold.” My roof, my place, promised at least that much: to offer a decent habitation for my thoughts. But something more too, something specific to my life and perhaps my times as well. Out there in this new room of mine, dryly enjoying the summer rain with its fine tang of ozone, it seemed just the place to sit and compose a word or two on behalf of the sights and sounds and senses of this, our still undigitized world.

  CHAPTER 7

  Windows

  By the time Joe and I headed into the second winter of construction, our work together, even though it amounted to something less than one day a week, had acquired its own particular rhythms and textures and talk. Joe reveled in playing the role of mentor to my eager if still-somewhat maladroit apprentice, except for the occasional period of sulking, when he would temporarily revert to sullen clock-puncher. These episodes were invariably occasioned by a suggestion from me that we should perhaps consult the blueprints before undertaking framing a window opening or hanging a door. “You mean the funny papers,” Joe’d grumble. “Well, you’re the boss,” he’d shrug, egging me to take control, or sides; I never was quite sure which. But in time such episodes became more rare, for as my own confidence as a carpenter grew, I was less inclined to regard Charlie’s drawings as revealed truth, much to Joe’s satisfaction.

  Working outside in the brief, chill days of December had a way of hurrying this process along. Architectural plans look different in the cold, especially when you’re rocking stiffly from boot to boot on top of fossilized mud, dispatching neural messages to toes and fingertips that go unheeded, and struggling to interpret lines on a drawing that only seem more ambiguous the harder you stare at them. Joe, can you see any framing to hold up that window? Nope, not a stick. Looks like he wants us to levitate this one. Under such circumstances the solidarity of carpenters is bound to intensify. After a while you can’t look at the blueprints—which by now have had their pristine geometries smudged by a parade of muddy thumbs—without thinking about the comfortable office in which they were drawn, the central heating and scrubbed fingernails and steaming pots of coffee. Such images had a way of magnifying any lapses in the architect’s renderings into affronts, any peculiarities of design into definitive proof of the woolly-headedness of the professional classes that do their work indoors. A class to which, it was true, I’d be returning myself first thing Monday, but for the time being my allegiance was to the double-gloved, triple-socked, shivering and quick-to-get pissed-off outdoor crew.

  It was an allegiance I found myself compelled to declare late one December afternoon, to Joe’s unbounded delight. He had casually called my attention to a notation on the drawings that specified pine, of all things, for the piece of wood that framed the recessed rock window on the building’s north exterior wall. It never occurred to me this might be some sort of a test, but I passed it just the same. “Fuck that,” I said, surprising myself almost as much as Joe. Pine was a dumb idea on several counts: the shady north side promised to be perpetually damp (pine has no rot resistance to speak of) and every single other piece of exposed exterior lumber—from the roofing shingles to the trim—was cedar, of which we happened to have several beautiful lengths left. “We’re going to use one-inch clear cedar there, I don’t care what the drawings say,” I announced, and Joe erupted. “Yes! You’ve finally got it!” he shouted, launching into a gleeful little end-zone dance in the snow. “Mike, I have been waiting an entire year to hear you speak those fine words. Charlie’s down…he’s out!”

  But sometimes Joe could take the Professor Higgins act a little too far. Probably because I’d proven such a willing pupil in matters of carpentry, Joe eventually began to think there might be other areas in which I stood to benefit from his instruction, and I soon found myself on the receiving end of lengthy lectures about child rearing, television, economics, and politics. I wouldn’t have minded this too much, conversation being one of carpentry’s best perks, except that Joe had a habit of stopping whatever job he was doing in advance of making a point and then forestalling its resumption until I had more or less conceded the wisdom of his argument. When we got to gun control—and sooner or later we always got to gun control—work all but ground to a halt.

  I knew politics were on tap whenever Joe’d pop his hammer into its holster, rear back on his heels, and then lean forward punching the air with his index finger. Power tools silenced, the woods would ring with his rhetorical question: “Mike, do you want to know what’s really wrong with this country?” Whether the abomination of the day was crime or immigration or free trade or the varieties of idiocy regnant in Washington and Hartford, the monologue would somehow or other and often quite ingeniously wend its way back to the mother subject of gun control. The precise route we would travel from here to there I never could quite reconstruct—the transitions could be dazzling—but get there we would, and before it was all over I’d be treated to a soaring peroration from some Second Amendment deity whom he’d then challenge me to identify.

