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

by Michael Pollan

  Outside, I pictured wood shingles instead of the crisp clapboards that clad the house; shingles seemed better suited to the wooded site and suggested a softer, shaggier, and generally more inviting building. And in spite of some of the fairly complicated elements I’d asked for inside, my letter emphasized that the look of the building from the outside should be plain and unselfconscious, “more chicken coop than atelier.” Then, in what would prove to be an unanswered prayer, I suggested a very rough budget and invoked the principle of simplicity one last time (“remember: something an idiot can build”) before dropping the letter in the mail.

  I had no idea what Charlie would make of it. On one level, the letter seemed to describe a plausible-sounding place; a novelist could probably construct a coherent fictional room out of the words in my letter. But a carpenter? I wasn’t so sure. The letter contained several fairly precise images of the building, yet they were all unconnected, just bits and pieces: Here was a corner with a tiny woodstove and a stuffed chair pulled up to it; over there, on one side of the desk, a small window completely filled with the face of the big rock. Then here—somewhere—was this thick wall of bookcases that was going to organize my life, like a second brain. And over there was the daybed, from which I wanted to look out on the meadow and yet at the same time feel perfectly snug. I might be able to write a logical transition from one image to the next, but could anybody begin to draw it?

  Just for the hell of it, I decided to try. I drew a rectangle and started filling it up with all the different elements I’d mentioned: the desk, the daybed, the stove, the thick wall, the door, the various windows, and, hanging somewhere off of the rectangle, the porch. Very soon I ran out of walls and corners, and had begun to add on more rectangles, even to contemplate a second story. I had drawn what amounted to a pile-up of architectural notions loosely contained by a couple of rectangles; I couldn’t even begin to picture what the exterior of such a structure would look like. Like my letter, my drawing was little more than a collage made up of wishes and remembered places, pictures I’d seen and things I’d read. The letter at least had a bit of syntax to keep it from flying apart.

  How would an architect go about turning these words into a building? The question began to intrigue me, so when I phoned Charlie to alert him to the letter, I asked if he would be willing to let me somehow observe the process—talk to him about it along the way, and maybe even drive up to Boston to watch him draw. At first Charlie sounded game. But a few moments later, after I’d tried to engage him in a discussion of some theoretical issue in architecture I’d been reading about, he seemed to pull back. Charlie cautioned that watching him design my building wasn’t necessarily going to give me a fair picture of contemporary architecture, if that’s what I was looking for. “Just as long as you realize that what I do doesn’t have too much to do with all that stuff.”

  I hadn’t realized that, actually. Charlie had studied under a number of eminent contemporary architects—Charles Moore, at UCLA, where he went to architecture school in the late seventies; and Peter Eisenman, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design in New York—and his father, a former head of the architecture department at MIT, was himself fairly well known for several arresting modernist buildings in and around Boston. So Charlie wasn’t exactly an architectural naïf.

  I heard nothing from Charlie for a couple of weeks, and had begun to wonder what was going on when two equally perplexing items arrived in the mail. The first was a computerized notice from the magazine Progressive Architecture informing me that Charles R. Myer had taken out a gift subscription in my name. The second was a hand-bound booklet of photocopied photographs and drawings that Charlie had put together, with thick cardboard covers and a spiral binding. No note accompanied the booklet, and its pages were completely wordless. So here was Charlie’s answer to my letter.

  I flipped through it with a deepening sense of bafflement that eventually ripened into frustration. The first couple of pages weren’t too bad. Here on the first spread was a collage of tiny houses, which made me think the book was probably a collection of references for the design of my studio. One of them, a tall and narrow shack set out under a bare tree in the snow, I recognized from Tiny Houses, and it had something of the feeling I associated with my hut and its site. The one next to it seemed way off the mark, though, a stone building with a beefy chimney and the sort of steeply pitched alpine roof I associate with some of the sounder houses in the Brothers Grimm. The second page was a site plan of our property, showing the pond and the rock in relation to the house and the axis of the garden.

