Authors: Michael Pollan
One reason Frank Lloyd Wright was for many years regarded as old-fashioned (Philip Johnson, in his International Style days, famously dismissed Wright as “the greatest architect of the nineteenth century”) is that, even as he set about inventing the space of modern architecture, he continued to insist on the importance of Here—of the American ground. Wright always upheld the value of a native and regional architecture (one for the prairie, another for the desert) and resisted universal culture in all its guises—whether it came dressed in the classicism of Thomas Jefferson, the internationalism of the Beaux Arts movement, or the modernism of Le Corbusier.
In retrospect, Wright’s stance seems the more enlightened one, and these days everybody has a good word for regionalism and the sense of place. But it remains to be seen whether the balance between Here and There is actually being redressed, or whether universal culture, more powerful than ever, is merely donning a few quaint local costumes now that they’re fashionable and benign. I’ve never visited a “neotraditional” town like Seaside, the planned community on the Florida panhandle celebrated for its humane postmodern architecture and sense of neighborhood, but I can’t help wondering if the experience of sitting out on one of those great-looking front porches and chatting with the neighbors strolling by doesn’t feel just a bit synthetic. In an age of Disney and cyberspace, it may not be possible to keep a crude pair of terms like Here and There straight too much longer, not when a “sense of place” becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold on the international market, and people blithely use homey metaphors of place to describe something as abstract and disembodied as the Internet.
So a lot more than wooden posts were resting on Charlie’s rock feet. Intellectually, I had no problem with the footings, or what they stood for. One of the reasons I wanted to build this hut myself, after all, was to remedy the sense I had that I lived too much of my life in the realm of There, so steeped in its abstractions and mediations that Here had begun to feel like a foreign country. In a sense, Charlie’s footing was exactly what I was looking for. What could be more Here, more real, than a rock?
And yet as his daunting sketch made plain, Charlie’s rocks
weren’t
entirely real. Oh, they were real enough in and of themselves, as I would soon find out trying to coax them to the site, but they couldn’t really do what they appeared to do: hold up the corner posts that in turn held up the roof. The hidden concrete footing with the spike of steel running through it would have to do that. The rocks might be real, but the idea that they were holding up the building by themselves was nothing more than a romantic conceit, a metaphor.
That’s because the building’s supposedly “comfortable relationship” with the ground didn’t take the reality of the ground into account. And the reality of the ground, American or otherwise, is that it doesn’t particularly
want
a comfortable relationship with the buildings that sit on it, no matter who their architects are or how fond their regard for the land. Frank Lloyd Wright knew this, Charlie Myer knows this, anybody who’s ever built knows this: The ground that really matters, the only ground on which we can safely found a building, lies several feet below the ground we honor, the precise depth depending on the downward extent of frost in any particular place.
Around here the figure is forty-two inches—which is simply the depth below which no one can recall the ground ever having frozen. Anywhere above this point, rocks and even boulders will be constantly on the move, gradually shouldering their way up toward the surface under the irresistible pressure of freezing and thawing water. And any rock that sits on top of the ground, however immobile it may appear, is liable to get up and dance during a January thaw. The evidence was all around this place: in the tumbled-down stone walls that bound these fields like smudged property lines, and in the wooded waste areas where the farmer dumped the new crop of boulders he hauled out of his fields each spring. The extraordinary prestige that the ground enjoys, reflected in so many of our metaphors of stability and truth, is largely undeserved: Sooner or later that ground will be betrayed by a shifting underground. Which is why, in latitudes where the earth freezes every winter, a comfortable-looking relationship to the ground will require a somewhat uncomfortable amount of architectural subterfuge.
I wasn’t prepared to face up to the metaphysical implications of this fact quite yet, but I was ready to confront a practical one: If I was actually going to construct such a footing—one that implied a certain relationship to the ground but in fact depended on a very different (and undisclosed) relationship and therefore required not only the ostensible rock footing but a subtext of concrete and steel as well as a system to join these real and apparently real elements together—then I was going to need some help. I decided to take Judith’s advice and hire somebody, not only to assist with the footings but also to guide me through the countless other complexities that I was beginning to suspect Charlie’s “idiot-proof” design held in store.
