A Place of My Own (34 page)

From the outside, the building was suddenly much more interesting to look at—because now the building looked back. It had a face. Roused by glass from its long material slumber, the structure now seemed something more than the sum of its wooden parts, as though, Oz-like, it had been inspirited. Especially after we’d installed the two windows in the peak, from which they peered out with a supervisory air, the building looked, if not alive, then at least like a pretty good metaphor for consciousness, with its big awning windows reflecting back the landscape in what seemed almost a form of acknowledgment. Like water in the landscape, which is likewise reflective and transparent by turns, glass has a way of inflecting whatever holds it, quickening what was formerly inert, suggesting other layers and dimensions, depths to plumb. And though I’m sure a big pane of plate glass would have animated the building too, I doubt it would have made it look nearly as, well,
smart
as my building now seemed. (Joe said the little windows up in the peak had given the building its brains.) Undivided plates of glass often wear a glazed expression, look blind. Muntins wink.

Inside too, the windows had invested the building with a kind of intelligence, a point of view. What had been a single uninflected horizontal view out over the desk was now divided into six discrete square frames. The surprise was just how much more you could see this way, now that there were six focal points instead of one, and twenty-four edges composing the scene instead of four. Here, top center, was a picture of the white oak, holding a great bowl of space in its bare upturned arms. Below it was a frame of vegetable garden blasted by winter; another of the iced pond, a glistening white tablet pressed into the freezer-burned earth; and, in the third, a trio of slender tree trunks leaning into the frame from offstage, almost close enough to touch. I don’t think I’d ever noticed these particular trees before; they were exactly the sort of ordinary, near-distance imagery we automatically edit out of a panoramic view. For someone not blessed with great powers of visual observation, the grid of muntin bars was a lesson in looking, a little like the graph paper art students sometimes use to break a scene down into manageable components.

I noticed that any movement on my part would radically revise the content of the six frames; the fixed point perspective of the undivided rough opening (much like a conventional picture window’s) had given way to a shifting mosaic of views. Standing up on the landing, the view was strictly middle distance, looking down to the massive trunk of the white ash rising out of a chaotic, unmade bed of boulders. Only when you stepped down into the main room did the full picturesque prospect, with its deep and orderly space, pop into view. I thought of Charlie’s metaphor of the prescription glasses, because the sensation recalled how putting on a fresh pair can snap the world so vividly into focus. I realized that Charlie had put the central window just where he had—down low over the desk—in order to seduce me into taking my seat, since there is where the prospect was most pleasing.

I knew this because I’d brought a chair out to the building to get some idea what working in front of this window would be like. It was the same chair I’d stood on back when I was deciding on the site, and now I slid it up to a chalked line representing the edge of my as-yet-unbuilt desk and sat down. This turned out to be the only spot in the room from which I could readily pop open and peer out of the little recessed window directly to my right—yet another way Charlie had deployed his windows to lure me to my desk. We seem to gravitate naturally toward windows (Christopher Alexander says this is because we’re “phototropic”), and Charlie was using this fact to organize my experience of the room.

This particular window reminded me of the little triangular smoking windows cars used to have up front, or the side window in a prop plane’s cockpit, the one the pilot slides open to receive the manifest from the ground crew. My own cockpit window overlooked the big rock, making for a decidedly unpicturesque view, all jammed up with the muscled back of a boulder not three feet away. This particular frame was like a blown-up photograph, a detail dwelling on the intricate map of lichens and moss that covered the granite skin. The view was utterly bereft of prospect; it told of rootedness and refuge instead, not at all what you expect from a window.

And yet it was perfectly in keeping with the building’s
parti
, the two thick walls giving refuge side to side while the thin ones, which seemed even thinner now that they’d been glazed and delicately subdivided with muntins, opened up to prospect fore and aft. Across the room the other thick wall was now pierced by a French casement that opened on no “view” at all but a latticework of cedar. In a year’s time this trellis would be draped in leaves and the casement would open directly on a second and entirely different image of refuge: the gardener’s hedgey green wall, no farther away than your nose.

Behind me the big awning looked up the hill toward the meadow, which seemed to tumble down toward it, and, high above, the two peak windows on either gable each admitted a paragraph of sky—just enough light to flatter Charlie’s boat-hull ceiling, throwing its rhythms of wood into relief and coloring its fir straps blood orange. Though all the new windows were badly smudged, and the early winter sun was feeble, the little room was awash in a light that already seemed its own.

