He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Was it thirteen feet precisely?”
I shrugged sheepishly. I had rounded out the extra inches. He corrected me, “In buildings, every measurement is precise. The dimension is thirteen feet four inches from the center of each post. Now why would I do that?”
I had no idea. He reassured me that plenty of adults couldn’t figure it out either. He smiled, “The secret of our house is that it is really built in meters.” I remembered from school, when they taught us that someday we would use the metric system for everything like in Europe. A meter is three feet four inches, or 40”.
Then my father quizzed me, “How many meters are in 13’4”?”
“Four! So our posts are four meters apart.” He made a quick sketch of our grid, pointing out that our house had a narrow overhang on our east and west walls. I looked at the plans for Villa Savoye; it had overhangs on the north and south walls. He wrote out the math. “Our dimensions are sixteen by seventeen meters, or 53’4” x 56’8”.”
Our house was just a little smaller than Villa Savoye. The miniature grid of bass wood posts became more real to me. I imagined I was a little figure in the white cardboard house looking out the window towards Paris. My father guided the X-Acto knife along the ruler edge, his face in the shadow, his eyes behind thick trifocals, his mouth pulled tight.
My father had never seen Villa Savoye or any of Corbu’s buildings. History had restricted his generation. Getting out of architectural school in the 1930s during the Great Depression, he couldn’t afford to go to Europe. Then there was the war, and it was a wonder Villa Savoye survived the Nazis. They hated modern architecture and used the house for storing hay for cows and horses that were kept in the garage. After the war, when Europe was rebuilding, my father was becoming an architect with little income and had a young family. He hoped someday to get to Europe. There were some buildings he’d like to see in person someday.
No wonder he liked going to Mexico. On a small budget, he could drive to see radical modern architecture that hadn’t been stopped by the war. I imagined someday I too would leave Ohio and go to Mexico and France.
We continued working on the main floor of our model, cutting out pieces of mat board, gluing the walls into place once we cut out windows. We glued the ramp from the first to the second floor inside the house walls. The ramp continued from the second to the third floor outside, in the enclosed patio open to the sky. On the top floor, freestanding walls curved and opened to form private outside rooms full of daylight. I loved the roof garden. I asked, “Why didn’t you design us a roof garden?”
I watched his pale eyebrows rise as he laughed behind his black frames. “I didn’t have the budget that Corbu’s clients had. And you forget how hot it gets here in Ohio!” He had raised the middle of the roof over the great room to have clerestory windows for airflow, so our house was filled with filtered indirect light in summer yet kept out the muggy heat. In winter, when the sun was at a long angle, sunlight streamed in from the high windows.
I cut out grey sandpaper for the driveway leading to Villa Savoye, under the overhang, and curving to the garage door. Woodie showed me how to brush on the rubber cement and shake on crushed lichen so it looked like grass. “We better open a window so we don’t get woozy!” He stood up and put his arm around me, hugging my shoulders. “Are you happy with this, Missy?”
I leaned my head against his chest and nodded, yes.
“I’ll drop you off at school in the morning on my way to work.”
I could smell our favorite Sunday dinner, melting aged cheddar with beer to make Welsh Rarebit, to scoop onto toasted homemade bread. My father said, “I’ll put our tools away. Go help your mother.”
“I will, Dad, I just have to go to the bathroom first.”
“Don’t close that door, Missy.” His voice was friendly but firm.
“But Dad, I’m thirteen. I need some privacy from the boys.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” His voice was more forceful. “Leave that door open! We aren’t a bunch of Victorians who have to cover every inch of our bodies!”
“Okay, okay.” I kept my voice upbeat.
I ran into the bathroom and glared at the cold walls of polished tiles of green marble stones set closely in grout. My father declared that, as a modernist, we were forbidden to close the doors, and chastised us for false modesty if we tried to sneak the solid birch door shut. The brushed steel door handle’s precise click would give us away. Then I shook off my irritation, remembered the model we’d built, and hurried out to the kitchen.
