A Place of My Own (33 page)

At street level too, plate glass proved unexpectedly alienating, inside as well as out. During the day, the glass building was scarcely transparent at all, and its reflectivity often made it an aloof and ghostly presence on the street. Faceless, cold, it seemed constitutionally incapable of making any connection with its surroundings, except to mirror them, mutely.

The wall of glass itself created a powerful social barrier that its champions had failed to foresee; to the extent that glass facilitated a “moral exhibitionism,” this was not a pretty or uplifting sight to behold. There are avenues in midtown Manhattan—Park in the Fifties, say, or Madison in the Sixties and Seventies—lined with posh shops and banks and galleries where the wall of plate glass at street level serves to isolate those well heeled enough to be buzzed in as effectively as a castle moat. There is one particular block in the Fifties on Sixth Avenue, the Manhattan thoroughfare that gave itself most wholeheartedly to modernism, where a homeless woman can gaze up and watch a famous magazine publisher making deals behind the glass wall of his second-story corner office: there’s the phone pressed to the ear, the hand gestures, the suit jacket draped over the arm of the sofa. The only reason I know about this homeless woman is that I was once inside this particular office, and briefly caught her eye, across the gulf of glass. It was a connection, I suppose, but not the kind that the modernists had prophesied.

If plate glass in the city tended to underscore the distances between people, in the suburbs and the countryside its effects were less brutal but no more socially constructive. In the suburbs the picture window, in search of a suitably picturesque view, tended to turn the attention of the houses away from the street, where the front porch had fixed it, and back toward the landscape. Magazines such as
House Beautiful
published articles on how to avoid the “fishbowl effect” of picture windows by planting hedges out front or restricting them to the backyard; either way, the large expanses of undivided glass tended to avert one’s gaze from the neighbors and the street, furthering privacy at the expense of community.

Most modernist houses were designed for (if not always built in) the sort of unpeopled rural landscapes where transparency promised to be somewhat more congenial to the homeowner. If the mass-market picture window took one’s eyes off the street, the genuine modernist article—the glass walls and
fenêtres en longueur—
was inconceivable unless you owned the whole street or at least enough land to obliterate its presence. (Though even then, the sense of exposure is apparently hard to take: Philip Johnson doesn’t actually
sleep
in his glass house, but in a cozy old Colonial down the road.) The modernist house with its glass walls is as impractical on a small plot of land as a picturesque garden with its ha-ha: Both require large and isolated holdings for the proper functioning of their transparencies.

So much for the glass utopia.

Like most people, I have never actually lived in a glass house, but when I was a boy my parents built a summer home at the shore whose design, I realize now, was beholden to the modernist dream of transparency. My father designed it himself with the help of a contractor, which suggests just how general some of these ideas had become by 1965. The house was a modified A-frame built on an open plan, with kitchen, living room, and dining room all flowing together, and its front wall, which looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, was almost entirely glazed: There were sliding glass doors on one side, a big horizontal picture window on the other, and above, undivided plates of glass rising all the way up into the peak. A half-dozen other houses were similarly deployed along a strip of sand dune, and together they resembled a flock of weathered gray birds perched on a wire, all staring intently ahead. Indeed, our house had only a couple of windows on its side walls, and these were cheap little double-hungs, strictly for ventilation. It was the big view that my parents had bought, and it was the big view and nothing else that their house was going to look at.

What I remember about our glass wall and its big view (besides the fact that the living room was always too hot and you never entered it except fully dressed, even though the only creature apt to look in was a gull) was that the ocean view was best appreciated from the couch, as if you were watching a movie—which the proportions, or “aspect ratio,” of the picture window closely approximated. It must be a convention of our visual culture that an image of roughly these proportions says, “Look no further: Here’s the whole picture,” because I can’t remember ever feeling the urge to get up from the couch for a closer look. A smaller or squarer window, on the other hand, seems to invite us to step up to it and peak out, glimpse what lies beyond the frame on either side. Every opening in a wall proposes a certain amount of mystery, and this is directly proportional to its size, with “keyhole” at one end of the scale. But a big window, and especially a big horizontal window, offers no more or different information when your nose is pressed against it than it does from a distance, so why get up? Like the single-point perspective of a Renaissance painting, the picture window posits an unmoving eye situated at a specific point in space, and this might as well be coordinated with the location of a particularly comfortable sofa.