  “‘Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops…’”

  “Jefferson?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Tom Paine?”

  “Wrong. Noah Webster, 1787. I thought you said you went to college.”

  The jurisprudence of the Second Amendment was Joe’s specialty; no other amendment (and least of all numbers four, five, and eight) elicited the same fervent devotion. (Indeed, he believed that the solution to the crime problem involved crueler and more unusual punishment.) Joe was not himself a serious hunter, but he collected guns and knew an astounding amount about their history and technology, their lore and care and proper handling. Any time we heard the report of a hunter’s rifle, he would stop to announce the caliber of the gun in question and then proceed to enumerate its salient virtues and limitations. Joe was convinced that if I would only learn more about guns, I would not be so quick to endorse ignorant measures like the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban—which anyone with any sense at all and about $50 worth of mail-order parts could easily circumvent, and which—was I aware of this?—specifically exempted assault weapons manufactured by the Israelis. Joe left me with back issues of Shotgun News and all manner of NRA propaganda; once he presented me with a bullet of some advanced design that allowed it to travel just under the speed of sound so as not to make a sonic boom.

  Like many people who regard gun control as the preeminent threat to our liberties, Joe’s politics occasionally shaded off into areas you really didn’t care to visit, the kind of places where the fantasies of Oliver Stone and the militia movement begin to fuzz together. I’m not entirely sure, though, whether it was the arrayed forces of conspiracy or stupidity that Joe deemed the greater threat; nor was I sure which offered safer conversational ground. Joe and I could just about agree on the folly of free trade or the perfidy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, but when he’d start in on his theories of evolution—how people are growing progressively more stupid because technology and the welfare state are interfering with the proper functioning of natural selection—I worked hard to steer him back to the relative safety of the Bill of Rights or, best and most benign of all, the perversity of architects.

  On this last theme, Joe and I had lately found a broad stretch of common ground. We had coined a term that we hauled out regularly to damn anything in Charlie’s plans that in our estimation defied practicality or common sense: “Eight-one.” It was sort of like the cop’s “ten-four,” or the short-order cook’s “eighty-six.” The pine window trim was an eight-one, so was its thin-air framing; in fact, the windows taken as a whole were one great big eight-one, since they were designed, as windows in the real world very seldom are, to open inward rather than out. T
his and a few other details about their design meant the windows could not be ordered out of a catalog but would have to be custom-made at considerable expense. “Custom” would be a very generous translation of our “eight-one.”

  Why “eight-one”? The term derived from the 8?1? height Charlie had specified for the walls in the main part of the building, a dimension calculated to offend every fiber in the body of any self-respecting carpenter. Lumber comes in standard even-numbered lengths; two-by-fours are either eight, ten, or twelve feet long, and plywood sheets come four by eight. Indeed, eight feet is virtually the common denominator of American construction, going all the way back to the standard dimension of a bay in Colonial houses and barns; ever since, the number eight has been one of the more prestigious integers in carpentry. In order to make all the 8?1? two-by-fours and lengths of plywood we would need to complete our walls and fin walls, a tremendous amount of wood would have to be wasted, not to mention sawing time, and, to a carpenter, waste is one of the forms poor craftsmanship takes. Whatever the architectural logic that dictated designing a wall one inch off of such a canonical dimension, to a carpenter it represented sheer perversity, a slap in the face of tradition, common sense, and frugality. Indeed you could argue—and believe me, Joe did—Charlie’s eight-one summed up everything that was wrong with the practice of architecture in America today.

  I remembered once reading a story in Fine Homebuilding, the magazine for carpenters and serious do-it-your-selfers, about a contractor who had grown so sick of performing what he regarded as needlessly “custom” work for architects that, when the time came to design a house for himself, he made sure that every last piece of wood in it would be a standard dimension, the overwhelming majority of them eight feet. The ceilings were eight feet, the floor plan of every story and room was a multiple of eight, and all the windows and door openings were a simple fraction of eight. This fellow bragged of the fact that not only had he designed his house without an architect, but he had been able to more or less frame it without using a saw. But what made him proudest of all was that not a single piece of framing lumber had gone to waste.