A Place of My Own (35 page)

Certainly when I think about spaces that I remember as having a strong sense of place, it isn’t the “architecture” that I picture, the geometrical arrangements of wood and stone and glass, but such things as watching the world go by from the front porch of the general store in town, or the scuffle of ten thousand shoes making their way to work beneath Grand Central Station’s soaring vault, or the guttering light of jack-o’-lanterns illuminating the faces of square dancers in a New England hayloft. The “design” of these places and the recurring events that give them their qualities—the spaces and the times—have grown together in such a way that it is impossible to bring one to mind without the other.

Jackson is doubtful that architects can
design
memorable places like these, at least on purpose; for him habitation will trump design every time, and that is how it should be. Certainly it is true that some of the best places are not made so much as remade, as people find new and unforeseen ways to inhabit them over time. Alexander, an architect himself, has more faith that an architect can design the “great good place,” but not entirely by himself and probably not all at once. This is because no single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and
thick
as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past, and also the future.

The first move is obvious enough: The architect borrows from the past by adapting successful patterns, the ones that have been proven to support the kind of life the place hopes to house—porches and watching the world go by, for example. But what about the time to come? There is of course the time of weathering: age seems to endear a building to people, to strengthen its sense of place, and the choice of materials can give an architect a way to either flout or abet this process. But it seems to me there is another, more profound way an architect can open a building to the impress of its future. Forswearing a totalitarian approach to its details, the architect can instead leave just enough play in his design for others to “finish it”—first the craftsmen, with their particular knowledge and sense of the place, and then the inhabitants, with their stuff and with the incremental changes that, over time, the distinctive grooves of their lives will wear into its surfaces and spaces. It may be that making a great place, as opposed to a mere building or work of architectural art, requires a collaboration not so much in space as over time.

THE UNFINISHED HOUSE

For a long time after the renovation of our house was finished and Judith and I had moved back in, whenever Charlie came to visit he had a disconcerting habit of staring at the walls, absently. “What are you looking at?” I would ask, worried he had spotted some grave flaw in construction. “Oh, nothing…nothing,” he’d blandly insist, and then rejoin the conversation for a while, until after a decent interval his gaze would once again float off, catching on the bookshelves, or the painting we’d hung in the breakfast room.

We realized eventually that it was our stuff he was staring at, and we began to kid him about it. Only with the greatest reluctance did he finally admit that the way we’d arranged our books and things on the living room shelves was, well, not quite how he’d imagined it. It seems we hadn’t adjusted quite enough of the adjustable shelves, so that the living room wall didn’t have the proper mix of big and little spaces; he could imagine a much more satisfactory rhythm of upright, leaning, and laying-down volumes, punctuated with the occasional lamp or picture frame. By giving us a whole wall with adjustable shelves, Charlie had given us the freedom to complete the design of the living room; now that we had, it was all he could do not to get up and finish the job himself. I told him I’d always thought the nice thing about freedom was that nobody could tell you what to do with it.

For the contemporary architect, trained as he is to think of himself as a species of modern artist, surrendering control of his creation is never easy, no matter what he professes to believe about the importance of collaboration. Even Christopher Alexander takes an authoritarian turn in the end, laying down inflexible rules for the minimum depth of a porch (six feet) or the maximum width of a piece of finish trim (one-half inch). There isn’t an architect alive who doesn’t approvingly quote Mies van der Rohe’s line that “God is in the details” (never mind that most other people credit the line to Flaubert). What strikes me as odd about this aphorism as applied to architecture is not so much the apotheosis of the detail as its implied identification of the architect with God. Even Charlie, who resists the monomaniacal tendencies of his profession, fought Judith for more Charlie-designed built-ins (she prefers old furniture), left almost no wall space for paintings (Judith is a painter), and proposed that he design not only the closet doors and medicine cabinets and towel racks (all of which we agreed to) but also the toilet-paper holders (which is where we finally drew the line). Much as he might theoretically want to, the modern architect is loath to leave anything to chance or time, much less to the dubious taste of carpenters and clients.

A superficial glance at the blueprints for my writing house might lead one to conclude that it represents a stark example of totalitarian architecture. Not counting my chair, everything in it has been designed: the bookshelves, the daybed, the desk—all are built in. On the blueprints Charlie even sketched in the books on the shelves, as if to suggest the correct ratio of upright to sideways volumes (with a few casual leaners—at precisely sixty degrees—thrown in for good measure). But even though the plans are highly detailed, that conclusion would be incorrect. In ways I was just beginning to appreciate, he had left plenty of space in the design for the passing of time and the impress of craftsmanship and habitation to finish it. Joe had grasped this right away—that was what his window trim was all about.

Charlie’s finicky drawings of them notwithstanding, my building’s two thick walls were where its design was perhaps most open, if not to our craftsmanship, then to my inhabitation of the place. By sketching an arrangement of my books on his blueprints, Charlie wasn’t so much trying to impose a shelving policy on me as he was tacitly acknowledging the crucial part my stuff would play in establishing the look and tone of this room.

That my books were an integral part of the interior design I understood as soon as Joe and I built the shelves. Though technically “finished,” they didn’t look at all that way; the long walls stacked with empty plywood cubicles seemed skeletal and characterless, blank. And the walls were going to remain blank until I’d filled them with my books and things; only then would the thick walls actually feel thick, would the building answer to Charlie’s basic conception of it as “a pair of bookshelves with a roof over it.”

