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

by Michael Pollan

  LIGHT

  While I was putting the finishing touches on my own first-person house, a local electrician by the name of Fred Hammond had been busy rigging up its electrical and telephone lines—the last significant hurdle before I could move in. It was one hurdle I decided it would be the better part of valor (Joe’s valor, that is: I’d never claimed wiring the building ourselves would be a “piece a cake”) to leave to a licensed professional. Given my extensive personal history of physical mishap (I’ve been bitten in the face by a seagull, and once broke my nose falling out of bed), remaining alive and intact for the duration of this project was never something I took for granted, and having avoided serious injury to this point—fingers and toes still coming in at ten and ten—I wasn’t about to start fooling around now with volts and amps and alternating current, an alien realm to which my customary haste and reliance on trial and error seemed especially ill-suited.

  Fred and his partner Larry happen to be brilliant electricians, but even so my little writing house managed to tax their skill and patience. “This is not normal construction,” Fred declared each time he missed a deadline and tossed another cost-estimate out the window. What he meant was that there were no sheetrocked walls or dropped ceilings behind which he could easily run, and hide, his wires. For the same reason, Charlie and I had both resigned ourselves to exposed wires or conduit. But Fred ultimately came up with a much more elegant solution, though it proved to be difficult and time-consuming to execute. The solution involved Fred, the smaller of the two electricians, spending a great many hours stuffed into the eighteen-inch crawl space beneath my building, blindly snaking wires up from there through the closed-in fin walls and bitching lustily the whole time. I give him credit for a masterful wiring job, but if I ever summon the courage to follow Thoreau’s example and actually tote up what this house cost me to build, I expect Fred’s bill will help push the total into the zone of serious folly. (I’m guessing I spent somewhere in excess of $125 a square foot—for an uninsulated, unplumbed outbuilding, on which half of the construction labor was free.) Fred’s complaint—“not normal construction”—could serve very nicely as a legend inscribed over my building’s door.

  The electricians finished up on a gray and chilly day in November, metallic as only that month can make them, and when Fred and Larry drove off I was elated to have the building to myself again, no more wire snakes, outlet boxes, or complaints to dance around. Now I had light and something that could pass for heat. Joe, whose hand had just about recovered, was due back in a few days to help me hook up the stove; to Charlie’s disappointment, I’d opted for kerosene instead of wood, going with a sophisticated little Japanese unit with a microchip that would see to it that the building was toasty by the time I arrived for work in the morning. For the time being, I had a couple of space heaters I could plug in, and so begin to get settled, sort of. All along I’d figured there’d come this one red-letter day when the building would be finished, but now I could see it wasn’t ever going to be as definitive or ceremonial as all that, no bottle of champagne smashed across the bow. The way things were going, there’d probably be maintenance jobs to start in on before the punch list was completely punched. So I decided I might as well just move in the day after the day Fred and Larry moved out.

  I spent what little remained of that afternoon cleaning up inside, sweeping out snips of wire, nails, and sawdust. As I was finishing up, Judith and Isaac paid me a visit, giving me a chance to show off my new lights. Isaac, who’d been an infant when we poured the footings, was a boy now, two and a half years old and able to make the trek out here on his own power. He had brought along a toy tugboat and a copy of Pat the Bunny, and before he and Judith headed back to the house, he placed the boat and the book on an empty shelf and took Judith’s hand to go. I couldn’t tell if Isaac meant the items as a housewarming present or as a way to mark the new space as his own, give him a reason to return.

  As darkness came on, I hauled a couple boxes of my books out from the barn and shelved them; book by book, the walls thickened and the room grew warmer. I got in a few trips before nightfall, and on the last, with two crates balanced under my chin, I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the hill to have a look at the writing house, lit up for the first time. It was not a terribly hospitable evening, moonless and blowing fitfully, the leaves recently flown from the trees, and my building seemed a welcome addition to the landscape—this warm-looking, wide-awake envelope of light set down in the middle of the darkening woods. It looked like some kind of a lantern, spilling a woody glow from all four sides. The building seemed to order the shadowy rocks and trees all around it, to wrest a bright space of habitation from the old, indifferent darkness.

