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

by Michael Pollan

  To my inexpert eye it seemed a fine solution, economical in the best sense. The bottom frame of the sash, or rail, doubled as a drip edge; by designing the rail to overhang the stop, the designer ensured that any water coming down along its face would fall onto the sill rather than the stop. And the curved profile of the stop itself eliminated any surface on which water might linger. At first I didn’t understand the purpose of the groove routed into the underside of the sash, but when I brought the drawing to Jim the following Saturday, he grasped its significance immediately.

  “Capillary action. Water wants to migrate along the underside of a surface, so it’ll work its way back to that gap there unless something is put in its way. That’s what the groove’s for: Water will collect in it until the bead gets heavy enough to break the surface tension. Then it’ll drop onto the sloping side of that stop and down to the sill and away.” Here was a case of thinking like water at the Ph.D. level.

  Jim felt the detail was definitely workable, though he’d need to adapt it some. For one thing, Connecticut gets a lot more rainfall than California does; for another, my windows would be made of painted pine rather than unfinished redwood (far too heavy for sash this size, never mind the expense), and he worried about the ability of such a slender pine stop to withstand the weight of sash banging against it. But he had some ideas. Jim gave me his price, which seemed fair in view of the complexities. It was, however, somewhat more than I could afford. Jim suggested I could shave several hundred dollars off of the total if I was willing to make the four little peak windows myself, a job he assured me was fairly straightforward. So we pulled these items out of the deal and shook hands on it.

  Jim had said it would be okay with him if I wanted to watch him build the windows, so early on a Monday morning I came by his shop. On a pallet by the front door stood a short stack of fresh, rough-sawn white pine planks of various lengths, knot-free and covered in a soft blond down. Nothing about this wood made you think “window”; it could not have been more opaque or inert. And yet what Jim proposed to do before the morning was over was transform this stack of lumber into intricate skeletons of finished white pine, the airy frames of six divided-light windows. The singleness of “stock”—what Jim called the raw pine—would be translated into that rich, antique, and multifarious vocabulary English offers for the parts of a window: sashes and stiles, muntins and mullions, sills and jambs and rails and casings and lights.

  Jim’s shop consisted of two large rooms divided by wooden racks stacked with handsome slabs of unfinished oak, cherry, mahogany, maple, and pine. Both spaces were crowded with doors, windows, cabinets, and countertops arrested in various stages of fabrication, and the whole place looked as though a blizzard had recently passed through, coating everything in several inches of fresh, fragrant sawdust, Jim included. The back room held two large, low tables where Jim did his layouts and glue-ups. Up front were a half-dozen machine tools spread out around the room in a rough approximation of an assembly line, separate stations each for the planer, shaper, table saw, tenoner, mortiser, and drill punch. It seemed like an awful lot of machinery for a woodworker as devoted to tradition as Jim professed to be.

  “They’ve improved on the chisel some,” Jim said as he set to work, bunching the sleeves of his sweatshirt at the elbows, “but the mortise joint is still the best we know how to make.” In this Jim’s thinking was in keeping with the Arts and Crafts movement for which he obviously felt a kinship. Gustav Stickley, the turn-of-the-century furniture maker who promoted Arts and Crafts ideas in America, had objected not to the machine as such but to the uses to which it was being put, including mass production and the devaluing of craftsmanship. “When rightly used,” Stickley had written in The Craftsman, the influential magazine he began publishing in 1900, “the machine is simply a tool in the hand of a skilled worker.”

  In Jim’s hands, the machine was a howling and slightly terrifying agent of transformation. Working with a swiftness that went some distance toward explaining the condition of his fingers, Jim escorted each rough plank from one station to the next, guiding the pine along on a journey of ever-increasing refinement and specificity. First he would select a piece of stock from the pile by the door and feed it through the planer, a steel sandwich of spinning blades that peeled a thin, even layer from both sides of the wood at once, leaving it smooth and plumb. Now Jim would lay the piece down against a full-scale diagram of the window he’d drawn on a masonite board, decide on its role (muntin, stile, rail, etc.) then mark it for width and length and cut it on the table saw. Next the stock would enter the snout of the shaper, from which it emerged looking like a piece of finished molding, its square corners having acquired the curved profile of a coping or fillet, ogee or reverse ogee, depending on the bit used. Shouting over the scream of the machine, Jim said that shaper bits cost upward of a thousand dollars apiece, so it was tough luck if I didn’t like the one he owned. My windows received the same austere profile you see all over New England, their crossbars, or muntins, narrowing down from glass pane to nosing in three quick curving steps, each about half the size of the one preceding. Not too finicky, but not too plain either; I liked it fine.

  From here on, the destiny of the various pieces of stock diverged, as some were designated tenons and others mortises, male or female depending on how they would ultimately fit into the window frame. The muntin bars that would hold the panes of glass in place would all be tenoned into the stiles and rails for maximum strength; each muntin passed through a tenoning machine that whittled its ends down to a narrow rectangular tongue of wood. The beefier members that would receive the muntin bars went instead to the mortiser, a modified drill press that cut perfectly matched notches using a spinning bit in combination with a chisel. Every one of these machines looked and sounded hungry for fingertips.