In the Great Room, under one spotlight, my brother Wood was setting the table on the teak dinner table, and under another spotlight, Hubbard was writing at the round Formica kitchen table. I was excited. “Mommy, you won’t believe what we made. Corbu’s house is so beautiful.”
My mother squinted at her recipe. She said, “That’s great, Elizabeth,” as she stirred melted cheese in the copper double boiler. “I just know this Rarebit is going to lump up. Do you think I need to put in more beer?”
After we cleared dinner away, I set the model on the table for everyone to admire. Spotlights shone on the little mat board house, where blocks of light and darkness floated on pilotis above a green field. I pointed out to my brothers and mother how people walked through the house. Then my brothers washed dishes. My father played Dave Brubeck and I leaned forward on my elbows to look through cutout windows, imagining living in my little house on pilotis. I turned the plywood model to see the house from every angle.
In their newest version of Take Five, the insistent piano rocked my head back and forth, building up a driving tension until the sax smoothed it out. I looked up. The night had turned our glass walls to silvery dark mirrors, reflecting the little white house on the table and my face above, short hair and tortoise shell glasses. My mother and brothers worked on homework at the kitchen table. Record over, the needle skipped and jolted at the empty center. “All right everybody, time to go to bed.” My dad stood up and stretched. “It’s been a good day.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I stood in the driveway, holding my model house on its plywood base, while my dad backed the Jag out of the garage. From below the row of bedroom windows, I studied how our house was built into the hillside. Standing in the drive, you could see our house had two stories like Villa Savoye. I turned the model around to the side where it looked like an abstract mask, with long dark eyes above and two sections like a dark open mouth. I looked at our house and it was almost exactly the same, without the roof garden. Our ground floor had two garage doors, with empty space on either side and pilotis at the corners. My father took the design of Villa Savoye and slid it into the earth like a long drawer. Had anyone else ever seen this? I was shocked. My father had copied Corbu.
Woodie got out of the car and came around to my side so he could hold the model as I got in. The red leather bucket seat was a snug fit with the model on my lap. My dad smelled like shaving soap, one hand on the wooden steering wheel, the other on the wooden stick shift knob. As he shifted into first gear he said, “Hold the model carefully so I don’t bump it.”
I was nervous and spoke carefully. “Our house looks just like Villa Savoye from this angle.” I showed him that side of the model. It was so obvious.
He reassured me. “That’s what architects do. We study other buildings and their concepts, and develop them to meet the needs of the site. I took Corbu’s points and made it work for our family. Good eye.” He patted my knee.
MY FATHER PULLED into the driveway behind the buses at Princeton Middle School on a hill overlooking Interstate I-75. He came around to my door and carefully maneuvered the plywood base out of the car. I climbed out of the low leather seat, straightened the sleeveless A-line dress I’d sewn, and took the model from him.
Some boys walking by yelled, “Man oh man, was that some kind of Corvette Sting Ray, or what?”
As I walked down the crowded hallway, past slamming narrow lockers
, a group of guys in skinny black jeans, white socks and short ankle boots turned and stared. They usually never talked to me, but one guy asked, “What is that, a space ship?”
“Uh, no, it’s a modern house, in France. It’s for French class.”
A shorter guy—I noticed his bad acne—joined in. “How could that be a house? Where’s the door?”
“Well, you can’t see it at first, but it’s here, under the overhang.”
“Sure, Four Eyes. It looks like a lot of sticks to me.”
I continued on, untouched by their snickering. I was carrying The Modern like a cake, like a prize on a platter, filled with my father’s pride. I couldn’t see that we were all living in a kind of suspended 1950s, where the impact of the 60s had yet to arrive. Even though it was 1967, my mother still wore white gloves when she went shopping in the city. I still wore skirts to my knees at school except on pants day, which came one day a year. In Cincinnati we read about the 60s in LIFE and TIME, where we studied black and white photos of Civil Rights marchers, long-haired rock and roll bands, sit-ins, protests, like it was a story going on far away.
