Architecture
By Ray Nayler 

*Originally published in Queen's Quarterly  Volume 127 #3 Fall 2020

Architecture was important to my grandfather. That is to say, he was somewhat obsessed by it.

What brings this on is looking at the funeral home. It's so nondescript you would miss it from the street. In fact, I never knew it was there until I had to attend my grandfather's funeral. Turns out I'd driven past the place maybe a thousand times already.

It's sort of a family quirk, these obsessions. With my grandmother, it's Atheism. She thinks anyone who believes in god is "a total jackass" who "might as well believe in the fucking tooth fairy."

She only says "fucking" when she's around family. Around everyone else she leaves that word out.

She was the one who taught me that you don't ever, EVER capitalize the word god in your writing.

The funeral home has a pitched, shingled roof like a house, but the front door is glass, like a restaurant door. Wooden letters spell out Evergreen Funeral Home in a mid-century font.

Everything looks cheap and disposable.

Obsessions. With my uncle, it's birds. It's really important to him you understand the fact there are no blue jays in California. That bird that looks like a blue jay? It’s a scrub jay.

I used to tell people that – the factoid about blue jays – to look smart. That's the other family quirk: looking smart. Quite often, it works. The fact is, everyone in my family is pretty smart.

But what I discovered is this: almost everyone who thinks you are smart, when you say something like that? Well, they also think you're an asshole.

What I learned – this thing the rest of my family didn't learn – is to keep my mouth shut when I feel like saying something smart. Sometimes, things come out anyway. But most of the time, I manage to keep them inside.

The problem is, being a quiet guy makes you a victim to other people's opinions. Especially if you have a family full of people who like to "hold forth" on a lot of topics that other people don't really care about.

My topic, by the way – the one that I try not to talk about all the time – is botany. But this story isn't about me.

The last conversation I had with my grandfather about architecture was on his 75th birthday. It was evening, an Inland Empire evening after a long and smoggy day. On one of those evenings, the darkness is a relief, because you no longer have to be aware of the fact that you can't see the nearby hills. If you breathe deeply you feel these burning spots at the bottom of your lungs, like you just set a personal best for the quarter mile.

We were drinking a $700 bottle of scotch he'd gotten that day from a friend of his. We were drinking it because that's what you do with gifts, in my family: you gloat over them by wasting them extravagantly. Later on, you brag about it – like I'm doing here.

I should mention that this was on the back patio of a single level ranch style tract home, built 1955. When it was built, the house was almost indistinguishable from its neighbors in the tract. But over the years, everyone had remodeled or changed the vegetation, so that now the houses were almost identical but with different plants in front or some tumor of a guest addition coming off one side.

Nowadays, when they fool you into buying the same house everyone else has, they build those little differences in right from the start. It saves everyone the trouble of trying to compensate later.

My grandfather was talking about Berlin. That was where he had been stationed after the war. The city had been almost totally destroyed – smashed by bombs and artillery and Russian tanks – and there wasn't much left of the architecture.

For my grandfather, that was a good thing: it was the architecture he blamed for the war, you see. All those drafty, ancient houses where you were just sure a bunch of other people had already died.

"In Berlin," he was saying, "When you looked at the buildings that had survived, like the Berliner Dom, or what was left of the Brandenburg gate, you could feel the weight of the ages on you. The heaviness of the stone. This is why nothing over there could change."

The light was on in the backyard pool, and it glowed a light blue, wobbling blankly off in the dark near the line of bird of paradise bushes and immaculated grass.

"It was like a tomb. A beautiful tomb, but can you imagine the feeling of these young people, living there, wanting something to change, with all that dead stone around them, trapping them?"

He rolled the scotch around the ice in his cut-crystal glass (another gift), sipped it. "Of course they were going to explode. All that weight on them, those stones, like ice pushing down on the earth's crust in Greenland. In Greenland, the Earth's crust bows in hundreds of feet. Just from the weight of all that ice. Did you know that?"

I did not know that.

