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Authors: Michael Pollan

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About a lot of novel and even avant-garde architecture it’s always been possible to say, Perhaps we just can’t appreciate its beauty quite yet; maybe we’ll have to catch up to it first. The label “Gothic,” after all, was coined as a term of opprobrium for that style when it was new. It struck people as barbarous and ugly, so they named it for the detested Goths. But this new architecture is different. Making people uncomfortable is not merely the byproduct of this style but its very purpose. It sets out to “deconstruct” the familiar categories we employ to organize our world: inside and outside, private and public, function and ornament, etc. Some of it does seem interesting as art, or maybe I should say, as text. But it seems to me it’s one thing to disturb people in a museum or private home where anyone can choose not to venture, and quite another to set out to disorient office workers or conventioneers or passersby who have no choice in the matter. And who also haven’t been given the chance to read the explanatory texts—the words upon words upon which so many of these structures have been built.

Likening this kind of architecture to a literary enterprise is not original with me. Eisenman himself claims that buildings are no more real than stories are, and in fact has urged his fellow architects to regard what they do as a form of “writing” rather than design. The old concept of design—as a process of creating forms that help negotiate between people and the real world—might have made sense when people still had some idea what “real” was, but now, “with reality in all its forms having been pre-empted by our mediated environment,” architecture is free to reconceive itself as a literary art—personal, idiosyncratic, arbitrary.

For me, the irony of this situation was inescapable, a bad joke. I’d come to building looking for a way to get past words, only to learn from an influential contemporary architect that architecture was really just another form of writing. This was definitely a setback.

At first I assumed that this literary conception of architecture was a notion limited to deconstructivist architects and the editors of
Progressive Architecture
. But the more I read about contemporary architecture, the more widespread and uncritically accepted this idea seemed to be. Nobody seemed to have any trouble with the notion that language, of all things, is a suitable metaphor for architecture—that buildings “mean” in much the same way that words and sentences do, so that the proper way to experience a building is to “read” it. Postmodernism, the movement that preceded deconstruction in the parade of postwar architectural styles I found chronicled in the back issues of
PA
, promoted a completely different-looking kind of building, yet here too the underlying approach was essentially literary, and there was a lot of required reading. In this case, however, the syllabus was not deconstruction but semiotics—which happens to be the predecessor of deconstruction in the parade of postwar continental philosophies.

A quarter century before Peter Eisenman imported deconstruction to American architecture from Paris, Robert Venturi had imported semiotics, also from Paris. In
Learning from Las Vegas
, the immensely influential manifesto the Philadelphia architect and theorist published in 1972, he argued that architecture was not really so much about the articulation of space, as the modernists had believed, but about communication by means of signs, or symbols. Buildings constituted a form of media; they were cultural texts to be read. Venturi urged architects to recognize that what they were really doing was making “decorated sheds,” and that it was the decorations, or symbols, that mattered most. The offspring of this theory was a slew of often very witty buildings self-consciously decorated with exaggerated (for ironic emphasis) columns, keystones, pediments, and, in Venturi’s case especially, actual signs with words on them.

Working my way through recent architectural theory, I felt like I was back on familiar turf. In fact, Charlie’s wordless little booklet about my hut was a lot more daunting than most of the buildings celebrated in the pages of
Progressive Architecture
, if only because the buildings in the magazine were based on texts with which I was at least glancingly familiar. But even if you didn’t know the printed sources, with the help of the captions and manifestos you could read your way through them without too much trouble. They might be brick-and-mortar buildings, but they were also rivulets in the same information-age waters I’d always felt comfortable paddling around in.

And yet it hadn’t been familiar waters I’d come to architecture looking for. I’d come because I wanted out of the tub. I’d come looking for something meatier than discourse, something nearer to the “views, sounds, and smells” of the material world that Hannah Arendt had celebrated. Buildings, I’d always assumed, had an especially strong claim on reality. Weren’t they supposed to be one of those things in the world that gets pointed to, and not just another of the things that point? Yet it is precisely this quality that contemporary architecture seemed eager to deny.

