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

by Michael Pollan

  Owing to the peculiarities of Charlie’s design, the finish work called for in my building was not “normal,” in Joe’s estimation. In some ways it was more challenging than the usual—there were all the built-ins to be built (the desk, the daybed, the shelves), and an “articulated” structure such as this always makes it more difficult for the carpenter to cover his tracks with trim or wallboard, carpentry’s blessed absolutions. But in other ways the finish work promised to be relatively simple—a little too simple, as far as Joe was concerned. Finish is where a carpenter usually gets to show off his craftsmanship, and Charlie hadn’t left much scope for the exercise of Joe’s virtuosity with the jigsaw or router.

  The plans called for a bare minimum of trim, for example, and what there was of it was fairly straightforward—not an ogee, fillet, or coping in sight. Only a small section of the walls—the area immediately surrounding the daybed—would be closed in, with narrow boards of clear white pine. The windows were supposed to be trimmed out with one-inch strips of the same clear pine, just enough to bridge the quarter-inch gap between post and casing. There were no baseboard moldings, unless you count the Doug-fir kick plate facing the bottommost bookshelf. And the plywood-and-two-by-four fin walls that held the bookshelves were to be sanded and oiled but left untrimmed: the “ornament” here, such as it was, consisted of the way the vertical two-by-four at the front of each fin wall came three-quarters of an inch proud of the exposed edge of the plywood that faced its sides.

  At least since the day that modernism turned Viennese architect Adolph Loos’s silly declaration that “ornament is crime” into a battle cry, the whole issue of trim has been a heated one in architecture, and Joe’s and my differences in outlook on this question were bound to come to a head sooner or later. On the one and only day Joe worked on the building by himself (I was out of town), he trimmed out a pair of the little peak windows with a fancy picture-frame molding, an expertly mitered piece of handiwork he was tremendously proud of. The day I got back he phoned to see what I thought of it. It was true that the drawings were somewhat vague on Charlie’s intention here, but it seemed to me Joe’s solution was too decorative for this building, and I very gingerly told him so. It took two weeks and all the diplomatic skill I could muster before we could even talk about actually replacing it, and even then the discussion came down to his inevitable half-surly, half-sulking shrug of resignation and challenge: “Mike, it’s your building.” But for some reason this time around Joe’s big line, calculated to put me on the defensive and check Charlie’s authority, struck my ears differently than it had before. Had I said anything about Charlie? No!—it was by my lights that Joe’s trim looked wrong. So, to put an end to the discussion, I simply said, “Joe, you’re right: It is my building.”

  And yet it wasn’t, not yet. Because although I’d worked on the building for more than two years, and although move-in day was in sight, the building still didn’t feel like it was mine, not in any meaningful sense. I might have dreamed up the program and paid all the bills, but this was Charlie’s design we had been building, and, let’s face it, even now I would be lost without Joe’s help—it was doubtful I could finish alone. For very good reasons, Joe and Charlie both seemed to feel more proprietary about the building than I did—which is why the two of them were by this point incapable of exchanging an untesty word. But in all the time I’d spent mediating their warring claims, I hadn’t really ever asserted my own.

  There was some sort of key to the building that was still missing, I felt, something that was needed in order to make it truly mine, and I began to wonder if this key might not have to do with time. Finishing didn’t mean the same thing to Joe and Charlie as it did to me: I wasn’t going to be finished with this building the day the building inspector wrote out the certificate of occupancy and the two of them headed home for the last time, turning over this page in their lives; nor was the building going to be finished with me. I alone would be accompanying it into the future, and it would be accompanying me. A not un-obvious thought, perhaps, yet it helped me to appreciate that the last thing these last surfaces and their finishes were was “superficial”; they were precisely where the building and I would spend the next however-many years rubbing up against one another, and possibly even rubbing off. Made right, these walls, this floor, this desk, might someday come to fit me as well as an old pair of shoes, be just as expressive of my daily life; feel as much mine, I mean, as a second skin. Yet is it possible to make such a thing? I wasn’t sure, but if it was, I decided, it would involve paying some closer attention—even now, before it was finished—to the life of the building in time.

  TIME AND PLACE

  Time is not something architects talk about much, except in the negative. The common view seems to be that mortal time is what buildings exist to transcend; being immortal (at least compared to their builders), buildings give us a way to leave a lasting mark, to conduct a conversation across the generations, in Vincent Scully’s memorable formulation. I doubt there are many builders or architects in history who would dispute Le Corbusier’s dictum that the first aim of architecture is to defy time and decay—to make something in space that time’s arrow cannot pierce.

  Or even scuff, in the case of Le Corbusier and many of his contemporaries. The modernists were avid about making buildings that had as little to do with time as possible, time future as much as time past. That modernist buildings strove to sever their ties to history is well known. But if modernism was a dream of a house unhaunted by the past, its designers seemed equally concerned to inoculate their buildings against the future. They designed and built them in such a way as to leave as little scope as possible for the sort of changes that the passing of time has always wrought on a building—namely, the effects of nature outside, and of the owners within.

