A Place of My Own

by Michael Pollan

  Sentiments of this kind, abetted by improvements in glassmaking, led to a dramatic increase in the size of windowpanes and sash over the course of the eighteenth century. The floor-to-ceiling casements known as French windows, which first appeared at Versailles in the 1680s, became popular on both sides of the Atlantic during this period (Jefferson installed several of them at Monticello), as did the gigantic double-hung windows that the Dutch invented around the same time to light the interiors of their long, narrow homes. Muntin bars were still commonly used in windows, but for a new purpose: They helped distribute the weight of the panes, thereby making it possible to build much larger windows. Beyond providing air and light, windows now admitted the landscape to the interior of a house.

  A line of historical descent can be drawn from the Enlightenment window to the modernist glass wall, and Sennett draws a convincing one, passing through the great Victorian green-houses—the first vast spaces to be enclosed in glass, creating the novel sensation of being at once indoors and outdoors—on its way to the Bauhaus’s curtain walls and the glass houses built by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. But it seems to me this line of historical development spent at least part of the nineteenth century in America, passing close by Concord, where Emerson was imagining himself a “transparent eyeball” in Nature, and Walden Pond, where Henry Thoreau was giving voice to the dream of a transparent habitation.

  The fenestration of Thoreau’s own cabin was nothing special: the sole double-hung window that punctuated the long wall where he kept his writing table probably did little to relieve the interior gloom of the house at Walden. But Thoreau’s imaginary architecture was way out ahead of what he actually managed to build, and it proved by far the more influential. You’ll recall how he waited until the latest possible moment that first fall to plaster his cabin walls, so much did he enjoy the transit of breezes through his building’s frame, “so slightly clad.” Sworn enemy of walls and bounds and frames of any kind, he declared that his favorite “room” at Walden was the pine wood outside his door, swept clean by that “priceless domestic,” the wind. In a memorable passage, he described cleaning day at Walden, when he moved his writing table and all his household effects outside on the grass, turning his house inside out. “It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,” he wrote, “and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house.”

  Thoreau’s dream of a house utterly transparent to nature, one in which the usual distinctions between indoors and out have been erased, is a beguiling one, and no doubt lies somewhere in back of my wish for a building that could be turned into a porch any time summer afforded me a benign enough afternoon. It probably lies behind Philip Johnson’s glass house too, whose transparency does not so much destroy all sense of enclosure as extend it to the tree line outside, which becomes the house’s true walls.

  In the twentieth century, the ideal of transparency became closely bound up with the whole utopian project of modernism, and it embraced a great deal more than nature. Modernist architecture sought, too, a transparency of construction (hence no trim) and function (no ornament) and space (no interior walls). Since transparency implied truthfulness and freedom, and opacity suggested deception, it was perhaps inevitable that glass would emerge as the supreme modernist material—though “material” is perhaps too stingy and earthbound a word for everything that glass represented in the modernist imagination. Far from being a mere building material, plate glass offered nothing less than the means for building a new man and a new society, one in which transparency would break down once and for all the barriers that divide us one from another, as well as from nature. Seemingly the most modern and least haunted of materials, glass promised to deliver humanity from the burden of its past and equip it for a shining future.

  In 1914 a German engineer and science fiction writer named Paul Scheerbart extolled the millennial promise of glass in a rhapsodic manifesto:

  We mostly inhabit closed spaces. These form the milieu from which our culture develops…. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher plane, so must we willy-nilly change our architecture. And that will be possible only when we remove the sense of enclosure from the spaces where we live. And this we will only achieve by introducing Glass Architecture.

  Scheerbart went on to predict that the word Fenster was about to vanish from the dictionary, as windows gave way to glass walls.

  The artists and architects of the Bauhaus took this man for a prophet. Even the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, a fervent admirer, championed the glass cause, declaring that “to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.” The absolute exposure guaranteed by glass would purge society of its ills like a cleansing blast of light and fresh air. Some went so far as to claim that glass architecture heralded the end of war, on the theory that people in glass houses would know better than to throw stones (a transparent-enough idea, anyway). For a time, glass was invested with the sort of mystical significance and magical possibility that for most of history has swirled around gold.

  It was structural steel that made glass architecture something more than the dream of socialists and science fiction writers. Since the birth of architecture, the size of windows—and especially their horizontal extent—has been constrained by the load-bearing function of the wall; many of the great innovations in architecture—such as the Gothic arch and the flying buttress—have had as their aim the freeing of walls so that they might hold bigger windows. If the history of architecture truly was, as Le Corbusier wrote, “the struggle for the window,” then with the invention of structural steel, that struggle was won. No longer needed to support the weight of the floors, walls could now hold vast horizontal expanses of undivided plate glass. (Needless to say, the muntin bar—being no longer functional, and hopelessly old-fashioned—didn’t stand a chance with the modernists.) With a further assist from the elevator (glass walls being easier to live with high up in the sky) and the air conditioner, glass architecture now leapt off the drafting table.