  I don’t want this to sound like some kind of vision, because though my building might have started out that way, a dreamy notion I’d once had, it was more literal than that now. Not just some metaphor or dream, the building I saw in front of me was a new and luminous fact. A new fact in this world, that was plain enough, but also a new fact in my life. That I had dreamt it and then had a hand in making it a fact was more gratifying than I can say, but now I was looking past that, or trying to, wondering, pointlessly perhaps, about how this building I’d helped to shape might come in time to shape me, where the two of us might be headed. Since the day Joe and I got it all closed in the building had reminded me of a wheelhouse, and now that it stood there all lit up on the wide night, a bright windshield gazing out from beneath its visor at some prospect up ahead, it certainly looked to be journeying somewhere.

  But now I was dreaming.

  I don’t think there is a lighted house in the woods anywhere in this world that doesn’t hint at a person inside and a story unfolding, and so, it seemed, did mine. As I walked with my crates up the hill toward my cabinet of light, the person that it hinted at was surely recognizable as me, or at least that part of me this room had been built to house. So this was the house for the self that stood a little apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the woods with one’s thoughts, in a place of one’s own, of one’s own making. As for the story that this house hinted at, the first part of it you know already, the part about its making; the next wouldn’t begin until tomorrow, on move-in day, a morning that from here held the bright promise of all beginnings, of departure, of once upon a time.

  Sources

  This book is the story of an education, and I had many teachers in addition to Charles Myer and Joe Benney. William Cronon gave me a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin that was eye-opening. James Evangelisti at Craftsman Woodshops taught me a great deal about wood and woodworking. Everyone at Northwest Lumber was consistently helpful and patient in answering my questions about materials, no matter how ignorant.

  And then there were all the books, dozens of which were recommended, and lent to me, by Charlie. Listed below, by chapter, are the principal works referred to in the text, as well as others that influenced my thinking and building.

  Chapter 1: A Room of One’s Own

  Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

  Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).

  Walker, Lester. Tiny Houses (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1987).

  Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest, 1989).

  Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Natural House (New York: Meridian Books, 1954).

  Chapter 2: The Site

  For Lewis Mumford’s discussion of the siting of houses in America, see Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York: Dover, 1972).

  There’s an excellent summary of picturesque landscape theory in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, by James Ackerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Also useful are William Howard Adams’s Nature Perfected: Gardens Thr
ough History (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991) and The Poetics of Gardens by Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).

  My information on fêng shui comes mainly from The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui by Stephen Skinner (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) and The Feng-Shui Handbook by Derek Walters (London: HarperCollins, 1991). I also profited from an interview with William Spear, a fêng shui doctor and the author of Feng Shui Made Easy (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995).

  For further reading on environmental psychology and landscape aesthetics, see:

  Appleton, Jay. The Symbolism of Habitat (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).

  Kellert, Stephen R., and E. O. Wilson. The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).

  Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

  Wilson, E. O. Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  Chapter 3: On Paper

  All of Christopher Alexander’s books are worth reading, but the best known and most useful to the builder are:

  Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

  ——. The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  The awards issue of Progressive Architecture I describe is January 1992.

  The classic account of the primitive hut myth in architecture is Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).

  Also see the essay on Marc-Antoine Laugier (don’t miss the plates) in Anthony Vidler’s The Writing on the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987) and Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Hermann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977).

  Any exploration of postmodern “literary” architecture must begin with Venturi’s two groundbreaking manifestos, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966) and, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).

  For an introduction to the architecture and writing of Peter Eisenman see Re: Working Eisenman (London: Academy Editions, 1993). Be sure to read his correspondence with Jacques Derrida. You can also find his writings in almost any issue of ANY: Architecture New York, a bimonthly broadsheet journal published out of his office and edited by his wife.

  Sophisticated critiques of the “linguistic turn” in architecture are hard to come by. I found these three persuasive and useful:

  Benedikt, Michael. Deconstructing the Kimbell: An Essay on Meaning and Architecture (New York: SITES/Lumen Books, 1991).

