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

by Michael Pollan

  “And have you actually seen this house?” Charlie demanded to know when I told him the story. He was in town checking on another job, and had stopped by at the end of the day to go over a couple of problems that had cropped up in the plans. Joe and I’d been giving him a hard time about the eight-one walls and the in-swinging windows, the full scope of whose difficulty—their radical customness—having just sailed into view. The day before, I’d taken Charlie’s drawings to a millworker who’d informed me that not only would the windows as drawn cost several thousand dollars to fabricate, but that he couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t leak. I intended to get around to this before Charlie left town.

  “Because my guess is that this Mister Eight-Oh of yours lives in one god-awful box. Oh sure, nobody actually needs an architect, if all you want is shelter, a dry box to work in. But you wanted something more.”

  True enough, but surely architecture doesn’t require eight-one walls.

  “Actually, I would argue that sometimes it does.” Charlie was clearly ready for us this time, and in no mood to let a pair of cranky weekend carpenters trash his profession. Charlie had come from a meeting on a new job he’d landed nearby; he was wearing his country-client attire, a graph-paper-checked shirt, chinos, and a sweater vest that together managed deftly to say to the client: informal yet billable. (Thankfully Charlie had taken my own job off the clock several months earlier, after I’d made some noises about the magnitude of the initial design fees.)

  Charlie reached into the rank of pens lining his breast pocket. Taking a black Expresso Bold to our smeary copy of the blueprint, he proceeded to demonstrate how he’d arrived at the eight-one dimension, a complex puzzle revolving around the need to keep both the height of the door and the building’s distance from the ground at a bare minimum. “One inch less in that wall and the doorjamb on the landing would be grazing your head. I suppose I could have raised the lower floor an inch, like so, but then the front elevation starts to float—not good. And when I start adding inches to the height of the wall, entering the building isn’t nearly so nice—you lose that neat transition from low, tight doorway into big space. Way too ordinary.” It was reassuring to know that eight-one hadn’t been an oversight. But I didn’t buy that raising the floor one inch would have ruined the elevation.

  “And by the way,” Charlie continued, hoisting his bushy eyebrows over an expression of mock injury, “the term ‘custom’ is a much friendlier way to describe what I do than this rude ‘eight-one’ business.”

  Charlie’s disdain for the “way too ordinary” reminded me of a definition Le Corbusier had once proposed for architecture. Architecture, Le Corbusier had declared, is when the windows are either too big or too small, but never the “right” size. For when the window is the right size, the building is…just a building. Viewed from one perspective, Le Corbusier’s dictum is as succinct a confession of artistic arrogance as you could ask for, implying as it did that originality, if not eccentricity, was an end in itself. Architecture as the wrong-size window is precisely what had sent Mister Eight-Oh around the bend—and what made his radically stock response seem at least partly sane.

  And yet, as Charlie was suggesting, where would you rather spend the afternoon? In the Villa Savoye, or Mr. Eight-Oh’s House of the Standard Dimensions? “Any building that’s trying not just to give shelter but to move us—to raise our spirits—is bound to break with our expectations in all sorts of ways,” Charlie said. “Sometimes you have to italicize a door or a window in order to make people see it freshly, and that might very well mean making it ‘too big’ or ‘too small.’ The fact is, your Mister Eight-Oh may have saved himself some trouble and some dough, but he’s missing out on the soul of a good building.”

  Joe now tried to reel the conversation back down to earth, where he hoped to pick up some needed information and then with any luck call it a day.

  “I hear what you’re saying about seeing things fresh, Charlie. But there are a couple things in these drawings of yours we can’t see at all—like the framing for this little rock window here. Sometimes Mike forgets to rub the lemon juice on these things and we can’t read the invisible ink.”