  But by the time I got to the third page I had started to feel lost. Here was a blueprint of the plan for a huge and bizarre-looking house consisting of three parallel axes crossed perpendicularly by a fourth. Peculiar as that drawing was, it was at least recognizable as architecture, which could not be said about what followed. On the next few pages were photocopies of a minutely detailed instruction manual for the assembly of some elaborate machine—the kind of headache-producing fig. 1 / fig. 2 diagrams that might come with a particularly intricate model airplane. Then came a page depicting several hand tools. So this section was something about an assembly kit. Maybe Charlie was trying to warn me against attempting to build the house myself?

  On the next few pages were a series of drawings having to do with the Golden Section, the famous mystical proportion I’d managed in a long education to avoid learning anything about. The first drawing—of a rectangle placed inside a circle so that its long side lined up along the circle’s diameter—purported to illustrate the geometry of the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series, a sequence of numbers that evidently has something to do with it. The drawings that followed demonstrated how the same 1:1.618 ratio pops up all over the place in architecture and nature: in the elevation of the Parthenon and the wings of a butterfly; in the façade of Notre-Dame and the spiral of a seashell. Frankly I’ve never been sure whether to file the marvels of the Golden Section under Profound Truths of the Universe or Pot-Smokers’ Koans. Now at least I knew where Charlie stood on the question. But what did it have to do with my building?

  The next several pages seemed to offer a return to Planet Earth, with a series of photographs of buildings and architectural details drawn from a bewilderingly wide range of places, styles, and periods. There was a broken-down tobacco barn with airy matchstick walls; a Voysey mansion with immense chimneys and delicate fenestration; a miniature bungalow that had sprouted a small, glazed room directly above its front porch; an Old World townhouse with a whimsical façade that resembled a cat; a lattice wall grown over with a riot of vines; a massive stone house with extremely deepseated windows; a pair of wicker rockers sitting in a room that had a thatched roof but no walls (this was one of a series of progressively odder roofs and ceilings, including one that looked like the hull of an overturned boat); a window seat cut into a deep bookcase in a sleek postmodern living room that was trimmed with oversized columns, capitals, and a pediment; and then a complicated little room, outfitted with a built-in bed and a desk and a wing chair, that reminded me of a sleeping compartment on a train.

  Each image was more beautiful and strange than the last; many of them strongly evoked particular senses of place or light or texture. But what did they mean? I don’t know if this had been Charlie’s intention, but his book left me feeling as though I’d been stranded in a place where I didn’t speak the language. Though in some of the pictures I could discern the ghostly traces of things I’d talked about in my letter (thick and thin walls, daybeds, casement windows), with most of them I failed to see the point. I thirsted for captions, just a word or two to help me see what in the world a stone mansion in England had to do with my one-room shack in the Connecticut woods. I closed the book feeling more than a little annoyed, in fact, a feeling that only intensified after I took a moment to study the cover design, which I’d somehow managed to overlook before. But Charlie had made an abstract design out of some thin slivers of balsa
wood that he’d pasted to the cardboard cover. It consisted of two parallel bars, about an inch thick and set an inch apart, joined together by a dozen perpendicular match-sticks, like so:

  I had no idea what this was supposed to mean (if anything). Like everything else about the book, it seemed insiderish, coy. All I could think about was whether or not all the time Charlie’d spent putting this thing together was going to show up on my bill.

  I called Charlie, hoping to find out what I was supposed to make of the booklet and to thank him for the subscription to Progressive Architecture. I confessed my bewilderment (the irritation I kept to myself) and asked him exactly how the book fit into the process. Charlie cheerfully explained that he’d collected these images after reading my letter, that this was something he often did at the beginning of a job. “Next time we meet, we’ll go through it together. That’ll give me a better sense of what’s important to you, what sort of feeling you want here. I find it’s usually better to hear somebody’s gut reaction to a specific picture than for either of us to try to describe some sort of effect, which can get pretty abstract, and lead to misunderstandings.” Charlie distrusted words, I realized; the booklet was his pointed response to my wordy and, probably to him, overly abstract letter.

