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

by Michael Pollan

  “See, the problem I’ve been having with this hut all along is with the thickness of the corner posts.” Charlie was deep inside the new scheme now, and his explanation came in a rush. “Basically, the idea is to do thick walls on the long sides, thin ones front and back. What this does is give the building a strong directionality—it becomes almost a kind of chute, funneling all that space coming down through our site toward the pond.”

  He proceeded to explain how the thickness of the posts set up the thickness of our interior walls, which meant the posts would have to be a foot square at a minimum if the walls were going to work as bookshelves. But in fact they had to be a couple of inches thicker than that, since he wanted them to “come proud” of the walls—stand out from the building’s skin, in order to retain their “postness.”

  “So already we’re up to fifteen, sixteen inches square, which is one fat post. I tried drawing it—way too chunky. You’d need a crane to haul it out there.

  “But what if instead I go to a pair of posts, six by six, say, with three or four inches of wall between them? That gives me my fifteen inches easily, but without any of that chunkiness.” A single fat corner post would also have suggested that all four of our walls were equally thick, he explained, while a pair of posts at each corner in front would imply that only the long walls directly behind them are thick; by comparison the short walls between the double posts at either end will seem thin, an impression he planned to underscore by filling them with glass.

  “There was one more piece of the puzzle, though, which didn’t hit me till this morning. Instead of two square posts, what if I go to six-by-tens and run them lengthwise? This way our corner could articulate the directionality of the building at the same time it sets up the whole idea of thick versus thin walls—enclosure one way, openness the other. That’s what I mean about the whole parti being right here in a nutshell.”

  Charlie might have been able to tease an entire building out of his corner detail, but I couldn’t see it, not yet. I might as well have been trying to picture a face by looking at a handful of genes in a microscope. I did notice, however, that Charlie’s corner post sat on a rock, and I asked him about that; I wasn’t going to need a house jack, was I? He assured me there was a conventional footing underneath the rock. The rock was his way of hiding the ungainly concrete pier we’d need to support the double posts. Stone footings also seemed right for the site. “What else could a big wooden post standing next to a boulder wear on its feet?”

  Charlie said he still had a few big issues to resolve, and the elevations to draw. “It’s a tight fit in there, and I haven’t figured out how I’m going to resolve the tops of the double posts, or how I’m going to make our thin walls disappear. But the hard part’s done. I should have something for you to look at in a week.”

  3. THE DESIGN

  Charlie drove down to present his design over the Fourth of July weekend. Sunday morning, out on the porch, he unfurled a single large blueprint that he had prepared with the help of Don Knerr, a young associate in his office. The drawing showed the big rock with the floor plan of the hut next to it and, orbiting around that, the four elevations and two cross-section views. They’d also sketched in some trees for atmosphere, and a curl of smoke rising from the stovepipe. I noticed the building was called a “Writing House” on the blueprint, an accurate enough but somewhat grand-sounding name it would take me awhile to make my own.

  My first impression was of how simple this building looked, considering all the thought and work that had gone into it. Here in plan was a basic rectangular box, and in elevation a square crowned by an isosceles right triangle: a house as a child might have drawn it. But as Charlie began to walk me through the drawings, narrating a trip through spaces that seemed as vivid to him as the porch we were sitting on, the simple hut began to disclose a few of its layers of complexity. Others I wouldn’t encounter for several months yet, not until I’d begun to build it.

  “The building is basically a pair of bookshelves holding up a roof,” Charlie began, a catch of nervousness in his voice. “It’s about living between two substantial walls that hold everything you’re about—or at least, everything this building’s about—and which channel all the air and space and energy streaming through this site.” As Charlie had predicted it would, the facts of the site had determined key elements of the building’s design. Its directionality, for example, was “given to us” by the flow of space between the rock and the hedgerow. The rock itself had dictated a building of great strength, Charlie explained; a lightly framed shack or gazebo would have been overwhelmed by the boulder, which “wanted a very beefy, post-and-beamy companion.” Yet there were also a couple of elements in the design that promised to feel extremely light and open to nature. The roof was a membrane of cedar shingles thin and delicate enough to transmit the tap of rain, Charlie said, and the two end walls would virtually disappear when I opened the main windows.