Naturally I had to test out the operation of my windows too. Each of them had its own custom operating system (tracking down workable hardware for these had been almost as difficult as finding the drip edge detail). What came as news to me was the way a particular arrangement of hinges and handles on a sash could call forth a particular physical gesture in the act of opening it, engaging the body in a very specific way. This building now summoned a whole vocabulary of these gestures, and each expressed a slightly different attitude toward the world outdoors. It was something an actor would have grasped immediately, how, say, hoisting one of the big awning sashes and hooking it to its chain (they hung from a chrome chain suspended from the ridge beam) felt like lifting a garage door overhead and heading out into the bright workaday morning, or maybe it was more like propping up the wooden flaps on your root beer stand—another hopeful
A.M.
gesture that said
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
. Whereas pushing open the rock window, which was hinged on the side and swung out like some kind of utility door, had something distinctly hatchlike and vehicular about it: You almost wanted to reach out and give somebody the old thumbs-up before shoving off. As for the French casement on the south wall, this window opened in an altogether different and more genteel world—a bedroom, say, or kitchen—and the action of its sash called for a refined, even feminine gesture, two hands drawing the day in like a breath. This window you could open in your pj’s, where the side window called for a uniform, maybe, or jumpsuit.

However attired, I could see that opening up and closing this building was definitely not going to be a swift or simple operation. For one thing, the procedure had to be executed in the correct sequence, always opening the French casement
after
raising the awning, lest the swinging sashes collide. It looked like summer mornings were going to enlist me in a skippery ritual of rigging and tacking the various parts of my building, and then at day’s end performing the reverse operation, carefully stowing everything and battening down the hatches, my own landlocked rendition of the seafarer’s rigmarole. One thing this building’s attitude toward the world outside its windows would
not
be was passive.

So what story did my windows have to tell, about nature and our relationship to it? The answer to this question eluded me at first, perhaps because the pictures of nature my windows offered were so various that they seemed to defy generalization. One frame might attend to the picturesque while another threw that whole idea into question, making a nice case for nature’s unspectaculars: the anonymous trees and weeds and ho-hum topographies of the middle distance. And still others had little use for pictures at all, preferring instead to snag a northerly breeze or wedge of overhead light. But maybe that
was
the point, or if not the point (for I doubt Charlie intended it) then at least the effect: to suggest that nature might be more various than any one of our conceptions of it. That any single view—whether it be wilderness or garden, sublime or picturesque, refuge or prospect—is only that, a version of nature and not the whole of it.

In place of the single, steady gaze, the room proposes a multitude of glimpses, and these are so different one from the next that sometimes it’s hard to believe a single tiny room that
wasn’t
a vehicle could supply them all. The picture of nature on offer here seems partial, mobile, and cumulative, built up not only from glances and gazes but also from the various bodily sensations that opening a particular window can provide, beginning with the feel of a handle’s grip and ending with a sample of the afternoon air. And every one of them is distinct—not only the view but the grip and even the air, whose scent and weight seem to shift with the cardinal points. And come summer, when I move into full porch mode, throwing the house as open as a gazebo or belvedere to the breeze and rush of space, the picture of nature on offer here will be more layered and complicated still. “Picture” won’t even be the word for it.

But then what about the word “transparency”? Surely that is part of the story these custom windows have to tell, with their in-swinging sash that can open the better part of a wall to the outdoor air. This is not, however, the transparency of a modernist, fooling the eye with an illusion of framelessness, so much as the qualified and much more sensual transparency of the porch. A porch is always frankly framed, as my building will be, by its thick, heavy walls, the ever-present ceiling, and the wooden visor in front that, like the visor on a cap, is a constant reminder that something’s been edited out, that here is one perspective. Rather than pretend to framelessness, to objectivity, opening all my windows will turn this whole building into a frame.

The romantics and the modernists were right to suspect the window frame of standing between ourselves and nature, between us and others, but I suspect they were probably wrong to think this distance could ever be closed. It won’t be, not by glass walls, not by flinging windows wide open, not even by blowing up the houses. For even outdoors, even in the pine wood that Thoreau said was his favorite room at Walden, we are still in some irreducible sense outside nature. As
Walden
itself teaches us, we humans are never simply in nature, like the beasts and trees and boulders, but are always also
in relation
to nature: looking at it through the frames of our various preconceptions, our personal and collective histories, our self-consciousness, our words. There might be value in breaking frames and pushing toward transparency, as Thoreau and his fellow romantics (the Zen masters too) have urged us to do, but the goal is probably beyond our reach. What other creature, after all, even
has
a relationship to nature? The window, with its qualified transparency and its inevitable frame, is the sign of this fact of relation, of difference.