We didn’t know that by the end of the year, cities across the country were about to shatter into violence. The social changes of the 1960s were about to slam into our privileged Midwestern backwater with an intensity none of us could imagine.
But we still felt untouched in a life that seemed unchangeable. I couldn’t imagine that my father wouldn’t always charge into the house with his big plans and that we wouldn’t always do his bidding. I thought we were already radical, which meant “modern.” We lived in a glass house, for heaven’s sake. We’d already changed. We’d left everyone else behind in the dust as we zoomed ahead in our father’s Jag. How much more could we change?
RIOTS
1967
Architecture or revolution!
—LE CORBUSIER
THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER WAS SPREAD ACROSS the breakfast table. My parents leaned over the front page. My father’s face was tight, his lips pinched. The headlines blazed: Race Riots Continue 3rd Night. A large black and white photo showed a car on its side, burned out, windows shattered, on a wide street with stately old houses. Behind the car I saw a brick house with a round tower. I peered at the photo more closely. The glass door. The brick tower. That was my dad’s office, behind the wrecked car. I stared at my father.
He looked at his watch, “I left my office less than ten minutes before those Negroes pulled a white man out of his car.”
The paper explained that rioters had beat up a man who had driven down William Howard Taft Road right in front of my father’s office, only three blocks from the University. Then they set the car on fire. My father’s car had been parked in a small garage behind the office. He had slipped out through the back door. He shuddered. “When will it be safe to go back to the office?”
My father paced, looking out the glass windows across our gardens. His voice was loud again. “I’ve got a gun. If anyone crosses my lawn that I’ve just seeded and tries to get to our house, I’ll shoot them.”
My mother’s voice was quiet. “They are burning the places where they live and work. Things must be really bad for them to do that. They have no interest in coming out here and crossing your yard.”
For weeks the paper had been full of talk about riots. It was a new word for me and seemed to have been taken out of a history closet, shaken out and ironed, leaving it fresh and ready to go. It slipped from lip to lip like sips of coffee over breakfast. We read about riots breaking out across the country, like an epidemic with doctors grappling with a disease, and bringing in the government who knew how to take care of it. The paper reported on quarantining the disease. Separate the outbreak from the unaffected people and it will burn itself out. But the epidemic leapt across the country, and had arrived in our city.
My father recounted what had happened the night before. He stood in the shadows of the glass doors to his office with a baseball bat. He peered out, watching the crowds surging down on the street. He smelled smoke from fires a few blocks away. Police in riot gear marched by, followed by the heavy thudding of a tank. What if someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the door where he was standing? He imagined the smashing of glass, gasoline leaping into flames racing up the stairs, setting his stacks of blueprints, plans and books ablaze. An architect’s life work lives on paper until it lifts off into form.
Suddenly he decided he had to leave. He raced down the basement stairs to the underground garage to start the Jag, a quiet rumble under the long white hood. He opened the garage door onto a back street below his office, cautiously pulling out. He quickly shut and locked the garage door, then slipped away as fast as he could. Headlights off, as if that could hide that sleek car’s perfume of privilege. The back street was vacant, yet the night air was electric with shouts of rage, smashing glass, gunfire, and smoke.
He noted the time on his watch, before the car whispered down the emptied streets of Avondale, lined with sturdy three-story brick houses that had been built by German families a hundred years before. In a city under curfew, he skirted past Corryville’s paint-peeling row houses jammed with students, fraternities, and families. Neon signs glowed red and blue inside darkened liquor store windows, barbershops, and corner groceries in nineteenth-century brick storefronts. Reaching the strangely empty Vine Street, he accelerated down the curving road designed by urban planners to propel suburban traffic from the densely populated hills of the city to the Interstate.