  In plan, Charlie had indeed teased an entire building out of his original corner detail. Between the pairs of six-by-ten posts at either end of the rectangle ran foot-thick walls the length of the building; these were the bookshelves that held up the roof. Each of the short sides of the rectangle, the front and back, was dominated by a big, horizontal awning window that carried from post to post. These windows were hinged at the top to open inward; raised overhead and then hooked to a chain hanging down from the ridge beam, they would disappear into the ceiling, almost like garage doors. Across the front, or west wall of the building was the main part of the desk; directly opposite it, on the east wall, was the daybed, which hadn’t ended up on the thick wall after all. That’s because those walls had been interrupted by a pair of steps, which divided a lower work area in front from a smaller raised landing in back that accommodated the daybed and the entrance. In plan the steps divided the room into a square (the landing) and a rectangle that appeared to have Golden Section proportions; they also served to rhyme the floor of the building with the slope of the site.

  Judith joined us at the table, carefully settling her eighth-month frame into the chair across from Charlie; Isaac would be born a few weeks later. “So this is where my child is going to go to smoke pot in fifteen years,” she said, patting her belly. “No,” Charlie smiled, pointing to the daybed on the blueprint. “This is where he loses his virginity.” Neither prospect had ever occurred to me, but of course my building would outlive my intentions for it in all sorts of unforeseeable ways. It was going to be a thing in the world, not just an idea in my or Charlie’s head.

  Charlie walked us through the design. After stepping around the big rock, you would enter the building through a low door on the thick wall, arriving on the upper landing. To the left was the daybed, which would have a dropped ceiling above it finished in narrow strips of clear pine; the idea was to make this space somewhat more refined and intimate than the rest of the building, Charlie explained, a room within a room. Directly ahead as you entered would be a double casement window cut into the thick wall and obscured by a trellis smothered in vines.

  From the little landing, the space stepped down into the work area, following the grade of the ground below. Charlie pointed out that since the height of the ceiling stayed constant, as you come down the steps “you’re going to feel the space lift from your shoulders”—a slight shift in mood. The workspace was dominated by a deep L-shaped desk that ran across the entire front and along most of the north wall, where there would be a little casement window tucked right into the bookshelf at desk height and opening directly on the rock. This window would allow me to see anybody approaching without getting up from my desk. Charlie said he’d placed the big window down low over the desk so that the pond wouldn’t come completely into view until you stepped down into the work area. “And then, when you pop those two awning windows open, the front and back walls are basically going to vanish, leaving nothing but air post to post. It’s the top-down-on-the-convertible effect we talked about, the whole building trans
formed into a screened-in porch.”

  The thick walls would feel as strongly present as the thin ones would seem ephemeral, Charlie said. These were divided into five bays approximately thirty inches wide; three in the lower space, two above. Each bay was defined by what Charlie called a “fin wall,” a twelve-inch-deep section of plywood-faced wall jutting in perpendicularly from the building’s plywood sheathing. These dividers would run floor to ceiling, giving the walls their thickness and anchoring the bookshelves. Along with the rafters, the fin walls composed the building’s skeleton, which was entirely exposed. At the top of the wall each fin met a four-by-six rafter that carried the frame up to the spine and then continued down the other side, where it met another fin wall, almost as though the whole space were suspended within a wooden rib cage.

  In the cross-section drawings, you could see how the thick walls did most of the work of the building. Many of the bays were filled with bookshelves, but others held such things as the stove, a stack of logs, the desk, two of the windows, the door, a nook for my computer, and another for stationery and supplies. It looked like I could reach just about all these spaces from my desk chair—retrieve a book, feed the stove, crack a window. Charlie had given me the cockpit I’d asked for. The building was indeed boatlike, not only in its radical economy of space, but also in its ribbed frame and pronounced directionality.

