Space and Ideas

This is being written in a space created over the past thirty years in collaboration with my wife Patricia, an architect. We were extremely fortunate to purchase a gorgeous parcel of land in the country when it cost very little, and to know next to nothing about what building actually entailed. Young, naïve, outrageous and energetic, we went at it, and have kept at it for all this time. The place has continued to reflect our process of working and thinking, and thinking about working. Having grown organically it is highly idiosyncratic and yet quietly bears witness to the time which has passed in its creation.

I am reading Italo Calvino’s American Diary 1959-60. Admiring the author greatly, I was interested to read what he saw in America when he spent time here as a Ford Fellow. Having myself been a Fulbright Fellow in his country, I know something about living and thinking abroad- in ‘foreign’ space, and have a basic knowledge of Italian culture to which he often compares what he encountered here.

He found American culture outside NYC sorely lacking, and also criticizes the fact that many of the intellectuals he met here spent time building their own homes. Indeed, it has always amazed our Italian friends that we would have done such a thing, the act of creating one’s own space in Italy being confined only to interior decoration. And surely fifty years ago, culture in America was dominated almost completely by New York.

As we spent days, weeks, years pounding nails on the weekends, and most of many summers, I did of course wonder what in hell’s name we had gotten ourselves into. Most all of my friends were in graduate school, as budding artists or completing doctorates. Supposedly they were coming to grips with big ideas, while I was gripping a big hammer that served to mess up my painting hand. And certainly we weren’t in any intellectual maelstrom- we were up in the Pacific Northwest, and not even in its metropolitan center- not that it offered much intellectual stimulation then either.

I would argue that our experience out in the country, creating the spaces which we have inhabited and continued to modify since, has sharply shaped and honed our ideas. Perhaps counter intuitively we became intellectuals in the way Calvino meant the term fifty years ago, but did so through a route he couldn’t possibly appreciate. Our ideas produced the space which in turn affected the way we experience the world and our relationship to one another. We learned to fully and freely collaborate, and to make our collaborative place work for each of us independently.

Patricia is a superb sought-after architect because she now knows how buildings come together from the inside out, how they can grow and change. Yet she has also published several articles about the role of architecture in people’s lives around the world. Having begun as a solitary painter, the building process got me interested in constructing space and ideas, and in working with others. Buildings come together as systems. Once I began to understand how those systems played out and could be manipulated, I saw how materials as ideas could also be built upon and put together.

By focusing considerable energy on our created environment, we managed to build an on-going laboratory for ourselves, without attempting to. We set out to build buildings and not systems of ideas, but those developed too. The Italian way was to develop such structures of ideas in urban smoke filled cafes- we did it in wood fired studios in the evergreens. New York was the center, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t nail together a differently centered existence, one that revolved around the ideas we were constructing.

Given the ad-hoc way the building has come together, there are rooms that look into and through others, planes that cross at strange and wonderful angles. As I experienced the concept of rooms functioning to frame the act of looking, I began to think about taking the act of looking out into the world.

Art is usually seen as making things that people look at- I wanted to get people actively looking through, as they do at our place. I contacted Ed Mannery, an optics engineer I had met, and proposed to him that together we collaborate on some devices of our own. We have built several over several years, and continue to do so. The looking devices are only one of the many ways that building our place has brought us out into the world, doing things we would have never expected.