A Place of My Own (11 page)

With my own well-established weakness for theories, I wasn’t about to do anything of the kind. I dug in. Alexander contends (in both
A Pattern Language
and a more theoretical companion volume called
The Timeless Way of Building
) that the most successful built forms share certain essential attributes with forms in nature—with things like trees and waves and animals. Both natural and man-made forms serve to reconcile conflicting forces (a tree’s need to stand up with the fact of gravity, say, or a person’s conflicting urges for privacy and social contact); the forms that do this best are the ones that endure. You might say that Alexander is an architectural Charles Darwin, since he believes that good form represents a successful adaptation to a given environment.

Consider the living room of a house, Alexander writes. Here the conflicting forces are not physical but psychological: the desire of family members for a sense of belonging and the simultaneous need of individuals for a measure of privacy and time apart. The pattern that will resolve this basic conflict (which Alexander says lies at the heart not only of family life but of social life in general) he calls “Alcoves”: “To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in one’s and two’s in the same space.” This is accomplished by creating “small places at the edge of any common room…. These alcoves should be large enough for two people to sit, chat, or play, and sometimes large enough to contain a desk or a table.” The pattern of an alcove off of a communal space (which also shows up in libraries, restaurants, and public squares) is as natural and right and self-sustaining as the pattern of ripples in a patch of windblown sand.

It follows that architectural beauty is not a subjective or a trivial matter for Alexander. “Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them,” he declares in the pattern “Window Place,” which follows “Alcoves” in
A Pattern Language
. A room lacking this pattern—even if it has a window and comfortable chair somewhere in it—will “keep you in a state of perpetual unresolved conflict and tension.” That’s because when you enter the room you will feel torn between the desire to sit down and be comfortable and the desire to move toward the light. Only a window place that combines the comfortable spot to sit with the source of sunlight can resolve this tension. For Alexander, our sense that rooms containing such places are beautiful is much more than “an aesthetic whim”; rather, a window place, like an alcove off a common room, represents an objectively successful adaptation to a given social and physical context.

Whether or not you are willing to travel quite this far with Alexander, his book fairly brims with patterns that seem sensible and ring with a certain poetic or psychological truth. I’d never thought about it before, but having windows on two sides of a room
does
seem to make the difference between a lifeless and an appealing room. The reason this is so, Alexander hypothesizes, is that a dual light source allows us to see things more intricately, especially the finer details of facial expression and gesture. Similarly, there is something vital about the experience of arrival captured in the pattern “Entrance Transition,” which calls for a transitional space at the entrance to a building—a covered porch, or a curving path brushing by a lilac, or some other slight change of view or texture underfoot before one reaches the door. Alexander suggests that people need this sort of transitional space and time in order to shed their “street behaviors” and settle “into the more intimate spirit appropriate to a house.” Sometimes Alexander sounds less like an architect than a novelist. I say that not only because he is a good student of human nature, but because he brings a sense of narrative—of time—to the design of space.

I realized that Charlie and I were sensing the need for just such an “entrance transition” when we decided to locate the door in back. Stepping around the big rock and turning into the site would create the very interlude Alexander is talking about, offering a change in perspective and a moment to prepare before coming inside. It was startling to see just how many of the things I asked for in my letter, and how many of the images in Charlie’s book, show up in
A Pattern Language
. “Thick walls,” for example, turns out to be an important pattern: “Most of the identity of a dwelling lies in or near its surfaces—in the 3 or 4 feet near the walls.” These should be thick enough to accommodate shelves, cabinets, displays, lamps, built-in furniture—all those nooks and niches that allow people to leave their mark on a place. “Each house will have a memory,” Alexander writes, and the personalities of its inhabitants are “written in the thickness of the walls.” So maybe I hadn’t been that far off, imagining the walls of my hut as an auxiliary brain.

After we had spent a couple of hours going through the book of images, using them to narrow my choices and refine our idea of the building, Charlie took out a roll of parchment-colored tracing paper, drew a length of it across his drafting table, and began to draw. He worked in ink to start, sketching rapidly in rough, scribbly lines, discarding a drawing and tearing off a new length of paper any time he didn’t like what he was seeing. If there was anything in a sketch worth saving, he’d start the new drawing by loosely tracing over that part of the rejected one; in this way a process of trial and error unfolded swiftly and smoothly, the good ideas getting carried forward from one generation of drawing to the next, the bad ones falling by the wayside.

At first, Charlie worked exclusively in plan, ignoring for the time being what the building might look like from the outside. He started with my desk, which we’d decided should carry all the way across the front of the building, where it could overlook the pond and the house. To determine its dimensions, Charlie inventoried the things I liked to keep on my desk and then asked me to extend my arms out to the sides. To that wingspan (six feet) he added the depth of a bookshelf on each end (two feet): this gave us the width of the building. Charlie now turned to the Golden Section to obtain its length, multiplying eight feet by the factor 1.618, which comes to 12.9. He sketched a rectangle eight feet by thirteen, roughed in the big rock to its right, and declared, “There it is: your ur-house.”

We had talked about the Golden Section earlier, when we’d come to that section in the book of images. Charlie told me he often resorted to the ratio when he had to make a decision about the proportions of a space. He’d devoted a couple of pages to it in the booklet because he thought the Golden Section seemed particularly fitting for this building, since it was to house someone who liked to write about nature. When I offered a puzzled look, he explained that, among other things, the Golden Section is a bridge joining the worlds of architecture and nature. “The same proportioning system that works in buildings also shows up in trees, leaves, in the spirals of seashells and sunflowers, and in the human body.” He hoisted his eyebrows, lowered his voice: “It’s everywhere.”

But wasn’t this an awfully mystical way to determine the proportions of my building?

