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Can you be passive-aggresive with yourself?
comments (0) February 19th, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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Last fall, I invited Wendell Berry to write the “Taking Issue” essay for this year’s Houses, and Wendell turned me down. Since then, I’ve considered various
other authors and topics that might be appropriate. For instance, I thought
about inviting architect Sim
Van der Ryn, whom The New York Times called “the grandfather of the
green movement,” to write a critique of the
LEED program.
A couple of years ago, during a lecture, I heard Sim talk about designing the Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, Calif.
At the building’s opening reception, a woman stormed up to Sim and berated him
for including an energy-guzzling central air-conditioning system. It was a
proud moment when he informed her that the building was not air-conditioned.
After telling this story, Sim went on to complain that the LEED program would
have awarded him points for installing a high-efficiency air-conditioning
system, but did not award him any points for designing a building that didn’t
need air-conditioning.
I decided not to invite Sim to write the “Taking Issue” essay for several
reasons. In my experience, architects are better at designing buildings than
writing about them. And being famous does not help the problem. But I also
developed incredible sympathy for LEED when I discovered that you get points
for designing a home with a bench just inside the door where people can sit and
remove their shoes. You also get points for opening up a house to the public so
that people can learn about energy-efficient and environmental design. How can
you criticize a program like that?
As the months went by, and the late-February deadline approached, I considered
and rejected other possible authors and topics until eventually, there simply
wasn’t enough time left to find an author and then develop, write, and edit an
essay with that person. Only one option remained. I would have to write the
essay myself. And I wonder now (this is the passive-aggressive part) if that
hadn’t been my goal all along.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing in 20-plus years at Fine Homebuilding, it’s this: Figure out what
you want to say before you start writing. But of course, I didn’t do that. I
just started writing, expressing my thoughts. I knew I wanted to write about
green building, but I didn’t have a clue what point I wanted to make. So I just
kept writing down random observations on the subject. I was like a bird dog
crisscrossing a field trying to pick up a scent. It was a throwback to my
fiction-writing college days.
The problem with this approach is that you fall in love with your own words.
“Isn’t that a lovely thought? Haven’t I said that well?” And then you’re left
with dozens of paragraphs to which you’re overly attached, but that serve no
unified purpose. This is one reason why writers need editors, someone who can
remove what doesn’t belong regardless of how good it is.
Eventually, in desperation, I asked myself what one point would I like
drive home with readers of Fine Homebuilding.
Here’s the paragraph that poured out of me in response:
“We builders of homes, and I mean all of us here—the architects, the
carpenters, the plumbers, the roofers, the do-it-yourselfers—all of us are
charged with a sacred trust, and we have not yet realized the enormity of that
responsibility. We thought we were just earning a living, or making shelter, or
expressing our creativity, or maybe just enjoying ourselves. We thought the
proper standards were, along with the applicable building codes, our own (or
our client’s) comfort, pocketbook, and aesthetics. We thought, on some level at
least, “Well, it’s not brain surgery.” But it turns out that it is brain
surgery, and that even the most conscientious among us is still a dilettante.
People’s lives, their physical and economic health, depend on what and how we
build. People living under the roofs we build and people halfway around the
world living with the consequences of how our building materials were mined and
manufactured. People alive today, and people yet to be born who will inherit
what we’ve built and whatever damage we may have done in the process.”
If I can just figure out a way to stretch that paragraph into 1500 words in the
next week, I’ll be all set.
P.S. My knee surgery went fine despite the fact that when my
surgeon came in to see me before the operation, I asked him if he was sober. It
seemed like a fair question. Without missing a beat, he replied, “Sober as I
ever am.”
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
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