A novel / memoir by Meghan Daum
The fact that I read this book at all is a sign of one of my favorite phenomena of the library. I would never have stumbled upon this title in a book store, but because my local library understands how to tempt me, it was grouped in the very small section of ‘new releases’ right next to the register.
This section is like the candy bars in the checkout aisle at a grocery store for me. If you took me to the candy aisle, I’d default to my old favorites because there are too many choices, and because I don’t really need a candy bar anyway. But if I stand in the checkout aisle for too long, I can understand why so many people buy candy bars they ‘otherwise would not have.’ The selection is limited, and delightful, and yet your favorite candy bar isn’t there, so you try something new on a day when you weren’t going to try anything at all.
The other part of my quirky personality that my local library loves to cater to is this notion I picked up… somewhere… middle school? That everything is connected, all topics intertwine, and ‘researching’ any one of them will immediately give me a broader understanding of myself and of how to be in the world. I still believe this notion is true. So I picked up the painfully yellow book with the enticing title, and I really enjoyed it. Daum is ridiculous at times, but in a ‘who knew I wasn’t the only person on the planet having these mental writhings,’ kind of way. Or in a laugh-out-loud at her absurdity kind of way.
I have always been interested in residential architecture in so far as the way that buildings become such an enormous part of our identity. I think one of the largest aspects of this connection between place and self is that we naturally associate life events with the locations where they occurred. Therefore, the places we have lived our lives become containers for all the memories of our very development as people.
Another reason why we so identify ourselves with our dwellings is that they are indicative of many of our personal choices – where are they located, what do they say about us? Daum encapsulates this sense of identity in place – and discomfort or confusion about that – here:
“And that is how I came to be the president of my own personal academy of domestic desire, the overseer of a pantheon of architectural structures and corresponding price tags that led to the most adolescent form of existential inquiry: Where should I live? Why can’t I afford to live where I want to live? How come where I live is so tied up in why I live?” (page 72)
Another idea that I am still exploring in my own design approach is that of the narrative, of the story, of trying to place oneself in the imagined space and experience it. I wonder to what extent my love of literature and my over active imagination is one of my strongest assets in terms of designing compelling spaces. I could concede to a devil’s advocate who would explain that I’d never be able to get it truly correct, and that each person has a very individual experience of a place. However, I still strongly believe that the imagination of an architect – and their ability to place themselves in the dream-worlds they’re developing – is likely one of our best tools for creating compelling places that actually work.
Daum’s eloquent waxing on wanderlust:
“When you’re as predisposed as I am to wanderlust, any activity that occurs outside your own home (walking to the corner store, for instance) is an exercise in looking around and determining whether you’d rather live there than where you’re currently living. All foreign and domestic travel, all excursions around the city, all books, movies and television shows depicting particular locations become fodder for relocation fantasies. It goes without saying that the real estate section of the newspaper is a form of pornography. So, with a few exceptions (Carbondale, Illinois; San Francisco), I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never visited a place without imagining myself permanently or at least semipermanently installed there.” (page 87)
made me consider the role in my designs, not only of the literature I seem prone to, but the travel. Many architects feel compelled to ‘see the world.’ And when we come home, we have our very romanticized, very personal maps of the places we’ve been, with our sketches and photographs beautifully compounding that. We then incorporate our memories of all the things that worked wonderfully – or that inspired us to conceive of something that could – into our design lexicon.
The most compelling narrative of all, however, was the rapture Daum lifted into regarding the stair landing in one of her homes:
“So, having come to terms with the property’s exterior limitations, I tried to focus on its inner beauty. There was, for instance, something incredibly gorgeous and satisfying about the way the upstairs landing was almost a room unto itself. To reach the top of the stairs, which made a graceful, lanky turn at a leaded-glass window, was to come upon the kind of space that seemed to encapsulate everything I loved about farms, about the Midwest, about life itself. No fewer than two hundred square feet, the landing had walls that were painted a shade of pink so pale it was almost as if early morning light were perpetually casting itself on the thick plaster and thicker woodwork. A built-in linen closet with heavy drawers, tarnished brass handles, and a cabinet latch that clicked shut with that perfect alto timbre known almost exclusively to early-twentieth-century-era door hardware took up most of one wall. The floors, of course, were the same glassy wood that covered the rest of the house.
What excited me most about the landing, though, was the marrow of all that it meant to be – and to have – a landing. The fact that a space large enough to be a room was actually not a room but a portal to other rooms, the fact that not two or three but four other rooms jutted out from this mother ship to form magical worlds filled with the promise of nighttime reading and snug, windy nights under patchwork quilts – that was nothing short of delectable. Why was I so stirred? To this day, I can’t quite say. Maybe it was all those years in New York City apartments with their entrails-shaped hallways and sorry excuses for ‘rooms’; maybe it was the collective claustrophobia of the prairie shack and then the apartment in Topanga and then Dani’s hamster cage of a cottage. Maybe my small living spaces had induced a sort of psychological cramping; maybe my acquisition of this farm was not a deliberate act but an involuntary reflex, a yawn and stretch writ large.” (page 118)
In my mind, this was a continuation of Daum’s lengthy differentiations between a house and a HOME. And my question as an architect is, have I – and how will I continue – to design these kinds of moments? How can a place or space be better designed to capture a person’s imagination, and become a container, a placeholder, an extension of their being?