Joe Benney was the man I had in mind. I first met Joe during the renovation of our house, when he was moonlighting for our contractor, helping out with the demolition, insulation, and all those other unglamorous construction tasks builders are only too happy to sub out. Joe’s day job at the time was in a body shop; fixing up wrecked cars is his passion, though bodywork is by no means his only marketable skill. Joe is, at twenty-seven, a master of the material world, equally at home in the realms of steel, wood, soil, plants, concrete, and machinery. At various times he has made his living as a mechanic (working on cars, diesel engines, and hydraulic rigs), a carpenter, a tree surgeon, a house painter, an excavator, a landscaper, a welder, and a footing man on a foundation crew. He also knows his way around plumbing and gardens and guns.
As you might guess from the number of careers Joe has already had at twenty-seven, none of them have lasted very long. From what I’ve gathered, and observed, the problem, if it is one, has to do with Joe’s mouth, not his hands. Joe hasn’t much patience for the kind of boss who fails to acknowledge that Joe knows more about his business than he does, which, unfortunately for Joe, happens to be the great majority of bosses. As I would soon find out for myself, Joe can also be a bit of a hothead; he says it’s his Irish blood. These qualities make for frequent job shifts and periods of unemployment, though since he is so variously talented these never last very long.
It happened that at the time I was puzzling over Charlie’s footing drawing, Joe was looking for some weekend work. I told him about the building, which I had been hoping to work on on weekends, and he offered to swing by to talk about it. Joe drives a small, somewhat beat-up Mitsubishi pickup, a vehicle longer on character than inspection-worthiness: no bumpers to speak of, smashed taillights, Grateful Dead decals on the cab window, and the name of his daughter—Shannon Marie—painted across the front of the hood. If not for the signature vehicle, I might not have recognized the fellow who climbed out of it that afternoon, with the broad cascade of auburn curls reaching halfway down his back. It’s only on a day off that you’ll see Joe without the cap (woolen in winter, baseball in summer) that he tucks his ponytail up into, to keep it clean on the job and perhaps also to keep down the grief. Joe is not very tall, but he’s a powerfully built thumb of a man, and depending on the current line of work, one section or another of his body is apt to be stuffed with muscle. Leaving aside his expertise, I very much liked the idea of having someone as strong as Joe around to help move boulders and lift six-by-ten posts.
We walked out to the site, where I showed him Charlie’s sketches for the building as well as the footing detail. He studied the drawings for a minute or two, made the obligatory carpenter’s crack about architects (“ivory tower,” etc.), and then said what he always says any time you ask him if he might be interested in a project:
“Piece a cake.”
We settled on an hourly rate and agreed to get started as soon as I had my building permit and the holes for the footing could be dug. Originally I had planned on digging them myself, but a backhoe was going to be on the property later in the month (to repair the pond; it’s a long story), so I’d figured I might as well have the excavator do it. Digging a half-dozen four-foot-deep holes in this ground by hand was a job I was happy to skip; it’s one thing to honor the rocks around here, and quite another to confront them at the end of a spade. Before he took off, Joe offered to give me a hand staking out each of the six holes to be dug—one at each of the building’s corners and then a pair in the middle of the rectangle, where the building would step down with the grade of the site.
Charlie and I had already staked two of the corners over the July Fourth weekend, deciding on the building’s precise location with respect to the rock (crouching a few steps back so as not to upstage it) as well as its orientation to the sun. Joe asked me how we’d determined the precise angle. It hadn’t been easy. The obvious solution would have been to adopt the orientation of the small clearing alongside the boulder, which ran more or less due east to west. But that angle would have admitted too much direct sunlight through the front window of the building, even with its visor, particularly on spring and autumn afternoons. Due west also put the big ash tree directly in my line of sight, which promised to block the sense of prospect from the desk.