I knew Charlie well enough to have a fair idea where he stood on these questions. He’d given me the subscription to
Progressive Architecture
as a way to define himself to me by counterexample:
This is everything I am not
. But he wasn’t going to get into any arguments about it, because even to argue was to let himself be drawn onto the ground of words and theories, where he evidently had no wish to go. Of course this was
my
ground too, and Charlie’s hesitance about me watching him work may have reflected a reasonable worry that I was going to somehow maneuver him out onto it. Only now did I understand that the exasperating wordlessness of his booklet, coming at the same time as the gift subscription to
PA
, had been meant as a gentle challenge. Charlie was asking me to choose, between the words and…what, exactly?

2. DRAWING

I drove up to Cambridge on a morning early in May to meet with Charlie about my building and, I hoped, to watch him begin to draw it. We met in his office, half a floor of a clapboard townhouse in Harvard Square, above a copy shop. His practice consisted of himself and a couple of freelance draftsmen, recent graduates of MIT’s architecture school who came in, or not, depending on how much work was in-house. The undivided workspace was informal but orderly, a horseshoe of drafting tables set out beneath bookshelves stacked with cardboard models and large-format books. The designers I met looked like graduate students (blue jeans, sweaters, and sneakers), except for the stylish $300 eyeglasses.

At the time of my visit, the architecture profession was mired in a recession that had hit Boston-area architects particularly hard. The city’s real estate market had collapsed, nobody was building, and with two local architecture schools continuing to graduate dozens of new architects each year, there simply were not enough commissions to go around. Charlie seemed to be getting by, however, with commissions for a couple of houses, a handful of residential renovation jobs, and the conversion of a building for an elementary school in Cambridge.

I had brought Charlie’s book of images with me, and we started by working our way through it, sipping containers of coffee from the croissant shop downstairs. As Charlie talked over the pictures, often with a catching enthusiasm, they immediately became less opaque. For one thing, I realized I had overcomplicated their import. I’d be puzzling over what a sprawling New England farmhouse could possibly have to do with my little shack when all he had wanted me to notice was the vine-tangled trellis over the porch, which he thought we might want to try on the window facing the ornery neighbor.

“That’s a great solution for a place where you want light but the view really stinks. The vines filter the sunlight nicely, too, since the leaves are always moving.” Charlie could be fervent talking about a window, describing the tone of the light it admitted to a room, or how flinging it open was apt to make you feel about life. He seemed so much more articulate in person than on the phone, and as I watched him talk about these images, hands and brows and even shoulders in almost constant motion, I realized that Charlie’s is a kind of full-body eloquence.

Only a few of the images were meant to be taken as literally as the vine-covered window. The reason he’d included the European townhouse that resembled a cat, for example, was because he felt my building should have an anthropomorphic façade. “It makes sense for our guy to have a strong face, since this is going to be a one-man house.” Okay, but a cat? “Hey. Don’t be so literal,” Charlie grinned. “This is just a reminder to me, something to think about when I’m drawing the elevation.” He explained that many of the images in the book had a similar purpose: They were cues to help him focus on issues he might otherwise lose track of in the design process—ways of thinking about windows, doors, ceilings, and roofs, the various ways a building can meet the ground.

“Like this door here—” He pointed to a picture of a formal Edwardian townhouse entrance. “Now this is obviously completely wrong for our building, but it’s such a fantastic example of
doorness
. It’s a reminder I need to deal with the whole issue of just what kind of experience the entrance to our building is going to be—should it be a public or a private kind of thing? Do we want to be inviting people up here with some kind of ceremonial front door like this one here, or do we want to maybe put them off a bit with something more backdoorish?” We talked about that for a while, and agreed the door should definitely be around back, where you wouldn’t see it until you’d stepped around the big rock. Then Charlie suggested we try to place the door on one of the thick walls: “That way, the entrance to the building becomes a real passage. As you walk in you’ll feel the great mass of that wall of books surrounding you.” He hunched his shoulders close, as if he were squeezing through the stacks in a library.