  But in practice glass architecture was full of unexpected and not altogether pleasant ironies, some of which undoubtedly prepared the way for the return of the muntin and the traditional window. As anyone who’s spent any time behind the curtain wall of an office building could tell you, plate glass was discomfiting in ways the theories hadn’t anticipated. One felt exposed and vulnerable behind a wall of glass. Some claimed this was a vestigial, bourgeois sentiment that people would eventually outgrow, as “moral exhibitionism” caught on. But there was another problem. Instead of connecting people to what lies beyond it, plate glass seemed to do the very opposite, to evoke a sense of alienation. The glass wall had an unexpected way of distancing you from the world on the other side, from “the view.”

  The exigencies of glass construction were partly to blame: glass walls, and even the “picture windows” that soon emerged as the glass architecture of the common man, had to be extra-thick for strength and double- or triple-glazed for insulation. Since such “windows” were obviously too large and heavy to be opened, the practical effect of glass architecture, as Sennett points out, was to achieve a transparency that was strictly visual. Not that this troubled the modernists, many of whom belonged to a long tradition in the West of favoring the eye over the other senses. The eye, Le Corbusier had declared, was “the master of ceremonies” in architecture; sometimes in his sketches he would draw an eyeball as a stand-in for the occupant of a house. Yet without the additional information provided by the senses of smell and touch and hearing, the world as perceived through a plate of glass can seem profoundly, and disconcertingly, inaccessible. More so, even, than the world beyond a wall of wood or stone, perhaps because the transparency promised by glass arouses sensory expectations that the material can’t fulfill.

  At street level too, plate glass proved unexpectedly alienating, inside as well as o
ut. During the day, the glass building was scarcely transparent at all, and its reflectivity often made it an aloof and ghostly presence on the street. Faceless, cold, it seemed constitutionally incapable of making any connection with its surroundings, except to mirror them, mutely.

  The wall of glass itself created a powerful social barrier that its champions had failed to foresee; to the extent that glass facilitated a “moral exhibitionism,” this was not a pretty or uplifting sight to behold. There are avenues in midtown Manhattan—Park in the Fifties, say, or Madison in the Sixties and Seventies—lined with posh shops and banks and galleries where the wall of plate glass at street level serves to isolate those well heeled enough to be buzzed in as effectively as a castle moat. There is one particular block in the Fifties on Sixth Avenue, the Manhattan thoroughfare that gave itself most wholeheartedly to modernism, where a homeless woman can gaze up and watch a famous magazine publisher making deals behind the glass wall of his second-story corner office: there’s the phone pressed to the ear, the hand gestures, the suit jacket draped over the arm of the sofa. The only reason I know about this homeless woman is that I was once inside this particular office, and briefly caught her eye, across the gulf of glass. It was a connection, I suppose, but not the kind that the modernists had prophesied.

  If plate glass in the city tended to underscore the distances between people, in the suburbs and the countryside its effects were less brutal but no more socially constructive. In the suburbs the picture window, in search of a suitably picturesque view, tended to turn the attention of the houses away from the street, where the front porch had fixed it, and back toward the landscape. Magazines such as House Beautiful published articles on how to avoid the “fishbowl effect” of picture windows by planting hedges out front or restricting them to the backyard; either way, the large expanses of undivided glass tended to avert one’s gaze from the neighbors and the street, furthering privacy at the expense of community.

  Most modernist houses were designed for (if not always built in) the sort of unpeopled rural landscapes where transparency promised to be somewhat more congenial to the homeowner. If the mass-market picture window took one’s eyes off the street, the genuine modernist article—the glass walls and fenêtres en longueur—was inconceivable unless you owned the whole street or at least enough land to obliterate its presence. (Though even then, the sense of exposure is apparently hard to take: Philip Johnson doesn’t actually sleep in his glass house, but in a cozy old Colonial down the road.) The modernist house with its glass walls is as impractical on a small plot of land as a picturesque garden with its ha-ha: Both require large and isolated holdings for the proper functioning of their transparencies.

  So much for the glass utopia.

  Like most people, I have never actually lived in a glass house, but when I was a boy my parents built a summer home at the shore whose design, I realize now, was beholden to the modernist dream of transparency. My father designed it himself with the help of a contractor, which suggests just how general some of these ideas had become by 1965. The house was a modified A-frame built on an open plan, with kitchen, living room, and dining room all flowing together, and its front wall, which looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, was almost entirely glazed: There were sliding glass doors on one side, a big horizontal picture window on the other, and above, undivided plates of glass rising all the way up into the peak. A half-dozen other houses were similarly deployed along a strip of sand dune, and together they resembled a flock of weathered gray birds perched on a wire, all staring intently ahead. Indeed, our house had only a couple of windows on its side walls, and these were cheap little double-hungs, strictly for ventilation. It was the big view that my parents had bought, and it was the big view and nothing else that their house was going to look at.