My parents’ view also acquainted me with the peculiar distancing effect of plate glass. Ours was double-glazed, and unless the big slider had been left ajar, the seal of the wall was complete. You saw the waves break white out beyond the dunes, but heard nothing; watched the sea grass bend and flash under the breeze, but felt nothing. There was a deadness to it, a quality of having already happened. The view seemed far away, static, and inaccessible, except of course to the eye.

Our picture window’s horizontal format probably contributed to this impression. As painters understand, the horizontal dimension is the eye’s natural field of play, the axis along which it ordinarily takes in the world. Compared to a vertical format, which is more likely to engage the whole body, inviting the viewer into the picture as if through a door, the horizontal somehow seems cooler, disembodied, more cerebral. This might be because people seem instinctively to project themselves into the spaces they see, and we don’t imagine our upright bodies passing through a horizontal opening, just our eyes, and possibly our minds.

Only much later did I realize that my parents’ picture window contained its own implicit philosophy of nature, one perhaps not quite as benign as its sheer appreciativeness might suggest. True, compared to the attitude of fear or antagonism toward the outdoors implied by the small pre-Enlightenment window, the picture window tells a considerably friendlier story about nature. Yet to put nature up on a kind of pedestal, as the picture window does, is to hold it at arm’s length, regard it as an aesthetic object—a “picture.” Our sole involvement with it is the gaze, which is fixed, cool, timeless, and possessive. (For this is “our” view, and we resent anybody who tampers with it.) The picture window turns the stuff of nature into a
landscape
, the very idea of which implies separation and observation and passivity—nature as spectator sport, which suited my father the indoorsman just fine.

Of course, the rural picture window doesn’t make a picture out of any old stretch of nature. Nobody ever placed one directly in front of a group of trees or the face of a boulder, and my parents never thought to put theirs on the wall that faced a pretty grove of gnarled beetlebung trees. No, a picture window must give the horizon its due, and the content of the view will always be something “special,” by which we usually mean “picturesque.” The space invariably will be deep (divided into near, middle, and far); the land pristine and changeless (except for the effects of weather and seasons), and there will be few if any signs of human work.

Implied in the very idea of a picture window is an assumption that there is a “special” nature that is entitled to our gaze and care, and an ordinary nature that is not. In this the picture window is in tune ideologically with tourism and environmentalism, both of which lavish their attention on those landscapes that most nearly resemble wilderness—places unpeopled, timeless, and pristine; nature
out there—
at the expense of all those ordinary places where most of us live and work, and which may be just as deserving of our attention and care. There might be some kind of window that discloses the beauty of such places, but it is not a picture window.

Though a picture window obviously has a frame (you can’t have a window or even a glass wall without one), it pretends otherwise. A frame always implies a point of view, the presence of some ordering principle or sensibility. Yet by eliminating muntins (which call attention to the sash) and stretching out horizontally to the peripheries of our field of vision, the picture window suggests that its view of nature is perfectly objective and unmediated:
This is it, how it really is out there
. And the full-scale glass wall goes even further, dropping the “out there” from the claim, since now any distance between ourselves and nature has supposedly been eliminated. If the picture window resembles a pair of eyeglasses so large the wearer loses sight of the frame, the glass house is a contact lens. The conceit of its more radical transparency is that the frame can be eliminated, leaving us with a perfect apprehension of nature, a clear seeing with nothing interposed save this inconsequential pane of glass—whose own reality everything has been done to suppress.