  “Hey. Mike here knows all about invisible ink—that’s what he signs his checks with. But I hear you. I’ll fax you an S-K on that tomorrow.” “S-K” is architect talk for “sketch,” which seems a rather dubious abbreviation when you realize it actually takes longer to pronounce than the word it purports to crop. Evidently a certain amount of opaque insider talk is a professional imperative; indeed, without an inside and an outside you probably don’t have a profession.

  All this backing and forthing was really just a warm-up for the talk we needed to have about the windows, the biggest eight-one of them all. All told there were eight of them, in five distinct types (the two big in-swinging awnings at either end of the building; one single-sash casement that swung out on the north wall overlooking the rock; one double-sash in-swinging French casement on the south wall, and then the two fixed and two operable windows in the peak)—all in a building not a whole lot bigger than a minivan. According to the lumberyard, only one of them—the out-swinging casement that would overlook the rock—was a stock item; the rest were as custom as custom gets. I told Charlie that the first millworker I’d taken them to, a giant, dour Swede named Tude Tanguay, had taken one look at the drawing of the awning window and pronounced it worthless. Tude guessed it might be possible to design an in-swinging window that didn’t let in the rain, but he was sure of one thing: This wasn’t that. “Architects,” Tude had growled, adopting the tone of voice other people reserve for the words “termites” or “telemarketers.” “Fellow who drew this doesn’t even show a drip edge,” he pointed out, pushing the blueprint aside. “Get me a better detail, then we’ll talk.”

  Charlie acknowledged he needed to come up with a system to prevent water from seeping under the sash and promised to get me a sketch right away. Very gingerly, I asked him if maybe we shouldn’t reconsider the whole approach. Couldn’t we find stock windows that would give us at least part of what we wanted, for a lot less money and with some assurance they wouldn’t leak? But Charlie felt strongly that the windows were the wrong place to compromise.

  “These in-swinging awning windows are absolutely key to the scheme. Remember, the whole idea here was to make the end walls vanish in summer—to turn your building into a porch. I don’t know of any better way to do that than with these windows.” He proceeded to tick off each of the stock solutions he’d considered—double-hungs, casements, and ordinary awnings—and explain why none would give us the effect we were looking for. In every case, the open window would leave a frame of mullions or visible sash instead of landscape wall to wall.

  “These windows are your building’s face, Mike, your face and your frame. They set up the whole relationship between inside and outside, between the guy sitting in that chair and the landscape. To use stock windows here would be like buying those cheapo reading glasses they sell off the rack at Woolworth’s. Maybe they do the job, I don’t know. But you can’t say it’s the same thing as having your own prescription. That’s what these are: prescription windows.”

  Joe was rolling his eyes. As he listened to Charlie talk, he’d been peeling off one layer of outerwear after another, getting ready to head home, and he’d stopped at a frayed black T-shirt with purple lettering across the chest that said, “What part of NO don’t you understand?” This was right up there in Joe’s collection of heavy-metal hostile-wear with his UZI DOES IT T-shirt. I told Charlie to fax me a detail for the windows. We’d see if we couldn’t figure out a way to make them work.

  The problem with in-swinging windows, the reason you don’t often see them in this world, is best understood by comparing two drawings:

  In a conventional out-swinging window (the one on the left), the stop against which the sash rests also serves as a weather barrier, effectively returning any water that seeps under the bottom edge of the sash back d
own the sill and away from the building. (The same holds true in a common double-hung window.) But when the window sash opens inward, which it can’t do unless the stop is to its outside, a certain amount of the rainwater that runs down the pane will find its way between the sash and the stop, and from there into the room. This is by no means a simple problem to solve. There is a very good reason for most windows to open outward; given the predictable behavior of water when presented with opportunities to infiltrate a building, a sash that swings out is the easiest and most natural solution, the fenestral equivalent of a pitched roof. Which is not to say the convention cannot be successfully defied, only that doing so will demand a more elaborate technology, and perhaps a greater degree of imagination on the part of its designer. It would help, for example, for the designer of such a window to be able to think like water, in the words of an old gardener I once knew.

