A Place of My Own (28 page)

But if these examples seem too speculative, consider an even more elemental symbolism of space: vertical and horizontal, up and down, forward and back. Contrary to the teachings of Euclidean geometry, we don’t really exist on an indifferent Cartesian grid, one where all spaces are alike and interchangeable, their coordinates given in the neutral terms of
x, y
, and
z
. Our bodies invest space with a very different set of coordinates, and these are no less real for being subjective. As Aristotle noted, up carries a very different connotation than down, front than back, inside than outside, vertical than horizontal. Vertical, for example, is more assertive than horizontal, associated as it is with standing up and the dominance such a posture affords, and though many of the meanings we attach to the vertical have grown more complicated than that (pride, hierarchy, aspiration, hubris, and so on), all are at bottom related to certain natural facts—specifically, to the upright stance of our species. Though something like verticality has been embroidered extensively by culture and history, its moral valence revised again and again (think of the fresh prestige Frank Lloyd Wright invested in the horizontal), its very meaningfulness—the basic terms on which an architect such as Wright could work his changes—is something given to us, not made. And it came into the world at the moment when our species first stood erect. Our bodies were making meaning out of the world long before our language had a chance to.

Our bodies are of course what get left out of a theory that treats architecture as a language, a system of signs. Such a theory can’t explain the physical experience of two places as different as Grand Central Station and my little shack, because the quality of those experiences involves a tangle of mental
and
physical, cultural
and
biological elements that the theory can’t account for, blinded as it is by old Western habits of regarding the mind and body as separate realms. Taking the side of the mind in the ancient dualism of mind and body, this theory can only explain that part of architecture that can be translated into words and pictures, published in magazines and debated at conferences. An architecture that ignores the body is certainly possible: the proof is all around us. But I doubt it will ever win our hearts.

It was to the body—to
my
body—that I owed the happy discovery that some of the reality I’d taken up a hammer to find was indeed still out there, and still available to me. I owed it to the body at rest, which had sensed in its shoulders the squeeze and release of the space in that room, but also to the body at work, sinking a chisel into the flesh of a Douglas fir, negotiating gravity in the raising of a roof beam. Not that I can ever hope to sort out all the different threads of sense and thought, body and mind, that have gone into the making of this experience (and this building), but then, that’s precisely the point. It was only after my hands had woven a shelter from these slender leaves of cedar that my mind could grasp the poignancy of a shingle roof. Only after I’d raised onto its base a Douglas fir post fully as heavy as I am did I really understand the authority of a column.

To manhandle such a post into place, to join it to a beam that holds up a roof, is just the kind of work to remind you that, no matter how much cultural baggage can be piled onto something like a column (for as we’ve seen, it can signify republican virtue, Southern aristocracy, postmodern wit, and even deconstructivist violence), it is at bottom different from a word in a language. Though perhaps a bit muffled by current architectural discourse, the architectural column still speaks to us of things as elemental as standing up, of withstanding gravity, and of the trees that supported the roofs of our first homes on earth. It’s not uninteresting when Peter Eisenman takes such a column and suspends it from the roof of a house so that it doesn’t quite reach down to the ground, but he is wrong to think my annoyance at the sight of it is purely ideological, a matter of seeing a cherished cultural convention upset. Our regard for gravity is not just a question of taste.

It seems to me that as a metaphor for the process by which architecture comes by its conventions, evolution is much more useful than language. Certain architectural configurations (or patterns, to use Christopher Alexander’s term) survive simply because they have proven over time to be a good way to reconcile human needs, the laws of nature, the facts of the human body, and the materials at hand. Some of these patterns—load-bearing columns, right angles, pitched roofs—appear almost everywhere we are, but there are others that vary from place to place and from time to time. Grand Central’s spatial trope of constriction and release resonates most powerfully in a culture raised on a deeply forested continent, in a place where the moment of coming into a clearing has had a special urgency and savor. The important point is not that these forms are necessarily universal or natural, but simply that they are not arbitrary; they are the by-products of the things and laws and processes of this world.

This is not a new idea, only a half-forgotten one, a fairly recent casualty of the modern artist’s cult of novelty. In architecture’s first treatise, Vitruvius describes a remarkably similar evolutionary process, and he was writing almost two thousand years before Darwin. Vitruvius recounts the invention of the first building not as revelation but as a gradual process of trial and error involving many, many builders, in which good ideas survived through imitation while bad ones fell by the wayside.

In Vitruvius’ account good ideas are the ones most closely tuned to the nature of reality, something we only discover after the fact, by observing, and remembering, what works.

One of the advantages of using a metaphor of evolution like Vitruvius’—or, for that matter, Christopher Alexander’s—to describe architecture is that it can take account of the tangled web of culture and nature we encounter in something like a building or in an architectural convention such as a column. It allows us to walk away from the cartoon opposition of nature and culture that has bewitched all builders of primitive huts, Peter Eisenman included. The human needs and the natural materials that go into the process of generating an architectural form are different from time to time and place to place; culture can enter into the process without rendering the whole thing arbitrary. It’s worth remembering in this context that it was evolution that generated human culture—and language—in the first place, and that culture ever since has been working to modify evolution; notice the emphasis Vitruvius puts on talk—“boasting”—in the evolution of architecture.