  The front of the building looked fairly straightforward in elevation, though it too held layers it would take me awhile to appreciate. Two pairs of thick Douglas fir posts rose from rock bases on either side of a broad window that was divided into six square panes, three over three. The window was capped by a wooden visor, and above that a gable, which was pierced by a pair of tiny windows directly beneath the peak. These matched the windows under the peak of the main house, striking a slight family resemblance between the two buildings. To my eye the elevation made no obvious stylistic or historical reference, though with its clean geometry and strong frontality you would have to say it leaned closer to the classical than the Gothic. The front elevation gave an impression of being open (even without a front door), resolute, frank, and somewhat masculine—a fit companion for the boulder it would sit next to.

  Charlie said that drawing the elevation had been a struggle, that the double posts had given him a lot of trouble. A single post would have been easy to resolve, Charlie explained; simply run it up into the frame of the building, so that it turns into the gable’s first rafter. But how do you terminate an inside post? If it travels up into the gable, it looks like a mistake, “or some kind of Gothic stick-style reference.” The obvious solution would have been to cap the posts with some kind of capital, or a cornice running across the front of the building. “But that immediately says ‘Greek Revival’—makes the building seem like some postmodern temple plopped out here in the woods. I wanted to avoid those kinds of associations at all costs.”

  I asked him why that was so important.

  “Because I wanted this building to be it’s own person. If I’d used the Greek Revival solution, it would have been too literal, too referential. The building immediately becomes part of a specific discourse. You’d look at it and start thinking about Venturi, about postmodernism and irony. It’s also just too easy. Suddenly you no longer even have to look at the building—one glance at the Greek Revival sign on the front and you’ve got it, you’re done. That’s much too fast, too cerebral. I want you to experience this thing, not read it.”

  It was the wooden visor that had given Charlie a way to resolve his corner detail without falling into postmodern mannerism. “This little guy here does a lot for us,” he explained. As a practical matter, it meant I could leave the window open in the rain, and in the late afternoon it would keep the sun out of my eyes. In formal terms, it actually is a kind of cornice, since it runs across the base of the pediment and caps the double columns. But a visor is so emphatically casual that it immediately shrugs off any classical associations, defusing any hint of formality or pretension in the elevation. “If this thing’s a temple,” Charlie said, “it’s a temple that wears a baseball cap.”

  I recalled the notion of architectural propriety we’d discussed in Boston. Charlie had taken pains to make certain that the building not come off the least bit flashy, though often he seemed to have arrived at his simple effects by a very complicated route. My building may have been a primitive hut—a wooden rectangle of space defined by four corner posts and a gable roof—but it was a most sophisticated primitive hut, a considered object from the ground (where its “simple” rock footings disguised modern concrete piers) up to its peak, where the two inconspicuous windows peered out at the world, knowingly.

  “I took what you said to heart,” Charlie said at one point near the end of his presentation. “That your building should seem fairly straightforward outside, yet have a kind of density within. We certainly could have done something a lot zippier in elevation—the tower scheme, say. Or we could have put a metal roof on it instead of these cedar shingles. But how self-conscious do we want to say we are?” This seemed like a particularly telling way for Charlie to phrase his sense of propriety. It suggested that self-consciousness, and complexity and sophistication, are given, inescapable—this was, after all, a building designed in the last decade of the twentieth century, a “primitive hut” in the woods that will nevertheless house a computer and a modem and a fax machine, not to mention my own word-bound, hypertheoretical self.

  With only a few small modifications, this was the building I would set out to build a few months later. Charlie had managed to give me everything I had asked for without compromising the basic idea of a hut, and he had done so with an impressive economy, even a measure of poetry, and by using the most basic of materials: a frame of Douglas fir, plywood walls, a skin of cedar shingles. The building also promised, at least on paper, to suit its site as well as it suited me, to make a fit companion for that boulder. It appeared that Charlie had found a way to harmonize my wishes with the facts of this particular landscape.