So Charlie and I had experimented, the two of us standing side by side where the front window would be, facing dead straight ahead and revolving our bodies in a stiff, incremental pirouette, one of us occasionally leaving the front line to check the view from another imaginary window. As we pivoted the building on its axis, each ten-degree shift in angle caused a revolution in perspective from every window. We would nudge the front of the building into a winning prospect only to find that the south-facing casement window now stared out at a Ford Pinto up on blocks in my neighbor’s yard. This must have gone on for an hour or more, both of us reluctant to give up without testing every conceivable angle. We were planting the building, after all, determining what was going to be my angle on things for a long time to come. Finally we hit upon one that seemed to satisfy all the windows and avoid a too-direct confrontation with the ash or the afternoon sun. By the compass, my angle on things was going to be 255 degrees, or 15 degrees south of due west.
Now Joe and I made preparations to fix this perspective in concrete. Once we had planted the four corner stakes, making sure they formed a rectangle of the dimensions specified on Charlie’s footing plan (14?2? by 8?9?), we checked to make sure it was square by measuring the diagonals; if the lengths of the two diagonals were equal, that meant the rectangle was square. This may have been the first time in my life I had successfully applied an axiom learned in high school geometry. Though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I was opening a chapter in my life in which the rules of geometry would loom as large as the rules of grammar ordinarily do. It seemed like a snap, too, but then I still had no idea how much less forgiving the new rules could be.
Now we had a life-size diagram of the building, outlined on the ground in yellow nylon string, and the effect of it, on the site but also on my spirits, was larger than I might have guessed. Part of it, I suppose, was the sense of satisfaction that often comes from making a straight line in nature—whether in a row of seedlings, a garden path, or a baseball diamond. “Geometry is man’s language,” Le Corbusier used to say, and it was cheering to see this perfect rectangle take shape on the rough, unreliable ground. (Who knows, but the fact that the rectangle’s proportions chimed with the Golden Section might have had something to do with it too.) All our abstract drawings on paper were at last being transferred to the real world.
While I stood there admiring the view from inside my box of string, Joe had been sitting up on top of the big rock, studying Charlie’s footing plan. He had been uncommonly quiet up to now, merely nodding as I explained to him the thinking behind the various decisions Charlie and I had made, and I had taken his silence for consensus. More likely, he’d been doing his best not to second-guess us, because now he interrupted my reverie with a question.
“Do you really want to put fir posts directly on top of a rock?”
I didn’t see why not.
“In one word? Rot.”
He explained that the end grain of the posts would wick up moisture from the boulders they sat on, a bad enough situation made worse by the fact that, among woods, fir offers relatively little resistance to rot.
“My building, I’d do it differently. But it’s up to you.”
“It’s up to you” just might be the single most irritating thing you can say to somebody under the circumstances, a cranky parody of the liberty it pretends to bestow. But I decided to keep a lid on my annoyance.
“So how do you suggest we do it?”
“Couple of options,” he began, settling a little too quickly into the role of tutor, his laconic manner of a few moments ago now a memory. I was treated to a detailed lecture about the virtues and drawbacks of pressure-treated lumber (wood that has been immersed under pressure in a solution of chemicals, including arsenic and copper, to kill off the microorganisms that dine on wood). This was followed by a disquisition on the relative weather-resistance of a dozen different tree species, beginning with pine (highly vulnerable) and ending with locust, which is so hard and rot resistant that it can be sunk naked into the ground. Redwood or cedar would apparently last much longer than fir, though both were considerably more expensive. Finally, Joe ran through a list of the various wood preservatives and sealants on the market, things we could apply to the end grain if I decided to stick with fir.
Everything Joe was saying sounded sensible, but I told him I wanted to consult with Charlie before making a decision. This was the wrong thing to say. I should simply have said I wanted to think it over. Invoking Charlie’s authority clearly annoyed Joe, who evidently had already concluded that Charlie was just another ivory-tower architect with his head in the clouds, if not someplace worse. Joe works hard at seeming to take things in stride, however. He maintains a whole vocabulary of phrases to indicate how non-chalant he is—“piece a cake,” “cool,” “I’m easy,” “no problem,” “no sweat”—as well as some novel contractions of these, one of which he now produced, along with a slightly offended, suit-yourself hike of the shoulders: