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Authors: Michael Pollan

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The tree house was always at its best under siege, creaking in the wind, its posts bending slightly, the better to withstand the blows. Bachelard says that this is a property of houses in general, that they only come into their own in bad weather, when the poetry of shelter receives its fullest expression. A house under siege from the elements becomes “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos,” he writes. “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.”

 

That was at night. During the day Grabel slept (or went to elementary school), and the significance of the tree house shifted. Instead of serving as a battleground, the building became a safer, more solitary, and dreamier place, my rural retreat from the cares of the big ranch house where, nominally, I lived with my three sisters, two parents, and numberless pets. Yet the tree house was in fact not the first such retreat I’d had. Even this room had its precursors, though these were strictly ad hoc and sited within the walls of my parent’s house. I’m thinking of the huts a child builds with an appliance carton, or two chairs and a blanket, or of one particular closet I cleared of coats and outfitted (with dials and gauges drawn in Magic Marker) to resemble a Gemini capsule. (NASA’s ingenious, high-tech envelopes of space have probably inflected my notion of the ideal room since the first time I watched Jules Bergman fold himself into one on television.) Lori, the oldest of my sisters, kept house for a time in another closet directly beneath the basement stairs, which gave the space a steeply sloped roof, lending it the feel of a cottage. Though these huts were firmly held in the embrace of our parent’s house, they formed another interior deep inside it, a second, more comprehensible frontier of inside and out, private and public, self and world, that we children could control.

Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space
is the only book I’ve ever read that takes these sorts of places seriously, analyzing them—or at least our memories and dreams of them—as a way to understand our deepest, most subjective experience of place. He suggests that our sense of space is organized around two distinct poles, or tropisms: one attracting us to the vertical (compelling us to seek the power and rationality of the tower view) and the other to the enclosed center, what he sometimes calls the “hut dream.” It is this second, centripetal attractor that inspires the child to build imaginary huts under tabletops and deep inside coat closets, and draws the adult toward the hearth or the kitchen table, places of maximum refuge that hold us in a small, concentrated circle of warmth. These, in Bachelard’s terms, are huts too.

Of course Bachelard, a Frenchman, is describing a European’s sense of space, and an American—especially an American with childhood memories of a tree house and a quasi-adult dream of building a hut in the woods—can’t help but wonder if maybe we experience space somewhat differently in this country. For in addition to the centripetal impulse that Bachelard so tenderly describes—our wish to be “enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house”—isn’t there also a centrifugal impulse at work in the American dream of houses, one that is always pushing us outward, flinging open windows and reaching out into the surrounding landscape?

One of the all-time great American houses—and one that no doubt stands behind any American’s wish for a room of one’s own—exhibits exactly this quality, at least in its author/architect/builder’s description of it. At Walden, after procrastinating for most of the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau finally built a hearth in time for winter, but he always seems much less enamored of his house’s sense of enclosure than of its unusual transparency. He delights every time a sparrow or a field mouse manages to infiltrate his cabin, which appears to have been no great feat. Thoreau waited until the freezing weather of November before he plastered the interior, so much did he enjoy the free passage of wind and sunlight through the knotholes and chinks in his walls.

With his cabin “so slightly clad,” Thoreau wrote, “I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather.” It’s almost as though Thoreau’s dream house keeps wanting to dissolve itself back into the landscape; he cannot make his walls thin enough, and has nothing but scorn for the whole hypercivilized distinction between inside and out. What he calls his “best room,” in fact, was no room at all, but the “pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.”

However whimsical, Thoreau was giving voice to a concept of American space that others of a slightly more practical bent would eventually pick up on. Indeed, it could be argued that Thoreau’s crude hut by the pond, or at least his account of it, has had a profound impact on the course of American architecture. Certainly Thoreau was militating for a transparency to nature and an open plan—for “a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest”—long before American architecture attempted to build these things.

The modernist glass house eventually fulfilled Thoreau’s dream of transparency—and brought its inhumanness to light. For although the glass house was a brilliant conceit, the material embodiment of the American romance of nature, it proved to be an inhospitable shelter. It fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to realize Thoreau’s dream of a centrifugal house without forsaking the satisfactions of shelter that Bachelard describes. Wright designed houses with strong, compelling centers (“It comforted me,” he said in accounting for his love of massive central hearths, “to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself”) that nevertheless unfolded outward, pushing into the surrounding landscape and dematerializing their walls—metaphorically scraping off Thoreau’s regretted plaster in order to admit nature once again, though on our own terms now. Outdoor nature for Bachelard is something the archetypal house girds against, or offers refuge from. For Thoreau and Wright and generations of American house builders, the land is what the house wants to embrace.

 

It must have been some such sense of American space that compelled me to situate my dream of a hut out in the woods, first as a child and then, some thirty years on, as a parent-to-be. Being the most literal people the world has ever known, it’s hard to imagine any American possessed by such a dream contenting himself for very long with the sort of imaginary hut-within-the-house Bachelard describes. Or even, for that matter, with Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, since her room is not a built thing so much as an agreed-upon thing, a consensual space located within a house still under the control of others. We Americans have always taken our metaphors very seriously, ever since we first decided it would be a good idea to site and actually build the “city on a hill” that generations of less literal-minded people had been content to regard as a nice figure of speech. But giving form and an address to our most abstract mental constructs—to our wildest dreams—seems to be what we do here. “Build therefore your own world,” Emerson urged, and we have tried.