  That evening, after Charlie had left for Boston, I reread the first letter I’d sent him, setting forth my many tangled wishes for the building. The desk, daybed, bookshelves, stove, sitting area, even the porch (or at least, a sense of “porchness”)—all the elements and patterns I’d specified were there. But instead of simply adding them up or stringing them together, Charlie had, like a boat builder, found intelligent ways to layer a great many different things into the confines of a single eight-by-thirteen-foot room. One pattern overlapped another, so that the thick walls were enlisted to help create the sense of an entrance transition, for example, and the desire to echo the topography was used to establish the two distinct spaces. Instead of adding a porch to the room, Charlie had found a way to turn the room into a porch.

  Rereading the letter, I realized he had achieved something much more difficult as well. My letter had articulated two completely contradictory images of the building: as a safe and wintry refuge on the one hand and, on the other, as a room that would throw itself open to the landscape. In Christopher Alexander’s terms, these were the conflicting forces at work in my dream for the hut: the simultaneous desire for enclosure and freedom. Charlie had invented, or discovered, a form that promised to bring these two impulses into some kind of balance. Two thick walls holding up a thin roof: this was the pattern, more or less. And this pattern had been there almost from the beginning. Because there it was, right on the cover of Charlie’s book of images, the design that had annoyed me with its obscurity and which now seemed clear as day:

  Using little more than this pair of thick walls, opened to the landscape on either end, Charlie had found a way to animate the space in the hut and grant his client’s warring wishes for an equally strong sense of refuge and prospect.

  On paper, at least. Because right now, any talk about the experience of space in my hut was idle, a matter of hunch and speculation. There was no way I could be sure Charlie’s design worked the way he said it d
id without actually building it and moving in. This might not have been the case had Charlie designed a more conceptual or literary building—a hut built chiefly out of words or critical theories or signs, the kind that, once worked out on paper, is as good as built (if not better). Just think, this whole project would have been done now, everything but the explanatory texts. I could have slipped back into the warm tub of commentary, and never have had to learn how to cut a bird’s mouth in a rafter or drill a half-inch hole through a boulder in order to pin it to a concrete pier. But no such luck. This particular building was meant to be experienced, not read. Only part of its story can be told on paper; the rest of it would be in wood.

  CHAPTER 4

  Footings

  How to get your building down to the ground, the task that now confronted me, has always been a big issue for architects and builders, not only from an engineering perspective—the foundation being the place where a building is most vulnerable to the elements—but philosophically too.

  This is perhaps especially true in America. Our architects seem to have devoted an inordinate amount of attention to the relationship of their buildings to the ground—which makes sense, in light of the fact that Americans have always believed, with varying degrees of conviction, that ours is somehow sacred ground, a promised land. The Puritans used to call the New World landscape “God’s second book,” and in the nineteenth century it became the preferred volume of the transcendentalists, who read the land for revelation and moral instruction. It is at any rate the ground of our freedom and, given our varied racial and ethnic composition, the one great thing we hold in common—the thing that makes us all Americans. So it matters how our buildings sit on this ground.

  This might explain why, when you compare a great American house such as Monticello to the Palladian models on which it was based, the overriding impression is that Jefferson has put his house on much more sympathetic terms with the ground. Where Palladio’s blocky, classical villas stand somewhat aloof from the earth, Monticello stretches out comfortably over its mountaintop site as if to complete, rather than dominate, it. The horizontal inflection that Jefferson gave to Monticello—this sense that a building should unfold along the ground—proved to be prophetic, for it eventually became one of the hallmarks of American architecture. It finds expression in the floor plans of turn-of-the-century shingle-style houses, which ramble almost like miniature landscapes in imitation of the ground on which they sit, and even in the ground-hugging ranch houses of postwar suburbia.