  I told him that I’d actually found his book kind of abstract, and couldn’t always see the relevance of a particular picture to the project at hand. For instance, what was the story with that mansion?

  “Isn’t that guy great? I love how that bay window curves outward without ever extending beyond the wall—it’s tucked in there almost like this eyeball with a big heavy brow over it.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the curve of the window gives you a sense of just how thick the wall around it must be, and I thought maybe we want to tuck the daybed into a bay like that. It might be really neat.”

  And what about those fig. 1 / fig. 2 assembly instructions?

  “Just a little joke. But it’s also a reminder to me to keep the construction fairly simple here, and that I might want to draw this project in some different way. Because a conventional plan and elevation isn’t going to tell you how all the parts fit together, or what order you need to do things in. These are things you can usually count on the contractor to figure out. But you may need something more like one of these diagrams—an instruction manual.”

  We arranged a time for me to come to Boston, and I thanked him for the magazine subscription. “I should warn you,” Charlie said, “PA can get pretty wild. But you’ve got to read it if you want to know what’s going on in architecture right now.” I asked Charlie if he was a subscriber. He said he used to read it religiously but hadn’t in the last couple of years. “It’s a lot of fun, but I don’t have time for that stuff these days. You’ll see. It’s not the real world.”

  The first issue of Progressive Architecture to arrive happened to be its annual awards edition, its thirty-ninth, which singled out a dozen or so new projects—houses, museums, office buildings, artists’ lofts—for praise.* The magazine was oversized and lavishly produced, with lots of full-color photographs on heavily coated stock. It had the look and heft and even some of the glamour of a fashion magazine. Except that all the models here were buildings—there were virtually no people in sight.

  I saw right away what Charlie had meant when he said, “It’s not the real world.” Almost all of the award-winners were not real buildings—they were drawings and models of buildings that, in many cases, would never get built. This seemed peculiar. Wasn’t reviewing a set of architectural drawings a little like trying to review a play without going to see it? How could you tell whether or not the building really worked before it was built? Of course I never asked this question of Charlie or anybody else; I figured it was probably naïve, and liable to mark me as unsophisticated. (Though I was amused to see a few years later that Progressive Architecture had instituted a new department called the “post-occupancy critique,” in which a reporter actually visited a building in use to see how well it worked and what the people who worked or lived there actually thought about it. This was regarded in architecture-criticism circles as a radical innovation.)

  Most of the prize-winning buildings, or designs, struck me as willfully idiosyncratic and, at least before I read the lengthy captions, totally perplexing. Here was a trio of silver plywood structures on a beach, each resembling a different fish washed up on shore: a carp, a ray, and a sea slug. Called Beached Houses, they were intended as artists’ housing in Jamaica. A prospective Tokyo office building designed by Peter Eisenman looked like a conventional glass-walled tower that had somehow been folded over and over again until it resembled an origami construction—a dizzying collage of multiplying facets and peculiar angles. The California architect Frank Gehry had two winners, both of them actually destined to get built. Another California architect had designed a house and gallery for an art collector in Santa Fe that consisted of two groupings of cubes within cubes within cubes; it looked like the sort of building you might get if you asked M. C. Escher to design your house. But probably the very weirdest house to win a prize wasn’t even one you could look at in a model or drawing. That’s because the architect proposed to improvise its design, so there could be no plan or elevation in advance. Periodically he planned to visit the site, look at whatever the builder had done that day and, taking his inspiration from that, make some new drawings for the next stage of construction. I guessed this was a joke on Goethe’s famous aphorism likening architecture to frozen music. Here was frozen jazz.