Paging through the book with Charlie, I began to see that the real subject of these pictures was not architectural ideas or styles so much as architectural
experiences
. Each picture evoked what a particular kind of place or space felt like, they were poetic that way, and it was the sensual nature of each experience, more than any purely visual or aesthetic details, that Charlie meant to call my attention to.

Turning to the picture of the Caribbean porch with the thatched roof and nonexistent walls, he talked about the sharp juxtaposition of the low, sheltering roof line and the wide open spaces underneath it. “Isn’t this fantastic? It reminds me of putting the top down on a convertible, that explosion of light and space you get the moment the roof flies up, only here it’s the walls that vanish. Makes me think of Frank Lloyd Wright, too, the way his strong roofs meet those light, dematerialized walls so that the space seems to race outward, right through them. We could do something like that.” I realized that the reason vernacular shacks and barns could cohabit so happily in Charlie’s booklet with examples of sophisticated architecture is that, for him, when they work, both draw on the same elemental feelings about space.

I asked Charlie about this. “People do seem to have some very basic responses to places and kinds of spaces,” he said, picking his words with care as he stepped gingerly out onto the ice of architectural theory. “I do happen to believe that there’s a basic vocabulary of ‘buildingness’ that we all share. This is what I try to work with—they’re my tubes of paint. And that’s really all this little booklet is about: singling out a handful of strong spatial experiences that might belong in your building.” Charlie used the word “vocabulary” to describe these architectural elements, but it seemed to me they could scarcely be less literary. He wasn’t talking about our interpretation of architectural conventions so much as our unconscious experiences of space—the sort of immediate, poetic responses to place that Bachelard chronicled in
The Poetics of Space
, a book that turned out to be close to Charlie’s heart.

I asked him if anyone else had written about this face of architecture, which seemed such a long way from the world I’d been reading about in
PA
. He mentioned Christopher Alexander, a somewhat unorthodox Bay Area architect who has tried systematically to analyze and catalog all the forms in architecture’s vocabulary, almost as if they were parts of nature and he were an obsessed naturalist.

Alexander calls these forms “patterns,” and his best-known book, A
Pattern Language
*
, published in 1977, is essentially a compilation of 253 of them in a phone-book-thick volume that reads like a vast field guide or encyclopedia. Each pattern is numbered and named (“159: Light on Two Sides of Every Room”), defined in a sentence (“People will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit from one side unused and empty”), and illustrated with a photograph or drawing. Charlie hadn’t exactly read
A Pattern Language
, he admitted, but he’d browsed around in it enough to decide that the definitions and illustrations were apt and even useful, and he suggested I have a look.

My first impression of
A Pattern Language
was that it reminded me of Charlie’s booklet a bit, except that there were long, interesting captions to accompany the photographs, as well as an overarching theory. Like the pictures in Charlie’s book, Alexander’s were strongly evocative of the experience of place: One showed a casement window flung open to embrace an early-morning street scene that reminded me of Paris readying to greet the workday; another, a trellis of bean vines that filigreed the sunlight coming through the window of a shack. There were big pine-plank tables in farmhouse kitchens you wanted to pull a chair up to, and front porches that seemed to say, here’s a sweet place to watch the world go by.

The images were well chosen and immediately appealing, yet the text made clear that there was something more here than a collection of nice places. We were told, in fact, that the “patterns” depicted in these images revealed profound truths about the world and human nature. Indeed, Alexander states that the discovery of any one of these patterns—of something like “light on two sides of every room” or “entrance transition”—is “as hard as anything in theoretical physics.” In a strange and wonderful way,
A Pattern Language
manages to combine a rich poetry of everyday life with the monomania of someone who believes he has found a key to the universe. I suspect Charlie had soaked up the former and skipped over the latter.

BOOK: A Place of My Own
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