  When a few days later I received Charlie’s window detail, I wasn’t at all sure he had solved the problem. Basically what Charlie had come up with was a rubber gasket to close off the gap between sash and stop, as follows:

  Thinking like water, I could easily imagine working my way down as far as that gasket, where it seemed to me I would be apt to linger and eventually do some damage to the surrounding wood, or maybe freeze and thaw enough times to crack the rubber gasket and then find my way indoors.

  But what did I know? I wasn’t an architect, and I was only maybe half a carpenter, if that.

  So I took Charlie’s detail back to Tude Tanguay, whom I found up in the woods behind his shop, slicing oak trunks into logs with a chain saw so easily they might have been baguettes. It was a threatening December morning, and the chill in the air was raw, arthritic. The big man had a black watch cap pulled down over his ears, and his Honest Abe half-beard was fringed with ice crystals. I felt like I was delivering a piece of unsolicited mail to Paul Bunyan. The detail was useless, Tude declared after a cursory glance at the paper, and for more or less the reasons I’d suspected. Yet whatever satisfaction I might have taken in being right was overshadowed by the grim realization that my architect seemed to know rather less about designing a weatherproof window than I did: a quite serious problem. I asked Tude if he had any suggestions.

  “Not off the top,” he said, gunning his chain saw. “Let me think on it, get back to you.”

  Sure.

  I had much better luck with the next woodworker I tried, a fellow by the name of Jim Evangelisti, who worked out of a shop across the street from a local lumberyard. Evangelisti’s shop was in a tall-gabled, board-and-batten building in a neo-Gothic style I associate with rural hippies from the 1970s (Charlie would have called it a “woody goody”)—vaguely churchlike, with a soaring wall of divided-light sash in front and a hand-lettered sign above the door that said CRAFTSMAN WOODSHOPS. Jim was fortyish, sandy haired and compact. He had the sort of high-strung, slightly squirrelly demeanor I associate with cabinetmakers, along with the usual complement of smashed-up fingers. It hurt mine just to look at them.

  It was a couple of weeks before Christmas when I dropped by with my drawings, and Jim was doing some pro bono work on the Christmas display for Main Street, drilling holes for lights in a plywood Santa, a mentholated cigarette clamped between his teeth. I didn’t get the feeling there was a backlog of work in-house; Jim showed considerably more interest in my project than Tude Tanguay had, though he was precisely as flattering as Tude had been about Charlie’s window detail.

  “Well this isn’t going to do us any good,” he said, flicking his fingers loudly against Charlie’s page. “You’ll have standing water on that stop, and he’s put his gasket way too far down—you can’t have water collecting there. You should also know right now I don’t make sash the way he’s showing it, with stops to hold the panes. I mount the glass with putty, same way it’s been done in New England for three hundred years at least.” Then he lit up another Kool and waved Charlie’s drawing at me. “You know what I call these?”

  “Let me guess…”

  “Cartoons.”

  But when I asked him if he had a better idea, he actually did…sort of. Jim said that Greene and Greene, the California architects who specialized in bungalow-style houses around the turn of the century, had built the only successful in-swinging casement windows he had ever seen. It seems that Jim had worked on the renovation of a Greene and Greene house in Berkeley after he got out of college in the mid-seventies. He couldn’t remember exactly how the casements worked, only that they’d had an unusually steep sill and some sort of drip edge. “But most of the Greene and Greene drawings are at Columbia University. Maybe you could find a detail.”