  What I remember about our glass wall and its big view (besides the fact that the living room was always too hot and you never entered it except fully dressed, even though the only creature apt to look in was a gull) was that the ocean view was best appreciated from the couch, as if you were watching a movie—which the proportions, or “aspect ratio,” of the picture window closely approximated. It must be a convention of our visual culture that an image of roughly these proportions says, “Look no further: Here’s the whole picture,” because I can’t remember ever feeling the urge to get up from the couch for a closer look. A smaller or squarer window, on the other hand, seems to invite us to step up to it and peak out, glimpse what lies beyond the frame on either side. Every opening in a wall proposes a certain amount of mystery, and this is directly proportional to its size, with “keyhole” at one end of the scale. But a big window, and especially a big horizontal window, offers no more or different information when your nose is pressed against it than it does from a distance, so why get up? Like the single-point perspective of a Renaissance painting, the picture window posits an unmoving eye situated at a specific point in space, and this might as well be coordinated with the location of a particularly comfortable sofa.

  My parents’ view also acquainted me with the peculiar distancing effect of plate glass. Ours was double-glazed, and unless the big slider had been left ajar, the seal of the wall was complete. You saw the waves break white out beyond the dunes, but heard nothing; watched the sea grass bend and flash under the breeze, but felt nothing. There was a deadness to it, a quality of having already happened. The view seemed far away, static, and inaccessible, except of course to the eye.

  Our picture window’s horizontal format probably contributed to this impression. As painters understand, the horizontal dimension is the eye’s natural field of play, the axis along which it ordinarily takes in the world. Compared to a vertical format, which is more likely to engage the whole body, inviting the viewer into the picture as if through a door, the horizontal somehow seems cooler, disembodied, more cerebral. This might be because people seem instinctively to project themselves into the spaces they see, and we don’t imagine our upright bodies passing through a horizontal opening, just our eyes, and possibly our minds.

  Only much later did I realize that my parents’ picture window contained its own implicit philosophy of nature, one perhaps not quite as benign as its sheer appreciativeness might suggest. True, compared to the attitude of fear or antagonism toward the outdoors implied by the small pre-Enlightenment window, the picture window tells a considerably friendlier story about nature. Yet to put nature up on a kind of pedestal, as the picture window does, is to hold it at arm’s length, regard it as an aesthetic object—a “picture.” Our sole involvement with it is the gaze, which is fixed, cool, timeless, and possessive. (For this is “our” view, and we resent anybody who tampers with it.) The picture window turns the stuff of nature into a landscape, the very idea of which implies separation and observation and passivity—nature as spectator sport, which suited my father the indoorsman just fine.

  Of course, the rural picture window doesn’t make a picture out of any old stretch of nature. Nobody ever placed one directly in front of a group of trees or the face of a boulder, and my parents never thought to put theirs on the wall that faced a pretty grove of gnarled beetlebung trees. No, a picture window must give the horizon its due, and the content of the view will always be something “special,” by which we usually mean “picturesque.” The space invariably will be deep (divided into near, middle, and far); the land pristine and changeless (except for the effects of weather and seasons), and there will be few if any signs of human work.

  Implied in the very idea of a picture window is an assumption that there is a “special” nature that is entitled to our gaze and care, and an ordinary nature that is not. In this the picture window is in tune ideologically with tourism and environmentalism, both of which lavish their attention on those landscapes that most nearly resemble wilderness—places unpeopled, timeless, and pristine; nature out there—at the expense of all those ordinary places where most of us live and work, and which may be just as deserving of our attention and care. There might be
some kind of window that discloses the beauty of such places, but it is not a picture window.

  Though a picture window obviously has a frame (you can’t have a window or even a glass wall without one), it pretends otherwise. A frame always implies a point of view, the presence of some ordering principle or sensibility. Yet by eliminating muntins (which call attention to the sash) and stretching out horizontally to the peripheries of our field of vision, the picture window suggests that its view of nature is perfectly objective and unmediated: This is it, how it really is out there. And the full-scale glass wall goes even further, dropping the “out there” from the claim, since now any distance between ourselves and nature has supposedly been eliminated. If the picture window resembles a pair of eyeglasses so large the wearer loses sight of the frame, the glass house is a contact lens. The conceit of its more radical transparency is that the frame can be eliminated, leaving us with a perfect apprehension of nature, a clear seeing with nothing interposed save this inconsequential pane of glass—whose own reality everything has been done to suppress.

  But perhaps the tallest tale told by plate glass is of man’s power and nature’s benignity. The promise of modernity was that we could master nature with our technology and science, and what better way to express that mastery—flaunt it, even—than building houses made of glass? Humankind has outgrown the need for refuge, the glass house says; now prospect alone can rule architecture. I was reminded of the ridiculousness of this particular conceit every time the weather bureau issued a hurricane warning for our stretch of Atlantic seaboard. My father and I would scamper up ladders to crisscross the great glass wall with webs of masking tape. The tape was supposed to help the glass withstand the gales, and these flimsy paper muntins did somehow make us feel marginally safer as the wind blew. After a few years of hurricane alerts, the glass wall had been scarred by the fossil traces of tape glue, an abiding rebuke to its boast of transparency.