stuffed chair pulled up to it; over there, on one side of the desk, a small window completely filled with the face of the big rock. Then here —some where—was this thick wall of bookcases that was going to organize my life, like a second brain. And over there was the daybed, from which I wanted to look out on the meadow and yet at the same time feel perfectly snug. I might be able to write a logical transition from one image to the next, but could anybody begin to draw it?
Just for the hell of it, I decided to try. I drew a rectangle and started filling it up with all the different elements I’d mentioned: the desk, the daybed, the stove, the thick wall, the door, the various windows, and, hanging somewhere off of the rectangle, the porch. Very soon I ran out of walls and corners, and had begun to add on more rectangles, even to contemplate a second story. I had drawn what amounted to a pile-up of architectural notions loosely contained by a couple of rectangles; I couldn’t even begin to picture what the exterior of such a structure would look like. Like my letter, my drawing was little more than a collage made up of wishes and remembered places, pictures I’d seen and things I’d read. The letter at least had a bit of syntax to keep it from flying apart.
How would an architect go about turning these words into a building? The question began to intrigue me, so when I phoned Charlie to alert him to the letter, I asked if he would be willing to let me somehow observe the process—talk to him about it along the way, and maybe even drive up to Boston to watch him draw. At first Charlie sounded game. But a few moments later, after I’d tried to engage him in a discussion of some theoretical issue in architecture I’d been reading about, he seemed to pull back. Charlie cautioned that watching him design my building wasn’t necessarily going to give me a fair picture of contemporary architecture, if that’s what I was looking for. “Just as long as you realize that what I do doesn’t have too much to do with all that stuff.”
I hadn’t realized that, actually. Charlie had studied under a number of eminent contemporary architects—Charles Moore, at UCLA, where he went to architecture school in the late seventies; and Peter Eisenman, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design in New York—and his father, a former head of the architecture department at MIT, was himself fairly well known for several arresting modernist buildings in and around Boston. So Charlie wasn’t exactly an architectural naïf.
I heard nothing from Charlie for a couple of weeks, and had begun to wonder what was going on when two equally perplexing items arrived in the mail. The first was a computerized notice from the magazine Progressive Architecture informing me that Charles R. Myer had taken out a gift subscription in my name. The second was a hand-bound booklet of photocopied photographs and drawings that Charlie had put together, with thick cardboard covers and a spiral binding. No note accompanied the booklet, and its pages were completely wordless. So here was Charlie’s answer to my letter.
I flipped through it with a deepening sense of bafflement that eventually ripened into frustration. The first couple of pages weren’t too bad. Here on the first spread was a collage of tiny houses, which made me think the book was probably a collection of references for the design of my studio. One of them, a tall and narrow shack set out under a bare tree in the snow, I recognized from Tiny Houses , and it had something of the feeling I associated with my hut and its site. The one next to it seemed way off the mark, though, a stone building with a beefy chimney and the sort of steeply pitched alpine roof I associate with some of the sounder houses in the Brothers Grimm. The second page was a site plan of our property, showing the pond and the rock in relation to the house and the axis of the garden.
But by the time I got to the third
Just for the hell of it, I decided to try. I drew a rectangle and started filling it up with all the different elements I’d mentioned: the desk, the daybed, the stove, the thick wall, the door, the various windows, and, hanging somewhere off of the rectangle, the porch. Very soon I ran out of walls and corners, and had begun to add on more rectangles, even to contemplate a second story. I had drawn what amounted to a pile-up of architectural notions loosely contained by a couple of rectangles; I couldn’t even begin to picture what the exterior of such a structure would look like. Like my letter, my drawing was little more than a collage made up of wishes and remembered places, pictures I’d seen and things I’d read. The letter at least had a bit of syntax to keep it from flying apart.
How would an architect go about turning these words into a building? The question began to intrigue me, so when I phoned Charlie to alert him to the letter, I asked if he would be willing to let me somehow observe the process—talk to him about it along the way, and maybe even drive up to Boston to watch him draw. At first Charlie sounded game. But a few moments later, after I’d tried to engage him in a discussion of some theoretical issue in architecture I’d been reading about, he seemed to pull back. Charlie cautioned that watching him design my building wasn’t necessarily going to give me a fair picture of contemporary architecture, if that’s what I was looking for. “Just as long as you realize that what I do doesn’t have too much to do with all that stuff.”
I hadn’t realized that, actually. Charlie had studied under a number of eminent contemporary architects—Charles Moore, at UCLA, where he went to architecture school in the late seventies; and Peter Eisenman, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design in New York—and his father, a former head of the architecture department at MIT, was himself fairly well known for several arresting modernist buildings in and around Boston. So Charlie wasn’t exactly an architectural naïf.
I heard nothing from Charlie for a couple of weeks, and had begun to wonder what was going on when two equally perplexing items arrived in the mail. The first was a computerized notice from the magazine Progressive Architecture informing me that Charles R. Myer had taken out a gift subscription in my name. The second was a hand-bound booklet of photocopied photographs and drawings that Charlie had put together, with thick cardboard covers and a spiral binding. No note accompanied the booklet, and its pages were completely wordless. So here was Charlie’s answer to my letter.
I flipped through it with a deepening sense of bafflement that eventually ripened into frustration. The first couple of pages weren’t too bad. Here on the first spread was a collage of tiny houses, which made me think the book was probably a collection of references for the design of my studio. One of them, a tall and narrow shack set out under a bare tree in the snow, I recognized from Tiny Houses , and it had something of the feeling I associated with my hut and its site. The one next to it seemed way off the mark, though, a stone building with a beefy chimney and the sort of steeply pitched alpine roof I associate with some of the sounder houses in the Brothers Grimm. The second page was a site plan of our property, showing the pond and the rock in relation to the house and the axis of the garden.
But by the time I got to the third
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