A convention or pattern such as “windows on two sides of a room,” which Alexander claims we value because it allows us to more readily read expressions off people’s faces, might not work nearly so well in Japan, where shadowiness and reserve are prized more than psychological legibility. What this suggests is that the pattern is cultural without being in any way arbitrary, and that the process that generated it has a certain abiding logic. That logic, which is the same trial-and-error logic by which evolution proceeds, is the path out from the real things of this world to the forms of our architecture. It happens to be a path unavailable to our words; a writer or philosopher would be crazy
not
to envy it.

The mystery is, why would modern architecture ever want to turn away from this path, to trade such a distinction for a place in the common tub of images and information where I found it?

That tub, this culture of ours so steeped in words and signs and images, poses a mortal challenge to architecture. For buildings aren’t very well adapted to life in such an environment, one that puts a premium on mobility and ease of translation. Despite the best efforts of postmodern architects, buildings, unlike signs, don’t travel well; they can’t be digitized, and the good ones are dense with the kind of particularities and sense impressions that can’t easily be summarized, much less sent over a wire or bounced off a satellite. About a memorable building we will often say “you had to be there,” which is just another way of saying that the experience of the place, its presence, simply couldn’t be translated into words and signs and information; the Here of it can’t be communicated There.

You would think architects would cherish this about their work, if only because it makes architecture unique, a ballast amid the general weightlessness of an image culture. At least that’s what I thought going in. As makers of real things that endure (things that get pointed to), didn’t architects have it over the makers of words and images, those things that merely point, and that vanish as soon as the spotlight of our regard moves on? The work of building engaged them in a dialogue with the world, while the rest of us are lucky to add our two cents to the conversation of culture.

But apparently the prestige of that conversation is so great today that architecture, perhaps worried it was on its way to becoming dowdy and irrelevant, was desperate to find a place for itself nearer to the spotlit heart of our information society. So with the crucial help of Robert Venturi, who announced to his colleagues in
Learning from Las Vegas
that “the relevant revolution today is the current electronic one,” architecture set about repackaging itself as a communications medium, playing down undigitizable space and experience—architecture’s old brick-and-mortary Hereness—and playing up the literary or informational angle for all it was worth, until it seemed as though buildings were aspiring to the condition of television.

This has been a bad bargain, and not just for someone like me, who’d hoped by building to find a Here with which to counter the thrall of There in my life, but for architecture too. By allowing itself to become a kind of literary art, architecture might win itself a few more commissions from the Disney Company, but only at the price of giving up precisely what makes it different and valuable. Not that this troubles Robert Venturi. He has said he can’t see much point in building grand public spaces anymore, now that television makes it possible to watch other people without leaving home.

As Venturi’s comment suggests, the relationship between the information society and architecture may resemble a zero sum game. The culture of information is ultimately hostile to architecture, as it is to anything that can’t be readily translated into its terms—to the whole of the undigitizable world, everything that the promoters of cyberspace like to refer to as RL (for “real life”). And yet notice how even these people are drawn to architectural and spatial metaphors, as if to acknowledge that, even now, architecture holds an enviable, inextinguishable claim on our sense of reality. Such terms as “cyberspace,” “the electronic town hall,” “cybershacks,” “home pages,” and “the information highway” belong to the great tradition of raiding architecture for its real-world palpableness—its
presence—
whenever someone’s got something more abstract or ephemeral to sell. Once it was the philosophers, now it is the so-called digerati. The game, however, seems very much the same.

But architecture would do well to distrust this sort of flattery, because the cyberculture’s interest in place is cynical and ultimately very slight. For what finally is the ultimate architectural expression of the information culture we’re being told is upon us? Try to picture
this
not-so-primitive hut: a roof, beneath which sits a man in a very comfortable, ergonomically correct chair, with a virtual reality helmet strapped around his head, an intravenous feeding hookup tethered to one arm, and some sort of toilet apparatus below. Think of him as Vitruvian man—the outstretched figure in the circle in the square drawn by Da Vinci—updated for the twenty-first century. All that the information society really needs from architecture, apart from the comforting effect of its metaphors, is a chair and a dry cybershack to house this body. Assuming, that is, the digerati don’t succeed in their dream of completely downloading human consciousness into a computer, in which case the work left for architects, and the space left for these irredeemable bodies of ours, will be skimpier still.

I’ve built my own primitive hut according to a more old-fashioned blueprint; no doubt a deconstructivist would dismiss it as nostalgic, or perhaps, considering its imperial prospects, dangerously anthropocentric. But don’t get the wrong idea: this is not Thoreau’s crude shack in the woods that Joe and I have been building. The blueprint calls not only for a telephone but a fax machine and a modem and a cubby for my computer; regarded from one angle, mine is a kind of cybershack too, for this building and its occupant are going to be on-line, at least some of the time. (I am not going in for the IV hookup, the VR helmet, or the toilet, however.)

From what I can tell so far, Charlie has designed me a building that will provide a good counterweight to whatever information and signs will be streaming into it (and my head) over that telephone wire—a credible enough Here with which to meet the There on the line. He’s given me plenty of reasons to gaze up from the flickering screen, whether to check in on the view, scan the bookshelves, or even contemplate the complicated underside of my roof, which already exerts quite a presence in the room. It also manages to keep out the rain, by the way: I checked this out at the first opportunity, which came with a torrential thunderstorm a couple of days after Joe and I had capped it. No roof is really done until it has been tested by a storm; when this one came, I sprinted out to the building as the summer rain slammed down, and nervously poked a flashlight beam up into the rafters, searching the cedar shingles for telltale blotches or stains. There wasn’t a one; my roof was tight as a drum.