Once on the highway, adrenalin racing, he gunned the engine, letting that baby rip, eighty, ninety, up to 110 miles an hour, past the industrial wastelands of factories in Ivory-dale pouring out the slippery stench of soap and detergents. Past GE factories lighting up the sky with round-the-clock shifts making bomber engines for Vietnam. Past the sprawl of new suburbs with twigs of trees propped in each identical front yard. Past every car and truck on the highway until his exit, when he slid back into the safety of the old village where he grew up, where towering oaks and elms covered the sky.
He crossed the tracks, cruised past the parade of dignified homes stepping up the hill, until he turned right at the brick firehouse. As the Jaguar curved down the hill, he gazed at the white sculpture of a house he had created, like Brancusi’s finely chiseled marble Muse on a pedestal at the Guggenheim in New York. At this late hour only a few solitary spot lights glowed within, like a candle inside a lantern, waiting for his return.
This was his monument to all things modern. This was his slap in the face to the world of Victorians, to the Greek-columned edifices of his father’s generation of architects, to all the narrow-minded people who tried to get in his way. This was his battleground for what was right and true. He would not lose it, no matter who he would have to take out to defend his creation.
The riots sparked a fury in my father. The Modernist radical would now pit himself against the new revolutionaries, blacks fighting for jobs and justice, women fighting for their voice, and long-haired anti-war protestors setting out to bring down the old order. He did not realize he was pitting himself against his own wife and children who, almost inevitably, each in their own way, would be joining the revolution.
FOR ME AT thirteen, reading the news about the riots rumbling through the city was like sitting up late on a hot summer night waiting for a tornado. Not that tornadoes were common in this part of Ohio, but when the winds blew wilder than before any thunderstorm, when threatening thunderheads turned purple and the bruised sky turned yellow, we knew something bad was coming. When night fell, we would sit out on our porches, listening to cicadas in the dark trees, radio on low, playing music quietly. The announcers would break in with bulletins, reports of sightings and touchdowns. The familiar shadows of enormous trees turned ominous. But then soon everyone would go off to bed, the storm past and out of mind. By morning our life in the suburbs seemed to continue unscathed by the riots. I left to catch the bus to school.
I crossed the field to Lin
da’s yard and entered her mother’s spotless chrome and linoleum kitchen. Her mother, with perfectly coiffed grey hair, dressed modestly in a buttoned blouse and A-line skirt below the knee, stockings and flats, was always polite and welcoming, yet I felt she was wary of me. I came from a strange modern world that had landed in the back meadow behind her house. For six years, I arrived daily, crossing her kitchen to walk with Linda to the school bus. Linda’s mother scanned us like a detective, as our fashion styles changed from careful to daring, our skirts from below our knees to short, then long, while our hair grew short, then long and longer. Linda and I perfected a secret language of raised eyebrows and hidden smiles to hide our plans.
Linda and I studied our skirt lengths like advanced geometry. On the way to school, Linda would roll up her waistband so her skirt was as short as mine. Two awkward girls, we’d walked down tree-lined street like nuns, our heads bowed towards each other, our backs curved forward to carry our books, as we conferred over everything essential: how to keep knee socks from falling down, our latest sewing plans, and boys, of course.
But we were most engrossed in the study of our town, like staring at a crowded chess board, a constant study of class and race, changing block by block. On the bus to high school we noted the different parts of town: the rich mansions with a black maid or cook, the small village center with brick store fronts, upper-middle-class streets that abruptly changed mid-block to working-class whites. When the bus rumbled over the train tracks, we crossed to the “wrong” side of the tracks with working-class blacks on the right side of the street and middle-class whites on the left. Hidden beyond the trees on the edge of town were a few more mansions on sweeps of land. Studying our town’s caste system, we completely forgot the city fifteen miles away, where one hundred firebombed businesses smoldered. Hundreds of rioters who had been arrested would be sentenced to serve their time in the century-old Cincinnati Workhouse.
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