Glass and Steel

I have no appreciation for modern architecture. I know this about myself. I do not like sleek, modern or dramatic anything, really. What's the point of making a building that looks like a cube balanced on one corner? The fact that you can? The fact that it's different from everything around it? I am unimpressed.

My husband, of course, values those two attributes highly. Looking at houses together is a comedy routine. He'll look at a house and wrinkle his nose in distaste. "It's so boxy and square," he'll say.

"What's it supposed to look like? A butterfly? A car?" Complaining that a house is too boxy is like complaining that shirts are human shaped. Of course it's boxy. It's a big box with windows and doors. That's what it's supposed to be. Ask virtually any elementary school child in America to draw a house, and they'll draw the same thing – a box with a triangular roof, a door, and two windows.

Dan will swoon over the balanced cube. "Do you know how hard it is to engineer that?" he'll marvel. I am not bored easily, but I am bored by trying to imagine how to build otherworldly shapes. Just make a conventional shape and be done with it, already.

Dan loves geodesic domes. He's often said that he'd love to live in one. I'm left wondering where, exactly, I'd hang anything on the walls. Where would I put the furniture, cowering in the center of the rooms? And what about windows? He once told me that if you used the right translucent material, you wouldn't need windows. It would actually be brighter than regular houses with windows. Well, OK, but light is only half of why I want windows.

Recently we got a magazine with a cover story on a new bridge. It looks like, I don't know, maybe a wing – the driving surface is fairly conventional (after all, you have to drive over it,) but the upper portion of the bridge is an elongated triangle, high and soaring at one end and tapering to nothing at the other. The article urged readers to go see the bridge, and make sure they saw it at night, too, when it would be lit. I was just thinking, "Why would anyone travel anyplace to see a triangular bridge?" when Dan saw the article. "Wow, that looks pretty cool," he said. "I'd like to see that." How did we manage to marry each other? I'm so glad most of our home owning decisions are based on finances.

When I was 19, my college fiction writing class received an assignment: describe something from the point of view of two different characters. Each should have an opinion very different from the other. It was an easy assignment for me.

You're always told, "Write what you know." I chose to center the assignment on the building I'd worked in for years, a monolith downtown. My first job was as a runner in the law firm my mother worked for. It was on first the 11th, then the 15th, floor of a bank and office building. The bank took up the lower floors, and various offices – many of them law offices – took up the rest. The building was a towering glass and steel edifice that looked black from the window tinting. It was modern and impressive, and I never really liked it.

One of my characters was a young man, a newlywed. He saw in the tall, shiny black building a symbol of progress, hope and strength. Everything that was right and good and wonderful about his future was embodied in that building. The other character was an elderly man, a veteran. He saw it as a sterile, impersonal, uncaring symbol of a society that was the same. This man knew that progress leaves people behind, that the bottom line is always money and not human beings. I got an "A".

You tend to identify most with the characters whose experiences mirror your own. I was young, I was engaged; on paper, my first character should have been me. Instead, I was the old man; wrinkled, walking with a cane, invisible to passersby, memories of a long ago battlefield unconsciously coloring his world. I wrote both of them well, but the old man was the one who held my opinions.

I'm at a loss to explain why so many museums are so frightfully modern, so Buck Rogers. I love museums, but I love the inside. I tend to think the outside should be old, weathered, stone, that they should show some age, for goodness sake. The most beautiful museum exterior I've ever seen is the Museum of Man in San Diego's Balboa Park. I absolutely swooned over the darned thing. Back in the days when photos took film, and you had to make it count every time you pushed the shutter button, I probably shot an entire roll of film on just the dome. There must be some reason things speak to a person's soul, but whatever the formula, that did it for me.

There's always the shorter, less poetic opinion. One of my sisters once watched me decorating my house or yard – I don't remember which, or what I was using. I just remember her chrome and glass sensibilities being offended as she queried, "What is it with you and old, ratty things?"