This doesn’t, however, quite explain how my own grown-up dream of a hut expanded to include the improbable idea of building it with my own hands. Any number of qualified general contractors could have rendered my dream perfectly literal with no help from me, and I’m sure it would have turned out a lot more square and true than it did. This was the part—the do-it-yourself part—that I could not have foreseen. Judith suspects that the prospect of a house vibrating with the howls of an infant—our son, Isaac, was born shortly before construction began—would have made any time-consuming outdoor project look attractive just then. Maybe, but you’d think I could have come up with an easier and more socially acceptable avenue of escape, like taking on paid work for which I had some acumen.

At least some of the blame for this unlikely turn of events should probably go to a captivating if slightly irresponsible book that Charlie lent me soon after our fateful exchange before the bedroom window. The book was called
Tiny Houses
, and had been written, or drawn (since it contains very few words), by an architect by the name of Lester Walker. Essentially a pattern book, and very much in the American grain,
Tiny Houses
presents photographs and architectural drawings of some forty one-person structures. The book includes plans for most of the tiny houses I knew about—Thoreau’s cabin; Jefferson’s honeymoon cottage (where he lived for several years while Monticello was being built); George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut—and a great many others I didn’t. There are ice-fishing shanties built on top of frozen lakes; a handful of funky prefab cottages; a forty-two-square-foot “rolling home” built in the back of a 1949 delivery van; several minuscule vacation cabins (including an “inside-out” summer house in which everything but the bed is arranged along the
exterior
walls of a tiny sleeping hut—perhaps the ultimate centrifugal house); a self-sufficient mobile home modeled on a space capsule (!); a two-hole outhouse that a painter had converted into a meditation hut, and, the tiniest house of all, a wooden bus shelter that measures two feet four inches square and can hold two children “but only if they are standing.”

As Charlie may very well have hoped, I found myself spending a fair number of my insomniac hours in the company of
Tiny Houses
, marveling at the ingenuity of their designs, the enterprise of their builders, and more than anything else, the distinct and exceedingly quirky character of these structures. The best of them were houses cast in the first-person singular, each the precise material expression, in wood or canvas or aluminum or plastic or simple tar paper, of a single individual. By studying the plans and snapshots of these houses you felt you understood something essential about their builders, as though the building were a second face, another window on the self. After paying a visit to his friend Daniel Ricketson’s vine-tangled Gothic Revival shanty in Brooklawn, Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote in his journal that in the building’s architecture “I found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love of retirement, simplicity, etc.”

I doubt that a big house could ever offer quite so intense a distillation of a single character or voice, so tight and uncompromising a fit of space to self. George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut, for example, an eight-by-eight pine shack at the bottom of his garden, was constructed on a steel turntable that allowed him to single-handedly rotate the building during the course of the day, in order to follow the arc of the sun. What could better suit a playwright than a house that looked at the world not from any one angle, but from every possible angle in turn?

Books like this have a way of gently interrogating the reader’s imagination, provoking the kinds of questions that can only be answered by way of a daydream. One cannot skim
Tiny Houses
without wondering, What would
my
first-person house look like? Would it be fixed or mobile, and what should it be made of? Where’s the best place to site it, and what would I want its windows to look out on? And yet there is one fairly obvious question the book plainly doesn’t want you to ask, which is, Who could I hire to build it for me?

“One of the great thrills in life is to inhabit a building that one has built oneself,” Walker writes in his introduction, neatly closing off that particular avenue of speculation. “My goal was to inspire people of all ages and degrees of carpentry skill…to take hammer in hand and build themselves a little dream.” There was something intrinsically do-it-yourself about the best of these buildings. You could see how their character was part and parcel of the work that went into making them, work that bore all the marks of the amateur. And one of those marks, as that word’s root reminds us, is love.

A house in the first person did not seem like something a third party could build. To hire the local Goeltz, to knock the thing off from a picture in a catalog, was to miss the point, or at least, the possibility. For besides getting his son off his back for a while, what had my father really gotten out of his hut-building project? What had he learned from it? Not nearly as much as he might have, or as I stood to were I to build my house myself. I began to see how there might be a connection between the kind of mental life I hoped such a place might house and the kind of work I’d have to learn in order to build it, a connection hinted at in words such as
independence, individual, pragmatic, self-made
. To build a house in the first person, a place as much one’s own as a second skin, would require an exploration of self and place—and work itself—that simply could not be delegated to somebody else. The meaning of such a place was in its making.

And anyway, this Lester Walker made building sound so easy, so roll-up-your-sleeves
doable
, as he chipperly introduced his plans for “very, very inexpensive small dwelling projects that would take a week or two to build.” Obviously Walker had neither my proficiency nor Charlie’s architecture in mind. If I strung together all the days I ended up working on it, my own first-person house took closer to six months to build and cost somewhere on the far side of $125 a square foot. (Thoreau famously claimed to have spent only $28.12½ building his cabin, but no construction cost accounting can ever be believed.) Yet, not having any way of knowing these things in advance, I began to entertain and then actually to believe that perhaps I
could
build such a building myself, and that doing so could prove not only economical and interesting but necessary in some mysterious way.

For someone as attached to words and books and chairs as I am, gratuitous physical labor wouldn’t ordinarily hold much appeal. Yet I had lately developed—in the garden, as it happened—an appreciation for those forms of knowledge that seem to yield most readily to the hands. Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world, and my work in the garden had revealed a face of nature I’d never seen before, not as a reader or a spectator. What I’d gleaned there was a taste of what the “green thumb” has in abundance, this almost bodily sense of plants and the earth that comes from handwork, sweat, and a particular quality of attention that involves very little intellect, but all of the senses. It reminded me just how much of reality slips through the net of our words, and that time spent working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.

BOOK: A Place of My Own
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