A Place of My Own (27 page)

The basic idea, as Charlie explained it to me, was to recreate the characteristics of a fairly large woodpecker hole in a dead, hollowed-out tree near a pond or in a swamp—the wood duck’s natural habitat. Charlie was free to design the building to look any way he wanted—vernacular, postmodern, deconstructivist, whatever—but in a few key respects it had better remind a wood duck of a woodpecker hole in a tree or no wood duck would ever come near it. What struck me as significant about this was that Charlie was attempting not to
fool
the wood duck, who would understand perfectly well that this gabled house on stilts (it wound up looking a lot like a Charlie Myer house) was neither a tree nor a woodpecker hole, but to somehow
evoke
those things. In a sense, Charlie’s wood duck house was an acknowledged piece of artifice designed to symbolize the wood duck’s natural habitat; as one thing that referred to another, you might say it was a kind of duck metaphor.

I know; I’m talking about ducks. Yet Charlie’s wood duck house made me appreciate that, even to a duck, the landscape brims with meaning. Certain formations in it imply certain qualities: To a duck, a deep hole set high over water connotes safety and convenience. This suggests a couple of things that seemed at least potentially relevant to human architecture. Meaning is not always a function of language or even communication; to wood ducks at least (who by the way can also communicate among themselves in the usual manner, by quacking), the things of this world are not mute but sometimes speak to a creature directly, carrying meanings of shelter, of danger, of nourishment, of sexual opportunity—all meanings that don’t depend on a sign system or culture of any kind. The meaning of a four-inch hole set high over water is the product not of an agreement among wood ducks—of cultural consensus—but of the species’s evolution. It came into the world whenever it was that wood ducks first figured out that, given the shape and size of a wood duck body and certain facts about the species’s reproduction, this particular formation denoted a superior shelter; in the case of this species, “symbolism”—perhaps even in some sense “taste”—is a by-product of survival: of what works.

And yet there’s no denying the existence of countless symbols and conventions that
are
entirely arbitrary and cultural. Even Charlie’s wood duck house featured symbols that almost certainly meant nothing to a wood duck, that were strictly part of a system of signs, a language you had to learn. There were a series of details, for example, that signified a human home: the gable roof, a trio of tiny windows along each side, and some ornament around the entrance that heightened the sense of ceremony there. These things were obviously directed not at ducks but at people.

What this suggests is that very different orders of symbolism can coexist in a building. Some symbols are patently just as arbitrary as the postmodernists say. How else to account for the fact that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, great white fluted columns on the front of an American house symbolized republican virtue in one part of the country and a slave-holding aristocracy in another? Had Charlie put fluted white columns on the façade of his duck house, they would have been nothing more than a sign, as meaningless as
ng
to a duck and, for that matter, to anybody else not versed in that particular human cultural system. So how could you have it both ways: fluted columns that were wholly arbitrary and four-inch holes (or, closer to home, pitched roofs) that were clearly fitted to the facts of nature? The birdhouse suggested a simple hypothesis: Maybe architecture speaks in more than one voice, the first grounded in meanings at least partly given by nature and another trafficking in meanings determined mainly by culture.

Soon after formulating this hypothesis, I found some human backing for it right in my own human building. Joe and I had finished shingling our roof, capping it at the peak with two well-caulked, -glued, and -screwed-together cedar ridge boards, and we’d turn our attention to closing in the rest of the building. We nailed four-by-eight sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood to the frame, whole ones first, and then smaller sections cut around the rough openings where the windows and the door would go. A layer of house wrap and then shingles would later be stapled and nailed, respectively, onto the plywood sheathing to complete the building’s walls.

No other single step in the whole construction process had so swift and dramatic an impact on the building as the nailing up of that plywood cladding. After just a couple of hours of work, the building, which before had stood open to the weather on all sides, had acquired a skin and with that an interior; what had been merely a wooden diagram of a structure was suddenly a house. Until now, Joe and I would always “enter” the structure willy-nilly, stepping in between any two studs wherever we pleased. But as soon as we had nailed up the last sheet of plywood, the only way in was through the door.

I tried it first, approaching and entering the building the way we were meant to, and the experience took me aback. Now that the building was clad, its bulk blocked the view down to the pond as you came around the big rock and turned into the site. What I saw before me was the body of the building to my left and the mass of the boulder on my right, two hulking forms separated only by a triangular wedge of space that closed down to a point where house and rock almost touched. Stepping through the narrow doorway, beneath the overhanging eave (inches above my head), then under the low cornice plank and between the two fin walls, the sense of constricted space suggested by the narrow wedge of ground outside seemed momentarily to intensify. But as soon as I had arrived inside and stood there on the upper landing, I could feel the space begin to relax around me.

Now I turned to my right and stepped down into the main room, drawn by the flood of light and landscape coming in through the big rough opening on the west wall where my desk would go. Two things seemed to happen simultaneously as I stepped down into the main space. This bright sense of broad prospect all but exploded right in front of me—the shimmery pond framed now not only by the oak and ash outside, but by the thick, vertical corner posts inside as well—and the weight of the ceiling, this canopy of shingles layered like so many leaves against its frame of lath and rafters, was lifted right off my shoulders as if I’d been suddenly relieved of a heavy winter coat. I noticed how, on turning into the light-filled opening beneath the lifting-off ceiling, you could not help but let out a chestful of air, as your body perceived and then entered into this most welcome release of space going on all around it.