  Defying the time of nature meant rejecting stone and wood, those symbols of the architectural past that have traditionally been prized for the graceful way they weather and show their age. Modernists preferred to clad their buildings in a seamless, white, and very often machined surface that was intended to look new forever. What this meant in practice, however, was an exterior that didn’t so much weather as deteriorate, so that today the white building stained brown, by rust or air pollution, stands in most of the world’s cities as a melancholy symbol of modernist folly. In architecture, time’s objective correlative is grime.

  Inside, too, modernists employed all sorts of novel, untested materials to which time has been unkind. But the important modernist attack on time indoors was less direct, and this had to do with human time, which in buildings takes the form of inhabitation. The modernists were the first architects in history to insist that they design the interiors of their houses down to the very last detail—not only the finish trims, which in the past had usually been left to the discretion of craftsmen, but the bookshelves and cabinets (“Farewell the chests of yesteryear,” Le Corbusier declared), the furniture and window treatments, and even in some cases the light switches and teapots and ashtrays. “Built-ins” became the order of the day. Everything that was conceivably designable the architect now wanted to design, the better to realize his building’s Gestalt, a German word for totality much bandied about in the Bauhaus. Had there been a way to somehow redesign the bodies of the inhabitants to fit in better with the Gestalt of their new house, no doubt these architects would have given it a try.

  As it was, the architects fretted over what the owners would do to their works of art, which, most of them agreed, would never again be as perfect as the day before move-in day. It is this pristine moment that became—and remains—the all-important one for modern architecture: the day the finished but not-yet-inhabited building gets its picture taken, freezing it in time. After that, it’s downhill. “Very few of the houses,” Frank Lloyd Wright once complained, were “anything but painful to me after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along after them.”

  What exactly does a totalitar
ian approach to the details of modern architecture have to do with time? Wright’s “horrors of the old order” and Corbusier’s “chests of yesteryear” give the game away. As inevitably as weathering, the process of inhabiting a space leaves the marks of time all over it, and so constitutes a declension from the architect’s ideal. A house that welcomes our stuff—our furniture and pictures, our keepsakes and other “horrors”—is one that we have been invited in some measure to help create or finish; ultimately such a house will tell a story about us, individuals with a history.

  Modernists often designed their interiors not so much for particular individuals as for Man; they regarded the addition of clients’ stuff as a subtraction from a creation they thought of as wholly their own. This is one legacy of modernism that we have yet to overcome; our stuff, and in turn our selves, still very often have trouble gaining a comfortable foothold in a modern interior. Even now most of them seem designed to look their best uninhabited. Stewart Brand, the author of a recent book on preservation called How Buildings Learn, tells of asking one architect what he learned from revisiting his buildings. “Oh, you never go back,” the architect said, surprised at the question. “It’s too discouraging.” For many contemporary architects, time is the enemy of their art.

  In The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander writes that “those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place…depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the pattern of events which we experience there”—everything from the transit of sunlight through a room to the kinds of things we habitually do in it. J. B. Jackson makes a similar point in his essay “A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time,” where he argues that we pay way too much attention to the design of places, when it is what we routinely do in them that gives them their character. “It is our sense of time, our sense of ritual” and everyday occurrence, he writes, “which in the long run creates our sense of place.”

  Certainly when I think about spaces that I remember as having a strong sense of place, it isn’t the “architecture” that I picture, the geometrical arrangements of wood and stone and glass, but such things as watching the world go by from the front porch of the general store in town, or the scuffle of ten thousand shoes making their way to work beneath Grand Central Station’s soaring vault, or the guttering light of jack-o’-lanterns illuminating the faces of square dancers in a New England hayloft. The “design” of these places and the recurring events that give them their qualities—the spaces and the times—have grown together in such a way that it is impossible to bring one to mind without the other.

  Jackson is doubtful that architects can design memorable places like these, at least on purpose; for him habitation will trump design every time, and that is how it should be. Certainly it is true that some of the best places are not made so much as remade, as people find new and unforeseen ways to inhabit them over time. Alexander, an architect himself, has more faith that an architect can design the “great good place,” but not entirely by himself and probably not all at once. This is because no single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and thick as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past, and also the future.

  The first move is obvious enough: The architect borrows from the past by adapting successful patterns, the ones that have been proven to support the kind of life the place hopes to house—porches and watching the world go by, for example. But what about the time to come? There is of course the time of weathering: age seems to endear a building to people, to strengthen its sense of place, and the choice of materials can give an architect a way to either flout or abet this process. But it seems to me there is another, more profound way an architect can open a building to the impress of its future. Forswearing a totalitarian approach to its details, the architect can instead leave just enough play in his design for others to “finish it”—first the craftsmen, with their particular knowledge and sense of the place, and then the inhabitants, with their stuff and with the incremental changes that, over time, the distinctive grooves of their lives will wear into its surfaces and spaces. It may be that making a great place, as opposed to a mere building or work of architectural art, requires a collaboration not so much in space as over time.

