Stand up straight
Michael Pollan writes about food, where it comes from, and its social and political histories. In his 2013 book, Cooked, he wrote about the chemistry of food, analyzing what happens to the molecules in food when something is boiled, roasted, grilled, or fermented. As he wrote about his experiments fermenting cabbage to make sauerkraut, he made me laugh by describing a voluptuous belch emanating from the fermentation vessel on his kitchen counter, enough that I ordered a similar vessel to do my own experiments. I have never heard the belch on our kitchen counter, and I have had a variety of results, some of which convinced me that it is easier to grow the bacteria of mold than the bacteria of fermentation, and others that brought the reward of tart, tangy, crispy sauerkraut. I made it with cabbages of different colors, beets, carrots, and other delights.
Some of Pollan’s other books, such as In Defense of Food, The Botany of Desire, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, are all central to the culture of food writing, taking readers to the fields, kitchens, and factories where food is grown, produced, and manufactured. Four of his books have been made into documentary films. He is a winner of the James Beard Award for Food Writing, the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace, and is a Guggenheim Fellow, among many other honors. In 2010 he was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
One of his books stands out from the rest as he leaves the world of food to write about architecture. A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, written in 1997 and published by Penguin, is the chronicle of the design and construction of a writing hut on his property in rural Connecticut. Though he freely admits he is not a man of his hands, he conceived the idea of building a free-standing structure himself, so he would have a quiet and private place to read and write. His wife, the painter Judith Belzer, was pregnant at the time, and they were sharing studio space in one room of their house. He mentioned that her talk-radio habit was not conducive to his writing, and he was in a moderate crisis realizing how the coming baby was diminishing the size of the house. He wanted a place of his own.
He engaged an architect who was full of theories about what the hut should include, such as two long walls of bookcases, one of which would be pierced by the entrance door to give one a sense of passing through mass when coming in. His desk would be along one of the short walls, under a large window placed for the perfect view. The building would be about thirteen by nine feet with a pitched gable roof, the interior open to the peak, and there would be a wood stove for warmth in the winter.
He paced the property carrying a chair so he could sit and soak in different views, searching for the perfect site, and settled on a spot at the top of a rise next to a large boulder that would anchor the building visually. He and the architect spent a lot of time discussing the building’s orientation to take advantage of the most desirable angles of sunlight, and they worked hard to develop the drawings so the new structure would have Zen-like perfection of placement, proportions, content, and furnishings. With the site, orientation, and drawings complete, Pollan was ready to build, and he faced his admitted weakness that he was not a builder and should involve someone to guide him through the complexities of this, the simplest of buildings.
Pollan found Joe, who worked most of the time in a local auto body shop repairing wrecked cars and who had worked part time for the contractor who renovated his house. Pollan described Joe as “a master of the material world, equally at home in the realms of steel, wood, plants, concrete, and machinery. . . . He has made his living as a mechanic, a carpenter, a tree surgeon, a house painter, an excavator, a landscaper, a welder, and a footing man on a foundation crew. He also knows his way around plumbing and gardens and guns.” That is a long résumé for a guy who is twenty-seven years old, and my suspicions were confirmed when Pollan let it slip that Joe is something of a know-it-all.
Small as it would be, the building had to be set on some kind of foundation that reached below the forty-six-inch frost line, so the two set about digging holes, placing sonotubes (cardboard forms for pouring cylindrical cement footings), placing photogenic boulders on top of the resulting pillars, and placing wooden footings on the boulders. They cut and mortised timbers for the post-and-beam frame of the building, and when they went to build the plate that would cap the four walls, they realized that the building was a couple inches out of square. They surmised that one of the footings had been moved by excessive groundwater and decided it would add character to the building, even if it would make framing the roof more complicated.
A Place of My Own gets downright humorous when Pollan writes about the history, character, construction, and qualities of roofs, noting that much of modern architecture incorporates flat roofs that are notoriously prone to leak. A pitched roof naturally sheds both rain and meltwater easily. He quotes the great modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright who declared, “If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough,” and who responded to complaints about his leaky roofs by saying, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.” The original owner of Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater referred to the iconic house as a “Seven Bucket Building.”
A view of the woods
During the spring and summer of 2020 Wendy and I along with the families of two of our children retreated to our house in Maine to escape the rigors of covid in New York City and Philadelphia. We were fortunate to be able to add a “sleeping cabin” 150 feet from the house, where one of the family units stayed for several months. Churches across the country were closed to the public, and the organbuilding world had shut down, leaving me unemployed for eight weeks for the first time in my life. I was not handling it well, and son Andy and I conceived the plan to fill our days building an outhouse in the woods behind the new cabin.
Unlike Michael Pollan, we did not spend a lot of time choosing a site (there was an obvious spot at the edge of a ravine in the woods) or the orientation—we simply figured that when sitting inside the house looking out through an open door, most would prefer to look off into the woods rather than a leafy view of the cabin and the lawn beyond. Andy cut a nice serpentine path through the shrubs and paved it with the chips from a couple stumps that had been ground up. A local excavator was grading our half-mile dirt driveway, and we relied on him to dig the hole.
Architect son-in-law Giorgos drew plans for a heavy timber foundation that defined the hole, the footprint of the building, and a porch. There would be four walls—one with a door, two with windows, and one with the obligatory half-moon for decoration and ventilation. The pitched roof would be built as a single unit that would slide on top of the building. We built and assembled all the frames in the driveway outside the doors to my workshop, then took it apart and carted it into the woods where we added siding, door, window shutters, and a beautiful square block of granite (the gift of our excavator) as a step to the outside porch.