This was, for me, a slightly melancholy discovery, since it had been in quest of a certain transparency that I’d set out on this journey. By building this house off in the woods, and by making it with my own hands, I’d hoped to break out of a few of the frames that stood between me and experience, especially the panes of words that boxed in so much of my time and attention and seemed to distance me from the world of things and the senses. Though I suppose I had accomplished this, it seemed clear now that what I’d really done was trade some old frames for a few new ones. Which might be the best we can hope for, transparency being as elusive as truth. Not that the trying wasn’t worth the effort; it was. Just look at what I had to show for it: this building and these new windows, for one thing, which have given me so much more than a view. And then there were the new and sometimes warring perspectives I’d acquired along the way—that of carpenter and architect, I mean, not to mention apprentice; there were all those new windows too. Maybe it wasn’t as important to see things as they “really” are as it was to see them freshly, scrupulously, and from more than one point of view.

Charlie had been right all along about going custom. To do so might not be straightforward or cheap, yet clearly it is possible to improve on the standard windows, these ways of seeing we’ve inherited. Some windows
are
better than others, can cast the world in a fresher light, even make it new. As Charlie said, you can pick up a pair of glasses at Woolworth’s, or you can spring for a prescription.

Yet there is still and always the frame, even if one has perfect vision and sleeps out under the stars. Transparency’s for the birds, for them and all the rest of nature. As for us, well, we do windows.

Once we’d butted the last course of shingles tight to the window casings and squeezed a bead of caulk along the joint, the building was at last sealed to the weather and Joe and I could start in on finish work. To my ear, the term had a welcome, auspicious ring, signifying as it did that we were moving indoors (it was January now, deep winter) and toward completion. This showed just how little I understood about the meaning of finish work, however, for nothing else in house building takes quite as long. I automatically assumed the primary meaning of the term to be temporal
(Hey, we must be nearly finished!)
, but of course finishing in carpentry also has a spatial meaning, having to do with an exalted level of refinement in the joining and dressing of interior wood. In fact, this turns out to be so time-consuming it’s apt to make finishing in the other sense of the word seem like a receding, ungraspable mirage.

Progress slows. Or at least it appears to, since it is by now such a subtle thing, measured in increments of smoothness and craftsmanship and in to-do lists done rather than in changes at the scale of a landscape or elevation. No one big thing, finish work consists of a great variety of discrete tasks, many niggling, some inspiring, but none you would call heroic. And yet, day by day, each task checked off moves you another notch down the punch list, that much closer to move-in day, when the time of building ends and the time of habitation begins. Joe and I would spend the better part of a year finishing the writing house.

Framing by comparison is epic work—the raising from the ground of a whole new structure in a matter of days. There’s poetry in finish work too, but it’s a small, domestic sort of poetry, which I suppose is appropriate enough. Building the desk, trimming out the windows, sanding and rubbing oil into wood surfaces to raise their grain and protect them, is slow, painstaking work that seems to take place well out of earshot of the gods. High ritual might attend the raising of a ridge beam, but who ever felt the need to bless a baseboard molding, or say a little prayer over the punch list?

No, finish work takes place in the realm of the humanly visible and tactile, and it is chiefly this that accounts for its laboriousness. Its concern is with the intimate, inescapable surfaces of everyday life—the desk one faces each morning, with its achingly familiar wood-grain figures, the sill on which an elbow or coffee cup habitually rests—and any lapse of attention here will leave its mark, if not on the land, then certainly on the texture of a few thousand days. Where being off by an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch was good enough when we were nailing shingles or spacing two-by-fours, the acceptable margins of error and imperfection had by now dwindled to nothing. Now we dealt in thirty-seconds of an inch, and strove for “drive fits” in wood joints that take the tap of a mallet to secure; now even hairline gaps rankle, and at close quarters indoors the eye can distinguish eighty-eight degrees from ninety. Fortunately one’s education in carpentry follows a course that makes the achievement of such exactitude at least theoretically plausible. Each stage in the building process demands a progressively higher level of refinement and skill, as the novice moves from framing to cladding to shingling and then finally to finish work, so that at this point in the construction I should have hammered enough nails and cut enough lengths of lumber to know how to do the job right. Theoretically.

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 totalitarian 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.”