A Place of My Own (32 page)

And yet, Jim’s architect-bashing aside, it seemed to me he and Charlie had important things in common. Not least was their deep appreciation for the American vernacular and the indigenous architecture that had drawn on it so fruitfully before modernism turned everybody’s attention back to Europe. Charlie and Jim were both children of the seventies, their approach toward building having been shaped by an odd confluence of currents that was at the time helping to return American architecture to American sources. One of these currents was of course postmodernism, which by the mid-seventies had sparked a revival of interest in the American shingle style, a homegrown domestic architecture with deep vernacular roots. Also gathering momentum during the seventies was the push for historic preservation. And then, coming from an entirely different quarter, there was the back-to-the-land movement, which had its own reasons to revive vernacular building styles and methods, such as timber framing; it also happened to share many of the values of the Arts and Crafts movement. (You remember the crafts.) Though it seldom finds its way into the architectural histories, American hippie architecture of the 1970s played an important role, chipping away at modernist ideas from below while more academic postmodernists attacked them head on. So while Jim was lending a hand to the revival of timber framing in Vermont, Charlie was studying at UCLA under Charles Moore, the postmodernist with perhaps the deepest feeling for the American vernacular.

In fact it wouldn’t be too much to say that Jim and Charlie, having started out from two such different places, had been working their way toward the very sort of neotraditional window coming together on this worktable at the Craftsman Woodshops. For the divided-light window, along with timber framing, pitched roofs, wooden shingles, and a great many other vernacular elements, was one of the casualties of modernism that architects like Charlie and craftsmen like Jim have both done their parts to revive. Here in microcosm was that collaboration, between the postmodern temper and the craftsman ideal—the “neo” and the “traditional.” Not that the collaboration was an easy or even a friendly one. The architect, being a modern artist, was not content merely to revive an idiom but insisted on giving it a fresh turn (the too-big window, the in-swinging sash), his novelty forcing the craftsman back on his wits (and his memory of forgotten solutions, such as the Greenes’ drip edge) to make it all work. Or to bail him out, depending on your point of view.

Of all the revivals of the postmodern period, perhaps the most surprising is the divided-light window. The pitched roof, after all, could justify its return strictly on utilitarian grounds: a case can be made that a gable was simply the best way to keep the weather out of a house. But the muntin bars dividing a window into small panes of glass can make no such claim for themselves. Indeed, from a purely technological standpoint, they have been obsolete in all but the very largest windows since the invention of rolled sheet glass near the end of the eighteenth century. It isn’t until the modern period, however, that they disappeared completely, only to be brought back again in the last few years—thanks (once again) to Robert Venturi, who put a gigantic, divided-light window on the façade of his mother’s house. (Actually it’s a sliding glass door bisected by a thick horizontal muntin bar.) The story of the fall and rise of the humble muntin, which I started looking into after my time in Jim Evangelisti’s shop, turns out to shed some light not only on how my own particular windows came to be, but on the whole history of the idea of transparency in the West, which is itself a kind of sub-history of our changing attitudes toward nature, objectivity, and the notion of perspective—a person’s and a building’s both.

Muntins were originally invented as a way to gang together numerous small panes of glass when that was the only kind there was. Before the development of sheet glass, a windowpane was made by blowing a glass bubble, flattening it out, and then cutting the biggest possible square from the resulting pancake, which was rarely more than a few inches on a side. A dozen or more such panes could be combined into a window using muntin bars to hold them in place. These panes are called “lights” because for a long time that’s about all they were good for: too small and ripply to offer views of any consequence, their main purpose was illumination.

In early American houses, window lights were few and far between. Most glass came from England, and during the Colonial period windowpanes were heavily taxed. Before improvements in the design of fireplaces, the light that windows offered also had to be weighed against the draughts of cold air they admitted. Not that anyone at the time would have wanted even a Thermopaned picture window, assuming such a thing had been within the grasp of technology: the taste for looking at landscape, which was an invention of the romantics, still lay in the future. And in America, where the outdoors was still regarded as a howling wilderness, the haunt of Satan and Indians and abominable weather, the desire to gaze out of a window, except for the purpose of spying a threat, was slight, or nil. Refuge in those days counted for more than prospect.

Indeed, the early Colonial window, with its high proportion of wood to glass and its parsimonious admission of light, was probably a fair reflection of the prevailing attitude toward the world outside. Medieval Christianity, as well as Puritanism, drew a sharp line between the spiritual sanctuary provided by interiors and the profanity of the outdoor world. When the world beyond the window consists of so much peril (spiritual and otherwise), that window is apt to be small and difficult to open.

The development of clear, leaded glass in 1674, followed a century later by sheet glass made with iron rollers, coincided with—and no doubt helped to promote—important changes in people’s attitude toward the world beyond the window. Beginning with the Enlightenment, people were less inclined to regard the world outside as perilous or profane; indeed, nature itself now became the site of spiritual sanctuary, the place one went to find oneself, as Rousseau would do on his solitary walks. Nature became the remedy for a great many ills, both physical and spiritual, and the walls that divided us from its salubrious effects came to be seen as unwelcome barriers. As Richard Sennett suggests in a fascinating study of perception and social life called
The Conscience of the Eye
, transparency—of self to nature, of self to other—became a high Enlightenment ideal. Writes Sennett, “The Enlightenment conceived a person’s inner life opened up to the environment as though one had flung a window open to fresh air.”

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:

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.