Thinking about structures
A couple weeks ago, I went to Oberlin, Ohio, to participate in the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the dedication of the wonderful Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall of the Conservatory of Music. I was an incoming freshman in the fall of 1974, and this trip evoked a flood of nostalgia. Walking around the town and through the buildings reminded me of people I have not thought of in all that time, of lessons learned in life and love as I grew from an adolescent to what passed for an adult, and the joys and agonies of striving to master the art of playing the organ. I had drinks, meals, and strolling chats with old friends and was delighted and enriched to hear the Flentrop and the many other instruments on campus that were part of my formation as a musician. Visiting professor of organ Christa Rakich and assistant professor of organ Jonathan William Moyer shared J. S. Bach’s entire Clavier-Übung III, that masterful collection of chorale preludes and duettos sandwiched between the great Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, the “Saint Anne,” offered as the central concert of the weekend.
As I sat in the concert hall listening to and staring at that iconic organ, I was reminded of the elegant lessons I learned about the structure of a classic free-standing hardwood organ case during my time working with John Leek in Oberlin. I had joined him as a three-day-a-week keyholder in my sophomore year, traveling around northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania together doing service calls. He taught me to tune and brought me into his shop to learn about working with wood, leather, low-voltage electricity, and the myriad skills and tasks involved in the art of organbuilding.
John was a first-generation Dutchman and was well known to the staff at Flentrop, the venerable Dutch firm that built and restored many distinguished organs in Europe, the dazzling organ in Warner Hall, and seemingly countless other organs on campus at Oberlin and in surrounding churches and universities. We installed several new smaller Flentrop organs ourselves and were engaged to help a crew from the Netherlands with the installation of the beautiful three-manual organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland. It was that organ that introduced me to the magic of the structure of those instruments.
The structure starts with a floor frame that outlines the footprint of the organ. It is usually made of lumber milled to about one inch by five inches (25 x 125 millimeters) connected with lap joints and placed flat on the floor to locate the organ. The frame is leveled with shims under the locations of load-bearing legs to form a solid and plumb base for the instrument. The floor frame shows the location of the action chassis, a large assembly of mechanical bits that includes the keydesk and keyboards, manual and pedal couplers, and the “hook up” points for the manual and pedal key actions. The stopjambs and drawknobs are sometimes included in this big assembly, which is typically shipped in one piece. There are vertical legs on either side of the action chassis that will hold up the level of the organ case. The floor frame also bears the positions of the rest of the upright legs of the first level of the organ. There is always a leg or a corner beam at each corner of the instrument, with additional legs along the back, sides, and front of the organ. The number of legs varies according to the size of the organ, but it is these that will ultimately support the entire weight of the organ.
In the Cleveland instrument, there are eight strong vertical legs that are integrated into the lower case. They in turn support the impost, a massive frame that defines the dimensions of the upper case, which is maybe four feet wider than the lower. The impost includes the heavy molding across the front and sides of the organ and the three towers, two pointed and one round, that hold the largest pipes. The transition between the lower case and the wider impost is softened by gracefully curved casework, often referred to as “armpits.” Besides helping with the visual completion of the case, they serve the important purpose of concealing the rollerboards that transition the key action from the width of the keyboards, about thirty-five inches, to the outer reaches of the pedal windchests, which span the entire width of the organ.
The impost provides the placement and support for the windchests of the Hoofdwerk (Great) and Pedaal and also positions sixteen vertical legs that support the three tower crowns, each with their own elaborate moldings. Some of those legs support the windchest of the expressive Bovenwerk division. When that windchest is in place, some installers can stand on the chest while others stand outside the case on scaffolding to hoist the lower side crowns into place. There is a little wrangling to do to get the tall and floppy legs to fit in their sockets, but once those two crowns are fastened the structure is rigid, and it is easy enough (though a little scary as one is fifty feet above the floor of the church) to plop the high center crown onto its legs.
My colleagues from many organ companies who have built and assembled organ cases like this will know that I am making it sound simple. Because the organ case is wider than the “birds’ nest” gallery it stands on, you can look straight down fifty feet to the floor from the top of the case on either side. I make it sound as if you are snapping Lego blocks together. In fact you are wrestling a little to get all the mortises to fit into the tower crowns. Did I mention that it is up high and you might feel a little wobbly?
When we started this installation, we placed the floor frame in the center of the balcony, and as we fit the pieces together higher and higher, we realized that the center tower crown would not be centered in the Gothic arch of the window or under the ridge of the ceiling, so we moved the entire organ—floor frame, action chassis, impost, windchests, towers, and all—using a pair of house jacks lying on their sides to sidle the organ a few inches to starboard. It swayed a little, making us feel a little funny inside, but it worked fine. After that, the tall case could be fastened to the wall behind the organ. It has been standing straight and solid for over forty-five years, and I think it will stay there longer.
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Michael Pollan’s survey of architecture in the context of building his little hut is an interesting introduction to the theories and practice of architecture, told from a personal point of view as his architect and builder coached him through the process. He reports that with the building finished, he wrote three books, including the one in question, and part of another in that place of his own. He left Connecticut when he was appointed a professor of journalism at Berkeley in 2003. It must have been hard for him to leave that little building. I do not know how it is being used today.
You might think it a little funny that I started thinking about my outhouse while listening to my friends play such great music on that wonderful organ in Oberlin. I suppose that others in attendance that night could confess odd trains of thought as well. The functional simplicity of that classic style of pipe organ is at the heart of the instrument’s beauty. The opulent mahogany case is the visual presence of the organ, the structure that holds it up, and the resonating chamber that blends its sounds. That is making maximum use of the lumber. We can talk about the structure of an electro-pneumatic organ
another time.