But perhaps the tallest tale told by plate glass is of man’s power and nature’s benignity. The promise of modernity was that we could master nature with our technology and science, and what better way to express that mastery—flaunt it, even—than building houses made of glass? Humankind has outgrown the need for refuge, the glass house says; now prospect alone can rule architecture. I was reminded of the ridiculousness of this particular conceit every time the weather bureau issued a hurricane warning for our stretch of Atlantic seaboard. My father and I would scamper up ladders to crisscross the great glass wall with webs of masking tape. The tape was supposed to help the glass withstand the gales, and these flimsy paper muntins did somehow make us feel marginally safer as the wind blew. After a few years of hurricane alerts, the glass wall had been scarred by the fossil traces of tape glue, an abiding rebuke to its boast of transparency.

While waiting for Jim Evangelisti to finish and truck over the windows, Joe and I spent a couple of Saturdays building the four small peak windows. Charlie hadn’t drawn these units in any detail, so fabricating and designing them proceeded hand in hand. We decided on a narrow stock for our windows—one-by-one pine for the sash; three-quarter-inch for the casing—since our rough openings were only a foot square and I wanted as big a pane of glass as possible. Following Jim’s example, we drew a full-scale diagram of the windows on a sheet of oak tag; this became a template for the dozens of precisely dimensioned pieces of pine we needed to cut.

I manned the table saw, cutting strips of pine to length and mitering their ends, while Joe handled the more sensitive routing work, making the grooves that would hold our glass and form our joints. Since two of the windows were to be operable (one at either end of the building, for ventilation), the frame of their sash needed a sturdy joint that could be counted on to hold its right angles indefinitely; only a sash that remained perfectly true would open reliably and keep out the rain. After we fit the pieces together and checked the frames for square, we glued the corners, resquared and clamped the assembly, and then tacked the joints with brads for good measure.

After the frames had dried, I attached them to their casing with hinges and then attempted to glaze the sash, a process that did indeed require a certain knack, as Jim had mentioned. The windowpane is held in place with a beveled bead of glazing putty, which is applied to the corner where it meets the wood frame with a putty knife that must be wielded at a precise forty-five-degree angle. Move the knife too slowly and the putty blobs up on you; move it too fast and it tears. Turning corners neatly is the real test, though, requiring skill and a bit of nerve. By the time I’d glazed my fourth window, I could manage a respectable straightaway, but my corners remained somewhat bulbous.

Luckily for me these windows would be twelve feet off the ground, so no one would ever be in a position to observe the gentleness of my learning curve. I took heart in what I’d read about the Arts and Crafts movement’s liberal line on mistakes: “There is hope in honest error,” one designer had declared, “none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque. Certainly the mark of my own unhandy hands was visible in these windows, which were hopeful in the extreme. Joe held up one of the finished sashes to his face and peered out at me through its frame. “It’s a window.” This was about all you could say for it, apart from the fact it was the absolutely squarest thing Joe and I had so far managed to build.

Jim delivered his own rather more accomplished windows on Christmas Eve, and Joe and I had them all installed by the end of an unseasonably warm New Year’s Day, a swift and hugely satisfying process that revolutionized the building both inside and out. Since Jim had already put on the hinges and painted the sash (a deep blackish green), installation was basically a matter of squaring and plumbing each casing in its rough opening in the wall, then securing it to the frame and hanging the sash.

And on an ordinary building this would have been a snap. But since ninety degrees was not this particular building’s predominant angle (no blaming Charlie for that one), we struggled for a while trying to determine exactly what plane each window should occupy in its wall; our rough openings were
rough
. After some adjustments and difference-splitting, we slipped the window casings into their openings. Shimming them with scraps of leftover shingle, we’d nudge the jambs a fraction of an inch this way or that and then, after consulting the level and the square, lock the right angle into place with a long galvanized wood screw. It was right here that the ever-widening gyre of oblique and obtuse angles that had bedeviled the construction from the start was finally halted; had it not been, my windows would never have closed properly. Now we lifted each sash into its casing, interlocked the knuckles on each half of hinge, and then inserted the brass pin that held the two halves together. The windows were in.