  THE UNFINISHED HOUSE

  For a long time after the renovation of our house was finished and Judith and I had moved back in, whenever Charlie came to visit he had a disconcerting habit of staring at the walls, absently. “What are you looking at?” I would ask, worried he had spotted some grave flaw in construction. “Oh, nothing…nothing,” he’d blandly insist, and then rejoin the conversation for a while, until after a decent interval his gaze would once again float off, catching on the bookshelves, or the painting we’d hung in the breakfast room.

  We realized eventually that it was our stuff he was staring at, and we began to kid him about it. Only with the greatest reluctance did he finally admit that the way we’d arranged our books and things on the living room shelves was, well, not quite how he’d imagined it. It seems we hadn’t adjusted quite enough of the adjustable shelves, so that the living room wall didn’t have the proper mix of big and little spaces; he could imagine a much more satisfactory rhythm of upright, leaning, and laying-down volumes, punctuated with the occasional lamp or picture frame. By giving us a whole wall with adjustable shelves, Charlie had given us the freedom to complete the design of the living room; now that we had, it was all he could do not to get up and finish the job himself. I told him I’d always thought the nice thing about freedom was that nobody could tell you what to do with it.

  For the contemporary architect, trained as he is to think of himself as a species of modern artist, surrendering control of his creation is never easy, no matter what he professes to believe about the importance of collaboration. Even Christopher Alexander takes an authoritarian turn in the end, laying down inflexible rules for the minimum depth of a porch (six feet) or the maximum width of a piece of finish trim (one-half inch). There isn’t an architect alive who doesn’t approvingly quote Mies van der Rohe’s line that “God is in the details” (never mind that most other people credit the line to Flaubert). What strikes me as odd about this aphorism as applied to architecture is not so much the apotheosis of the detail as its implied identification of the architect with God. Even Charlie, who resists the monomaniacal tendencies of his profession, fought Judith for more Charlie-designed built-ins (she prefers old furniture), left almost no wall space for paintings (Judith is a painter), and proposed that he design not only the closet doors and medicine cabinets and towel racks (all of which we agreed to) but also the toilet-paper holders (which is where we finally drew the line). Much as he might theoretically want to, the modern architect is loath to leave anything to chance or time, much less to the dubious taste of carpenters and clients.

  A superficial glance at the blueprints for my writing house might lead one to conclude that it represents a stark example of totalitarian architecture. Not counting my chair, everything in it has been designed: the bookshelves, the daybed, the desk—all are built in. On the blueprints Charlie even sketched in the books on the shelves, as if to suggest the correct ratio of upright to sideways volumes (with a few casual leaners—at precisely sixty degrees—thrown in for good measure). But even though the plans are highly detailed, that conclusion would be incorrect. In ways I was just beginning to appreciate, he had left plenty of space in the design for the passing of time and the impress of craftsmanship and habitation to finish it. Joe had grasped this right away—that was what his window trim was all about.

  Charlie’s finicky drawings of them notwithstanding, my building’s two thick walls were where its design was perhaps most open, if not to our craftsmanship, then to my inhabitation of the place. By sketching an arrangement of my books on his blueprints, Charlie wasn’t so much trying to impose a shelving policy on me as he was tacitly acknowledging the crucial part my stuff would
play in establishing the look and tone of this room.

  That my books were an integral part of the interior design I understood as soon as Joe and I built the shelves. Though technically “finished,” they didn’t look at all that way; the long walls stacked with empty plywood cubicles seemed skeletal and characterless, blank. And the walls were going to remain blank until I’d filled them with my books and things; only then would the thick walls actually feel thick, would the building answer to Charlie’s basic conception of it as “a pair of bookshelves with a roof over it.”

  And even then the building would continue to evolve in important ways, because most of the materials and finishes Charlie had specified were the kind that time conspicuously alters. Outside, the cedar shingles would gently silver as they weathered; more slowly, the skeleton of oiled fir inside promised to redden and warm, and the white pine walls and trim would eventually turn the color of parchment. Except for its windowpanes and hardware, the building was made entirely of wood, the material most tightly bound to time. Its grain records its past, ring by annual ring, and though the tree stops growing when it’s cut, it doesn’t stop developing and changing. “Acquiring character” is what we say it’s doing, as a wood surface absorbs our oils and accumulates layers of grime, as it is dignified by use and time. I’d told Charlie in my first letter I wanted a building that was less like a house than a piece of furniture; he’d designed a place that promised to age like one.