  ——. For an Architecture of Reality (New York: Lumen Books, 1987).

  Shepheard, Paul. What Is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

  Chapter 4: Footings

  The best writing about the importance of the ground, and the horizontal, in American architecture is by the architectural historian Vincent Scully. See American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969); Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and The Shingle Style and the Stick Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). See also the discussion of Walden and Fallingwater in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  Wright’s own comments on the ground are drawn from The Natural House (op. cit., Chapter 1) and The Future of Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1953).

  There’s a useful discussion of foundations and wood in A Good House by Richard Manning (New York: Grove Press, 1993) and a great riff on concrete by Peter Schjeldahl, “Hard Truths About Concrete,” in the October 1993 Harper’s Magazine. Mark Wigley offers a close reading of architectural metaphors in Western philosophy in The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

  Chapter 5: Framing

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s discussion of the origins of architecture and the role of trees is in The Future of Architecture (op. cit., Chapter 4).

  My account of the origins of balloon framing and its environmental significance draws on William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). For the social history of timber framing in America (including the evergreen ritual) I relied on John Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Everyone who writes on the social meaning of building methods in America owes a large debt to the essays of the late J. B. Jackson. See The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1980) and Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

  Hannah Arendt’s account of homo faber, and the distinctions between work and labor, appear in The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

  For a wonderful discussion of shame and sacrifice rituals, see Frederick Turner’s The Culture of Hope (New York: Free Press, 1995).

  Chapter 6: The Roof

  As much of this chapter took place in the library as up on the roof. Here’s a partial list of my readings on roofness and architectural theory:

  Alexander, Christopher, and Peter Eisenman. “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony: A Debate” in Lotus International (1983). This is the text of a fascinating, and heated, public debate held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

  Argyros, Alexander J. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

  Benedikt, Michael. Deconstructing the Kimbell and For an Architecture of Reality (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  ——, ed. “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information,” a special issue of Center: A Journal for Architecture in America (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

  Bloomer, Kent C., and Charles W. Moore. Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

  Cronon, William. “Inconstant Unity: The Passion of Frank Lloyd Wright,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect, Terence Riley, ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994).

  Crowe, Norman. Nature and the Idea of a Man-Made World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

  Eisenman, Peter. Re: Working Eisenman (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  Ford, Edward R. The Details of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

  ——. The Details of Modern Architecture, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

  Frampton, Kenneth. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

  Frank, Suzanne. Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994).

  Hildebrand, Grant. The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991).

  Jackson, J. B. Landscapes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). His description of Grand Central Station is on page 83.

  Kahn, Louis. Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979).

  Lyndon, Donlyn, and Charles W. Moore. Chambers for a Memory Palace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

  Norberg-Schultz, Christian. Architecture: Meaning and Place (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

  ——. Genius Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).

  ——. New World Architecture (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 1988).

  Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. Experiencing Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1959).

  Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987).

  Rykwert, Joseph. On Adam’s House in Paradise (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  Schwartz, Frederic, ed. Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill (New York
: Rizzoli, 1992).

  Scully, Vincent. The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge (New York: George Braziller, 1974). His discussion of the taboo against pitched roofs appears on page 15.

  Shepheard, Paul. What Is Architecture? (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  ——. Iconography and Electronics: Upon a Generic Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

  Vidler, Anthony. The Writing of the Walls (op. cit., Chapter 3).

  ——. The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

  Vitruvius. The Ten Books of Architecture, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960). His description of architectural evolution appears in “Origin of the Dwelling House,” pages 38–41.

  Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (op. cit., Chapter 4).

  See also The Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau Design and Application Manual (Farmingdale, New York).

  Chapter 7: Windows

  On the history of the idea of transparency in the West, I relied on Richard Sennett’s The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). Also helpful on the subject of glass in architecture were Robert Hughes, in his terrific chapter on modern architecture in The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), and Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969). See also John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: BBC & Penguin, 1972) and Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).