  Once all the pieces had been cut and shaped, Jim spread them out on his worktable and began fitting them together, like a puzzle. With a gentle tap of his wooden mallet, the tenons snapped smartly into their notches, the molding designs neatly turning the corners and matching up, concave fillets meeting fillets, convex copings meeting copings. The machine tolerances were so exact that, except for the largest sash, whole frames virtually squared themselves. Satisfied with the fit, Jim would take the frames apart, spread glue over tenons and into notches, and then reassemble them. After checking for square, he’d clamp the frames end to end and put them aside to dry. In a day or two, he’d send the frames out to the man who did his glazing. “There’s a knack to working the putty just right,” he explained when I asked why he subbed out this particular step. “Glazing’s an old-timer’s game.”

  Once the frames were assembled, I studied Jim’s drip edge detail. It looked like this:

  It was ingenious, if not quite as economical as the Greene and Greene detail on which it was based. Like theirs, the bottom edge of my sash extended well out over the stop, in order to conduct water away from the window, and it had a groove routed along its underside to thwart any capillary action. But below, the design diverged from its model, since Jim had decided he couldn’t taper the stop, as the Greenes had done, to minimize its surface area. Pine wouldn’t have been strong enough, for one thing. But the more serious problem, and the one I never saw coming, was that in an awning window (as opposed to a casement like the Greenes’), when the projecting drip edge swung inward, it would follow a slight downward arc that would actually collide with any stop that wasn’t either set well beneath it or angled the wrong way—that is, toward the building’s interior, rather than away. (You had to think like wood as well as water in this business.) Jim’s solution was inspired: He angled the stop toward the building so that the drip edge would clear it coming in. Then he routed a second groove along its surface to collect any water seeping under the sash, which would then flow out through a series of weep holes drilled through the stop. Basically, Jim had provided a second line of defense.

  I congratulated him on the design, a critical detail of m
y building that no one except perhaps another carpenter would probably ever notice. Jim was unexpectedly cranky about it. “I’m not going to start complaining yet, but I’ve got two extra days in this job already, just thinking. Architects get a lot of money to come up with this kind of detail.” Maybe, but it seemed to me that this is precisely the place where, nowadays at least, architecture stops, where it comes down either to finding a craftsman like Jim Evangelisti or a bucket.

  Except for the tapping of the wooden mallet, the final assembly was mercifully quiet, and Jim talked a little about the path that had brought him to the Craftsman Woodshops, which turned out not to be so far from where he started. Jim’s family had owned the lumberyard across the street, so he’d always been around wood and carpenters as a kid, but it wasn’t until he went away to college, in Vermont, that he got serious about woodworking. One of his professors at Godard was building an authentic timber frame house, cutting his own wood off the site, milling it by hand, and framing the structure solely with hand tools—no electricity allowed. It was the seventies, remember, and Vermont was teeming with back-to-the-land types who (not unlike members of the Arts and Crafts movement) made a moral and political virtue of traditional craftsmanship and self-reliance.

  After college Jim moved out to California, where he heard about the restoration of a Greene and Greene house in Berkeley. “I saw right away that the architect in charge didn’t have a clue,” Jim said. “I mean, he was butt-jointing everything for chrissake! Didn’t know the first thing about the joinery in that house. I practically had to force them to let me work on it.” As I listened to Jim describe the months he spent on the job—replacing a porch railing and restoring an ornate footbridge that he still had a dog-eared drawing of—I could see that the job had been a high point for him, and a formative experience. He’d found his calling. That, and his lifelong bête noire: the well-paid and ignorant architects he always seemed to end up bailing out.

  And yet, Jim’s architect-bashing aside, it seemed to me he and Charlie had important things in common. Not least was their deep appreciation for the American vernacular and the indigenous architecture that had drawn on it so fruitfully before modernism turned everybody’s attention back to Europe. Charlie and Jim were both children of the seventies, their approach toward building having been shaped by an odd confluence of currents that was at the time helping to return American architecture to American sources. One of these currents was of course postmodernism, which by the mid-seventies had sparked a revival of interest in the American shingle style, a homegrown domestic architecture with deep vernacular roots. Also gathering momentum during the seventies was the push for historic preservation. And then, coming from an entirely different quarter, there was the back-to-the-land movement, which had its own reasons to revive vernacular building styles and methods, such as timber framing; it also happened to share many of the values of the Arts and Crafts movement. (You remember the crafts.) Though it seldom finds its way into the architectural histories, American hippie architecture of the 1970s played an important role, chipping away at modernist ideas from below while more academic postmodernists attacked them head on. So while Jim was lending a hand to the revival of timber framing in Vermont, Charlie was studying at UCLA under Charles Moore, the postmodernist with perhaps the deepest feeling for the American vernacular.