  We agreed I would look for one, while Jim worked up a price. But I hesitated. My confidence in Charlie’s window scheme was dwindling, and I was seriously considering bailing out on it, sacrificing what might well be a set of brilliant ideas to the legitimate demands of practicality. Though really, how brilliant was any architectural idea that so blithely defied the facts, the exigencies of construction and weather, which is to say the world we live in? It seemed to me Charlie had really dropped the ball on this one, that he had designed me the equivalent of a modernist leaky roof, an interesting but unworkable conceit. I was going to wind up like one of those quietly fuming clients of modern architecture who, when they dare complain to the master about the back-breaking chair or the drip on their heads, are forced to endure one of those delightful, one-eye-on-the-biographer quips about buckets and genius. (“This is what happens,” sighed one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s clients, resigned to her leaking house, “when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”) The willingness of people in this century to suffer on behalf of art (and someone else’s art, at that) may have been a precondition for the rise of modern architecture, but it wasn’t something I wanted any part of.

  And yet…there was the promise of those prescription windows. Every window is an interpretation of a landscape, and the variety and inventiveness of Charlie’s fenestration, so specific to the site and circumstance (so custom, in the very best sense), was one of the most exciting parts of his design. What a sweet idea, to turn the writing house into a porch for the summer; Charlie’s metaphor of putting the top down on the convertible had stayed with me. Windows that opened in would also, I imagined, admit the landscape to the building, usher in that cascade of space, of chi, that had attracted me to the site in the first place. And I particularly liked the idea of the windows on each of the thick walls with their extreme close-up views: the hump of gray-green rock on my right and the tangled, fragrant, light-filtering vine on the south side, both shelved right there alongside my books.

  So, sure, I was taken with the romance of these windows—this novel pair of glasses, eight lenses custom-ground. And yet every whisper of that tiny, hissing, deflationary word—“leak”—put my head in a mind to overrule my heart’s desire.

  I couldn’t decide the question one way or the other for more than a minute at a time, so I figured I might as well pay a visit to Avery Library at Columbia, check out Jim’s tip. If I found a Greene and Greene window detail that looked like it might work, fine; if not, I would insist that Charlie redesign the windows. Over the phone, the librarian at the archive confirmed that they did indeed have a sizable collection of original Greene and Greene drawings—several thousand of them, in fact. I couldn’t decide whether this was good news or not; I certainly wasn’t about to spend a week chasing down the drip edge Charlie had dropped. The librarian didn’t know anything about window details per se (why would she?), but said that all the drawings had recently been put on a CD-ROM, which meant I could flip through them pretty quickly. I made an appointment for the following morning.

  The resolution of the images on the CD-ROM was too poor for me to discern whether any given window opened in or out, but it allowed me to narrow my search to a series of houses with promising-looking casements. The librarian pulled my selections from the file drawers, spreading the delicate buff pencil drawings on a table w
hile reciting the archive’s rules: no photocopying, no tracing, no ballpoint pens or ink markers on the table. Great. The last best hope for my windows, if not for the integrity of my building’s design, rested on my skill as a freehand draftsman, which was exactly nil.

  I washed my hands and started going through the drawings. Most of the houses pictured were elaborately timbered bungalows with a great many shallow gables piled one on top of the other in a manner reminiscent of Japanese architecture. You could see why a cabinetmaker who called his business the Craftsman Woodshops would respond to this work: the Greenes’ designs owed a lot to the Arts and Crafts movement, sharing its emphasis on traditional craftsmanship in wood. With their exposed structures and hand-worked finishes, many of the houses look like celebrations of the very possibilities of wood and the art of joinery; they exhibited in their design and finishes a kind of transparency to the craftsmanship that made them. Coming at a time when such craftsmanship was under attack from the factory system, such an aesthetic had a strong moral cast, made a last-gasp protest against the machine age and an assertion of the dignity of work. It is a message that still seems to speak to many carpenters today (and not only to them).

  By the end of the morning, I had found what I was looking for: an ingenious construction detail for an in-swinging casement window on a house in Pasadena. I kept going, and began to find variations on the same idea over and over again, in one house after another. The window must have worked, I reasoned, or else the Greenes would have tried some radically different tack or given up on the in-swing altogether. So I copied the window detail into my notebook as carefully as I could, checking it once and then again to make sure I’d left nothing important out (assuming of course that I knew what important looked like).