And even then the building would continue to evolve in important ways, because most of the materials and finishes Charlie had specified were the kind that time conspicuously alters. Outside, the cedar shingles would gently silver as they weathered; more slowly, the skeleton of oiled fir inside promised to redden and warm, and the white pine walls and trim would eventually turn the color of parchment. Except for its windowpanes and hardware, the building was made entirely of wood, the material most tightly bound to time. Its grain records its past, ring by annual ring, and though the tree stops growing when it’s cut, it doesn’t stop developing and changing. “Acquiring character” is what we say it’s doing, as a wood surface absorbs our oils and accumulates layers of grime, as it is dignified by use and time. I’d told Charlie in my first letter I wanted a building that was less like a house than a piece of furniture; he’d designed a place that promised to age like one.

THE WRITING DESK

In the case of my writing desk, however, Charlie seemed to have pushed this whole notion of “acquiring character” a bit too far. He had specified we build the desk out of a thick slab of clear white pine. I hadn’t paid much attention to the choice until I happened to mention it to Jim Evangelisti one afternoon in his shop and uncorked a gusher of antiarchitect invective along with a lecture on a few things about wood he felt I needed to know.

I’d returned to Jim’s shop because he’d agreed to let me run my floorboards through his planer and joiner—no small favor, since the boards in question were more than two hundred years old and studded with iron nails hidden beneath a crust of grime. The boards had already done a stint as a barn floor somewhere—probably in a hayloft, Jim guessed, from the fact that the wood showed so little evidence of hoof traffic. These were stupendous pieces of pine; many of them were knotless and close to two feet wide, meaning they’d been cut from the kind of old-growth trees that survive in New England today chiefly as legends. My parents had found a stack of these boards in their barn and offered them to Judith and me when we were renovating the house; there’d been just enough left over to floor the writing house. The remaining boards were badly caked with dirt and coats of milk paint, however. I’d test-sanded a couple of them, but this had left the wood looking a bit too self-consciously rustic for a building that made no bones about being new. So I tried taking the boards down an eighth of an inch with a plane, where I found clean wood of a clarity and warmth I’d never seen before. It looked like pale honey, or tea.

As Jim and I ran the boards through his planer, raising a nasty plume of shavings that smelled as old as the world—a wild perfume of attic, must, fungus, and lilac—we sneezed and talked about woods. Jim said that the boards appeared to be mixed to him—some were white pine, but others looked more like yellow pine, a harder though less desirable Southern species. Knotty and prone to twisting, yellow pine is difficult to work and notoriously hard on tools. Jim mentioned in passing that he still occasionally heard an old-timer call the wood by its old nickname: “nigger pine.” The label might not have struck a nineteenth-century ear quite as violently as it does ours, but it’s a safe bet no flattery of the wood was intended.

Jim made it clear he thought building a desk out of white pine was nuts; “Only an architect…” etc., etc. The wood was just too soft, he said; in no time it would be nicked and pitted and horribly scratched. I’d actually once raised the issue of wear with Charlie, after Joe had mentioned something about it, but Charlie had been unconcerned; indeed, that was precisely the idea, he’d told me, to have a surface that would very rapidly acquire a history.

“Think of those great old marked-up wooden desks we had in elementary school,” Charlie’d said, growing animated as he spoke. “Remember how you’d scratch your initials in them with a Bic pen, try to decipher what last year’s kid had written. Every one of those desks told a story.” It was a romantic notion, and I’d fallen for it. Jim didn’t, however, and not only because he was a woodworker for whom the prospect of a perfectly good piece of furniture being gouged at by Bic-wielding schoolchildren held no romance whatsoever. A white pine desk was so soft, he said, that it would take the impression of a ballpoint through several sheets of paper, which was more history than I probably wanted. I’d be unable to write on my desk by hand without a blotter.

“And by the way,” Jim added, “those desks in elementary school? They’re made out of maple, not pine.”

This pretty much sank Charlie’s desk idea as far as I was concerned; maple is rock compared to pine.

So if not white pine, then what? I was pretty much on my own with this one. Jim nominated maple, and showed me a counter-top he was building. The wood was almost white, with virtually no discernible grain to it. It made me think of Danish Modern, that kind of sleek blond surface you saw so much of in the sixties—a decidedly unwoody wood, and way too contemporary for this place. What about cherry? It seemed kind of fancy for an outbuilding; I worried it would stand out too much against the workaday fir and plywood. Charlie had said the desk should be of a piece with the other kinds of woods that made up the building, and not too “zippy.” So maybe oak? Oak desks were eminently hard and venerable (and not at all zippy), but there’s something about the wood that rubs me the wrong way. Oak is almost
too
woody a wood, the wood you see whenever someone wants to say “wood”—by now it’s as much a signifier as a thing. It’s been simulated so often, in fast-food furniture and hotel case goods, that even the genuine article has begun to look a little fake. Running through the various options, dropping by Jim’s shop now and again to look over a sample, I was struck by the amount of cultural freight the various wood species had been made to carry, at least the ones we’ve seen fit to bring indoors. Selecting a wood for an interior means weighing not only the species’ appearance and material qualities, but also the history of its use and whatever architectural fashions have imprinted themselves on it—the mark that Danish Modern has left on maple, say, or Arts and Crafts on oak.