And yet not
all
around it, for this was no glass house, after all. On either side of me an arm’s length away stood these two tall, thick, companionable walls that lent the space an unmistakable sense of refuge; I felt as though I captained this broad prospect from the safety of a sturdy enclosure. The tall walls so near at hand did something else too. They gave the building a pronounced trajectory, funneling the space coming down from the hillside behind it straight through this stepping-down wooden chute (through
me
, it almost seemed, standing directly in its path) and then out again, firing it between the trees and down into the pond below. There was something buoying about this, in the way the prospect said “Ahead!” and seemed to join the two senses of that word—prospect as seeing and prospect as opportunity. The building’s interior seemed to underscore, or re-present, certain qualities of the landscape outside it: the powerful flow of chi running through it that I’d sensed back when I sited it, the delicateness of the overhanging canopy (reproduced in the leafy shingles and boughlike rafters), the counterpoised senses of prospect and refuge. Coming in from outside, these qualities of the site seemed more available, not less.

So here it was, this place of my own that I’d been working on for so long, and now I could feel it working on me. And “feel” was the right word for it too, for my experience of the room was a matter of so much more than just the eye; sure, the view was a big part of it (and the easiest to describe), but the experience of the space was at least as much a matter of the shoulders, of whatever that whiskery sense is that allows us to perceive the walls around us even in the dark. Even with my eyes shut tight I know I could have sensed that constriction of space followed by its sudden release, my brainstem performing some ancient animal calculus on the sense data streaming in, measuring the slight but perceptible changes in the properties of the air, subtle swings in its temperature and acoustics, even in the shifting scents of the different woods all around me. Our vocabulary for describing the work of the senses may be impoverished (one reason, perhaps, they don’t get much play in the architectural treatises), but that doesn’t mean the senses aren’t always at it, giving shape to our sense of place, making the experience of space just that: a fully fledged
experience
, something greater than the sum of what you can read about or glean from the photographs in a magazine.

Joe was outside, gathering up his tools and getting ready to go, when I called him in to check out the new room. Plainly it worked on him too, because he gave a tremendous smile of satisfaction as he stepped down into the room and drank in the view. “Cool” was as much of an observation as he managed at first, and then: “It feels like I’m standing in a wheelhouse. On the bridge of the Mothership Organic! Mike, I think we built a goddamn boat.” And there was definitely something to that. The ceiling did recall the ribbed hull of a sailboat, and the walls and windows left no doubt as to which way the prow lay, but what really made you feel that this might be the bridge of a ship was the sense of command you felt standing at the window, riding high over the landscape spread out before you, a fine, beneficent breeze of space (of chi?) at your back.

Perhaps what makes the experience of space so difficult to describe is that it involves not only a complex tangle of sense information (hard enough to sort out by itself) but also the countless other threads supplied by memory and association. As soon as you’ve begun to register the sensory data, the here-and-now-ness of the place, there arrives from somewhere else all the other rooms and landscapes it summons up—and in this particular case a couple of boats (and perhaps a tree house) as well. Even so, describing the experience of this room now, while it is still not much more than a thin shell of space, is probably as easy as it’s ever going to get, for as Joe and I add to it the layers of finish and furnishings and trim, each carrying its own valence of memory and allusion, the complexity of the experience will only thicken. Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be.

And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does in fact speak to us, and that we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left-brained talk about signs and conventions would have us think. I would venture, in fact, that we respond to it rather more like a wood duck than a deconstructionist. For whatever else you can say about it, the experience of coming into my building for the first time was not foremost a literary or semiological experience, a matter of communication. This is not to say that the experience wasn’t rich with meanings and layered with symbols; it was, but the meanings and symbols were of a different order than the ones the architectural theorists talk about: no key was required to unlock their meaning.

Well, actually there
is
one key needed to unlock the experience of this room, though it is not a textual key and it is a key all of us possess. I mean, of course, the human body, without which the experience of the room as I have described it would be meaningless. For only a body like our own (upright, and of more or less the same scale) could have fully registered the pleasing sequence of constriction and release I felt upon walking into the building or the expectant forward trajectory I’d sensed standing at the window, or been moved by the sense of prospect and refuge created by the juxtaposition of those thick walls and big windows—the window exactly wide enough to fill your field of vision completely, the walls almost close enough to give a reassuring tap.

So you don’t have to take my word for it, or think my building unique in this regard, let me offer another, more well-known example: Grand Central Station, in Manhattan. As an architectural space, Grand Central is of course loaded with signs, literal as well as semiotic, having to do with the significance of arrival and departure, the rich symbolism of a railroad station in the heart of a great city, the whole complex of social meanings woven into that great cosmopolitan thrum. But anyone who has ever strode through this space recognizes that it works on us at a very different level as well. This is how J. B. Jackson describes it in an essay called “The Imitation of Landscape”:

What Jackson is describing here sounds very much like the experience of constriction and release one feels passing through a dense forest and then stepping out into a broad clearing or meadow, the close, shadowy canopy of trees suddenly yielding to the soar of sky. Jackson writes that Grand Central, like many great architectural spaces, is among other things “an imitation of landscape”—of the various familiar forms of nature that precede architecture and have always supplied it with an especially rich trove of symbols. Owing to its scale, Grand Central is a particularly dramatic example of such an imitation, but the sequence of constriction and release we feel stepping out of a forest into a clearing is probably one of the most common spatial gestures, or tropes, in all architecture; even my little building contains it. It seems to me that spatial tropes of this kind—prospect and refuge is another—speak to us more deeply, more
physically
, than mere signs do, since our sense of their meaning depends on nothing more than the fact of our bodies and those forms of landscape with which everyone has had firsthand experience.