“Hey. It works. More often than not, rooms with Golden Section proportions feel right.” Charlie stressed that he’s not a slave to the system; should he find he needs a couple more feet in the length of the building, for example, he’ll dispense with it. “But all other things being equal, I’ll use it, because I’m convinced there’s something there.”

I was surprised that such an occult proportioning system hadn’t gone out with the Enlightenment, or modernism, but Charlie rattled off a long list of modern architects who’d sworn by it, including two as different as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Even to contemporary designers not at all given to mysticism or numerology, the Golden Section seems to retain some value as a pattern, or type—something to fall back on when faced with a decision about proportions, providing a bit of shelter, perhaps, from what Kevin Lynch, the writer and city planner, once called “the anxieties of the open search.”

For the next hour, Charlie worked variations on this basic rectangle, now moving the daybed from the east wall to a bay on the south wall, now switching places between the daybed and the stove. At one point he experimented with the idea of turning the front of the building into a screened-in porch, while moving the desk to the north wall. But that meant it would look right out on the giant boulder, and when I mentioned that this seemed like a good recipe for writer’s block, he quickly dropped that idea.

Sheet after sheet, Charlie moved around the elements we’d settled on—desk, daybed, porch, stove, bookshelves, chair—like pieces on a chessboard, talking the whole time as if we were inside the game and the pieces were animate. “This guy here,” he’d say, pointing to the chair, “really wants to be over there by the stove, but if we move him, like so, then the daybed can’t go on the same wall because code says you need at least three feet of clearance to a combustible on either side of your stove.” He started to draw it anyway. “Unless, that is, you decide not to bother with a building permit—” he looked at me hopefully; this wouldn’t be the last time Charlie tried to keep on going after one of his ideas ran up against some practical consideration. I told him to stick to code. “Okay, okay, so…”—he tears off another length of tracing paper—“let’s move the bay window for the daybed to the south wall, where it’s really going to want that shady trellis”—he scribbled a dense tangle of lines over the window—“and then put the door on the east end, the stove back over here…This just might work.”

As he tested each new arrangement of elements in plan, Charlie would narrate a procession through the imaginary space taking shape at the end of his felt-tip. “Now I approach the building this way, turning right up here past the rock, which is hiding the big view from me, that’s perfect, and then I step into the building, passing through our thick wall here…Good.” Thinking, narrating, and drawing seemed to proceed almost in lockstep, the process now pushing, now following, the prow of black ink over the sheet of paper. His line danced across the page with a quality that managed to look both sure-footed and provisional at the same time, doubling back on itself to correct an angle or try out a new dimension, then flying off to scribble a shelf full of books while its author contemplated his next move. Swift, buoyant, heedless for now about being neat or right, it was a line that seemed to say, “Okay, so how about
this?
” Charlie’s words hustled to keep pace with its improvisations.

“So now I’ve arrived,” he continued, his pen swinging a door open to the left. “And right there in front of me is the daybed with the bay window behind it, looking out through our clematis vine, all that filtered south light. Good, good, good. Then I turn to my right, and boom, there’s the big view down to the pond—that’s very strong, the surprise as I turn into that view. So let’s make the most of it, carry that window wall to wall like this, run it the entire length of the desk. Nice. Uh-oh”—he flashes a panicked look, eyebrows rocketing—“I don’t see the porch! Where am I going to put
that
guy? And it looks like that stove and chair are going to be in my way as I move toward the desk. It’s starting to get a little crowded in here.” He tore off another length of tracing paper.

Now Charlie seemed stuck, and while he sat there rubbing his chin, a half-dozen rejected schemes spread out in front of him, I opened the booklet to the photograph of the miniature bungalow with the glassed-in room squatting over its front porch. Maybe we could go up, like this, I suggested. Charlie told me a little about the house in the picture, evidently a favorite. It was in a campground on Cape Cod called Nonquit, a summer community his grandparents had been members of, where Charlie had spent time as a child. He spoke affectionately of the place, and especially of the strong, eccentric architecture there, which he still sometimes returned to admire and, occasionally, borrow from. Every house was different, Charlie said, idiosyncratic but without straining to be. They’d been built at the turn of the century by Beaux Arts—trained architects working in vernacular American idioms—stick, shingle style, bungalow. What he admired most about these buildings was their simultaneous inventiveness and unpretentiousness, qualities not easily combined.

“The houses have a certain propriety I’ve always associated with my grandparents.” These were the Quakers on his mother’s side. “They’re very sophisticated buildings—a dozen different ideas in each—yet they’d much rather be thought of as plain than risk seeming the least bit affected. But there are layers upon layers here if you look. You’re welcome to uncover as much, or as little, as you want.” Charlie seemed to prize this notion of propriety in people and buildings equally.

Now he seized on the idea of a small second story, and set off in a whole new direction, drawing a square, about five foot on a side, in the middle of our rectangle—a tower, essentially, that would rise above the main room and accommodate either the daybed or the desk. I told Charlie about my tree house, which the tower he was drawing reminded me of. We were suddenly on much trickier ground, having now to factor in a half-dozen new and relatively inflexible elements, like the clearance beneath the second story (“How tall are you? Let’s see if we can get away with seven feet under here”) and some means of access to it that wouldn’t eat up too much space downstairs. A staircase would take up nearly as much square footage as we were adding, so we played with the idea of using a library ladder on a track, which would slide right into the thick wall and out of the way.

The rest of the morning was taken up elaborating the tower scheme. After we had settled on what seemed to be a workable arrangement in plan—my desk lining the glazed walls of the tower, the front of the house below becoming a porch, with the stove and sitting area directly beneath the tower, and the daybed still occupying a bay window curving out from the south wall downstairs—Charlie declared that the moment of truth had arrived. It was time to see what this thing was going to look like in elevation.