  I got the feeling there were a lot of jokes being made, and the best ones were probably sailing over my head, since they were aimed primarily at other architects and architecture critics. I seriously doubt Peter Eisenman chuckled about origami when he presented his office building scheme to his Japanese patrons. Or that the designer of the carp, ray, and sea slug in Jamaica mentioned to his client that the decision to base these artists’ houses on fishes was meant as a postmodernist statement about the arbitrariness of the relationship between form and content in architecture. (Fish is to artist as form is to content?) I certainly wouldn’t have known this about the project unless I’d been told.

  And told we were, over and over again—in the captions, in the quotations from the architects’ statements of purpose, and in the jurors’ comments, which were informative and often highly entertaining. A good thing, too, because without the words, these buildings were incomprehensible indeed—sort of like Charlie’s booklet, but without any of the sensual rewards.

  Lewis Mumford once wrote that sometime in the nineteenth century it became necessary to know how to read before one could truly see a building. Architecture had become referential, so a person needed a key in order to fully understand it. A Greek Revival house, for example, embodied a message about republican virtue that it helped to have at least some small knowledge of the classics to appreciate. To judge by the oceans of words that accompany prize-winning buildings today, the situation has evidently gotten much more complicated since Mumford’s time. Nowadays you also have to be up on contemporary philosophy and literary theory in order to understand buildings. This seemed a great stroke of luck for me, since, as a former English major, I knew slightly more about these subjects than I did about building.

  Take Peter Eisenman’s Tokyo office tower. What had baffled me as a building, or model, began to make a certain amount of sense once I’d read the accompanying text. Eisenman’s deconstructivist design is meant as “a kind of cultural critique of architectural stability and monumentality at a time when modern life itself is becoming increasingly contingent, tentative, and complex.” Evidently the wrenching dislocations and foldings of space in this building will help office workers in Tokyo experience the dislocations and contingencies of contemporary life on a daily basis.*

  About a lot of novel and even avant-garde architecture it’s always been possible to say, Perhaps we just can’t appreciate its beauty quite yet; maybe we’ll have to catch up to it fir
st. The label “Gothic,” after all, was coined as a term of opprobrium for that style when it was new. It struck people as barbarous and ugly, so they named it for the detested Goths. But this new architecture is different. Making people uncomfortable is not merely the byproduct of this style but its very purpose. It sets out to “deconstruct” the familiar categories we employ to organize our world: inside and outside, private and public, function and ornament, etc. Some of it does seem interesting as art, or maybe I should say, as text. But it seems to me it’s one thing to disturb people in a museum or private home where anyone can choose not to venture, and quite another to set out to disorient office workers or conventioneers or passersby who have no choice in the matter. And who also haven’t been given the chance to read the explanatory texts—the words upon words upon which so many of these structures have been built.

  Likening this kind of architecture to a literary enterprise is not original with me. Eisenman himself claims that buildings are no more real than stories are, and in fact has urged his fellow architects to regard what they do as a form of “writing” rather than design. The old concept of design—as a process of creating forms that help negotiate between people and the real world—might have made sense when people still had some idea what “real” was, but now, “with reality in all its forms having been pre-empted by our mediated environment,” architecture is free to reconceive itself as a literary art—personal, idiosyncratic, arbitrary.

  For me, the irony of this situation was inescapable, a bad joke. I’d come to building looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really just another form of writing. This was definitely a setback.

  At first I assumed that this literary conception of architecture was a notion limited to deconstructivist architects and the editors of Progressive Architecture. But the more I read about contemporary architecture, the more widespread and uncritically accepted this idea seemed to be. Nobody seemed to have any trouble with the notion that language, of all things, is a suitable metaphor for architecture—that buildings “mean” in much the same way that words and sentences do, so that the proper way to experience a building is to “read” it. Postmodernism, the movement that preceded deconstruction in the parade of postwar architectural styles I found chronicled in the back issues of PA, promoted a completely different-looking kind of building, yet here too the underlying approach was essentially literary, and there was a lot of required reading. In this case, however, the syllabus was not deconstruction but semiotics—which happens to be the predecessor of deconstruction in the parade of postwar continental philosophies.