A place of my own: the architecture of daydreams by Michael Pollan

Author:Michael Pollan [Michael Pollan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
ISBN: 9780143114741
Published: 2009-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

I thought about the farmer more than once that spring as we worked on the heavy timber frame of my building. I thought about the speed and ease with which his precut, mail-order frame must have come together; it had taken Joe and me several weeks to get just the front of the structure framed. I also thought about J. B. Jackson’s question, about how the same landscape that “explained” the farmer’s mail-order bungalow could also explain a building as different from it as my post-and-beamy hut. But though this might be the same land the farmer had built on, it was no longer quite the same landscape.

It seemed to me that even the posts themselves implied a landscape some distance from the farmer’s, one that had welcomed back the same trees (oak and hickory, pine and hemlock) that he would have looked upon as weeds. These massive vertical pairs of exposed six-by-tens—so much bigger than anything a structural engineer would have spec’d for the load, and then doubled up on top of that—called attention to themselves as wood, belonged to a landscape in which trees are prized and people have become self-conscious about preserving them. In part this is because it is a landscape shaped no longer primarily by work but by leisure. The farmer’s kit house, with its horizontal clapboards painted white, was the product of a culture that saw virtue in the clear-cutting of forests and was untroubled by a waste of wood we would now consider unconscionable. One ready-cut house catalog of that time made a standing offer to homeowners that would be unthinkable today: “We’ll pay you a dollar for every knot you find in our houses.” Imagine the amount of wood that had to be wasted in order to produce an entirely knot-free house.

Already the stolidness of these corner posts, with their mortises holding the floor beams in an unshakable embrace, suggested, if not permanence, then at least an intention of staying put on the land that the lightly framed bungalow has always lacked. A timber frame creates (and is created by) a more settled landscape than a balloon frame. Any visitor to the site who knew the first thing about construction made the same crack about my heavy frame: So how many stories up are you planning to go? “Overbuilt” was the intended dig; and I suppose that it was. Then they would bang on a six-by-ten with the side of their fist, and when that failed to produce even so much as a wiggle, they’d say: Well I can see this building’s not going anywhere. Nor the man who built it.

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