  In fact it wouldn’t be too much to say that Jim and Charlie, having started out from two such different places, had been working their way toward the very sort of neotraditional window coming together on this worktable at the Craftsman Woodshops. For the divided-light window, along with timber framing, pitched roofs, wooden shingles, and a great many other vernacular elements, was one of the casualties of modernism that architects like Charlie and craftsmen like Jim have both done their parts to revive. Here in microcosm was that collaboration, between the postmodern temper and the craftsman ideal—the “neo” and the “traditional.” Not that the collaboration was an easy or even a friendly one. The architect, being a modern artist, was not content merely to revive an idiom but insisted on giving it a fresh turn (the too-big window, the in-swinging sash), his novelty forcing the craftsman back on his wits (and his memory of forgotten solutions, such as the Greenes’ drip edge) to make it all work. Or to bail him out, depending on your point of view.

  Of all the revivals of the postmodern period, perhaps the most surprising is the divided-light window. The pitched roof, after all, could justify its return strictly on utilitarian grounds: a case can be made that a gable was simply the best way to keep the weather out of a house. But the muntin bars dividing a window into small panes of glass can make no such claim for themselves. Indeed, from a purely technological standpoint, they have been obsolete in all but the very largest windows since the invention of rolled sheet glass near the end of the eighteenth century. It isn’t until the modern period, however, that they disappeared completely, only to be brought back again in the last few years—thanks (once again) to Robert Venturi, who put a gigantic, divided-light window on the façade of his mother’s house. (Actually it’s a sliding glass door bisected by a thick horizontal muntin bar.) The story of the fall and rise of the humble muntin, which I started looking into after my time in Jim Evangelisti’s shop, turns out to shed some light not only on how my own particular windows came to be, but on the whole history of the idea of transparency in the West, which is itself a kind of sub-history of our changing attitudes toward nature, objectivity, and the notion of perspective—a person’s and a building’s both.

  Muntins were originally invented as a way to gang together numerous small panes of glass when that was the only kind there was. Before the development of sheet glass, a windowpane was made by blowing a glass bubble, flattening it out, and then cutting the biggest possible square from the resulting pancake, which was rarely more than a few inches on a side. A dozen or more such panes could be combined into a window using muntin bars to hold them in place. These panes are called “lights” because for a long time that’s about all they were good for: too small and ripply to offer views of any consequence, their main purpose was illumination.

  In early American houses, window lights were few and far between. Most glass came from England, and during the Colonial period windowpanes were heavily taxed. Before improvements in the design of fireplaces, the light that windows offered also had to be weighed against the draughts of cold air they admitted. Not that anyone at the time would have wanted even a Thermopaned picture window, assuming such a thing had been within the grasp of technology: the taste for looking at landscape, which was an invention of the romantics, still lay in the future. And in America, where the outdoors was still regarded as a howling wilderness, the haunt of Satan and Indians and abominable weather, the desire to gaze out of a window, except for the purpose of spying a threat, was slight, or nil. Refuge in those days counted for more than prospect.

  Indeed, the early Colonial window, with its high proportion of wood to glass and its parsimonious admission of light, was probably a fair reflection of the prevailing attitude toward the world outside. Medieval Christianity, as well as Puritanism, drew a sharp line between the spiritual sanctuary provided by interiors and the profanity of the outdoor world. When the world beyond the window consists of so much peril (spiritual and otherwise), that window is apt to be small and difficult to open.

  The development of clear, leaded glass in 1674, followed a century later by sheet glass made with iron rollers, coincided with—and no doubt helped to promote—important changes in people’s attitude toward the world beyond the window. Beginning with the Enlightenment, people were less inclined to regard the world outside as perilous or profane; indeed, nature itself now became the site of spiritual sanctuary, the place one went to find oneself, as Rousseau would do on his solitary walks. Nature became the remedy for a great many ills, both physical and spiritual, and the walls that divided us from its salubrious effects came to be seen as unwelcome barriers. As Richard Sennett suggests in a fascinating st
udy of perception and social life called The Conscience of the Eye, transparency—of self to nature, of self to other—became a high Enlightenment ideal. Writes Sennett, “The Enlightenment conceived a person’s inner life opened up to the environment as though one had flung a window open to fresh air.”

  Sentiments of this kind, abetted by improvements in glassmaking, led to a dramatic increase in the size of windowpanes and sash over the course of the eighteenth century. The floor-to-ceiling casements known as French windows, which first appeared at Versailles in the 1680s, became popular on both sides of the Atlantic during this period (Jefferson installed several of them at Monticello), as did the gigantic double-hung windows that the Dutch invented around the same time to light the interiors of their long, narrow homes. Muntin bars were still commonly used in windows, but for a new purpose: They helped distribute the weight of the panes, thereby making it possible to build much larger windows. Beyond providing air and light, windows now admitted the landscape to the interior of a house.

  A line of historical descent can be drawn from the Enlightenment window to the modernist glass wall, and Sennett draws a convincing one, passing through the great Victorian green-houses—the first vast spaces to be enclosed in glass, creating the novel sensation of being at once indoors and outdoors—on its way to the Bauhaus’s curtain walls and the glass houses built by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. But it seems to me this line of historical development spent at least part of the nineteenth century in America, passing close by Concord, where Emerson was imagining himself a “transparent eyeball” in Nature, and Walden Pond, where Henry Thoreau was giving voice to the dream of a transparent habitation.