"When you took a breath in Berlin," He said, "You must have felt like you were breathing the bones of the dead."

My grandfather fought in the war for five minutes, parachuting into occupied Holland for Operation Market Garden and laying in a ditch with a bunch of other "replacements" to the mauled 82nd Airborne. He remembers an ancient stone farmhouse, with a hole blown in one wall. Smoke pouring out of the hole. There was a dead man in the road with his parachute silk wrapped around him like a cocoon. The concussion of a nearby mortar explosion knocked the barrel of my grandfather's rifle into his face, damaging his left eye.

All that training for nothing.

By the time he was better, the war was over and he was assigned to help run a radio station in Berlin. There's a black-and-white picture: him, a jeep, a very German-looking German girl. The jeep's windshield is folded down; the girl looks bored and a little overly concerned about dust in the great horned twists of her hair. My grandfather is squinting.

Personally, I can never quite think of people in black-and-white photographs as real.

"That's the problem with Europe, you see . . . that old way of living: stiff and stone and huddled together with your own dead . . ." He takes another drink, he pats his front pocket for a cigar, but he's forgotten them inside. "So when I came back from Berlin, I wanted a house that nobody had ever died in."

Inside, through the plaster and wood walls and the single-paned, aluminum-clad windows, you can hear my grandmother washing dishes, the clatter of plates. She had a dishwasher but almost never used it.

Frank Lloyd Wright said: Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

"Of course you look around you, and all you see is houses that look alike."

That isn't exactly what I see.

"What you should be seeing, though, is the fairness of it all. The equity. Each man with his own yard, his own rooms, his own garage. Everyone equal. There are no castles here, reminding you of who your ancestors are. Or aren't."

Usually, this is where he gets into Frank Lloyd Wright. Or maybe the Window on the Landing Story. The Window on the Landing Story is meant to illustrate that architecture affects people, that it changes them. The Window on the Landing opens a view to the outside world. If it leads only to an airshaft, that's the vista the child sees – the nothingness of his future life. If to a field of grass, life seems limitless. My grandfather's father painted the Window on the Landing over because the light got into his eyes in the morning.

My great grandfather – this is just about all I know about him. No castles here in America, reminding me of who my ancestors are. I don't even know what he was obsessed with. Maybe geology? Masonic conspiracies?

There is a black-and-white picture of my great-grandfather. The car he's standing in front of is a Model T. He is in a suit, has a pocket watch, and is squinting. There is a shadow cast into the picture by the photographer. The photographer appears to be female, and wearing a pillbox hat.
Actually, the picture is sepia-toned. But still, I can't see him as real. He’s just a man carefully painting over a window, holding the paint bucket in one hand, the brush in the other, covering the panes of glass evenly.

When they were young, before my mom and my uncle were born, my grandparents lived in a house outside of Chicago. It had a basement, and one of those porches with the big river-rock columns. They got it cheap, and you can picture it: all yellowed, waterstained wallpaper, perdurable horsehide furniture and drafts.

It wasn't the kind of a place you wanted to raise a kid, so they moved again to California. My grandmother says that all the time about that house. "It wasn't the kind of place you wanted to raise a kid." As if there had been a high crime rate, or a dangerous set of train tracks, right there in the living room.

The problem with Frank Lloyd Wright houses, which are probably perfect for raising kids in, is that nobody who lives in our world could afford one. Remember – that $700 bottle of scotch was a gift.

When they got here to the Inland Empire, the tract homes were so new you could see the lines between the strips of turf on everyone's lawn. If you pulled even a little hard, you could start rolling up the grass. You could cart away a lawn like a Persian carpet, rolled in the back of your truck.

What you would want with it – with someone else's lawn--I don't know.

Kids in other states had snow days. My mom and my uncle had smog days. All those streamlined cars, shark-finned, heavy as tanks. Some days, you couldn't even go outside.

My grandfather says: "The problem with Los Angeles is that it turns out not everyone can have it all."

Up north, at the University where I am still working on my doctoral thesis, they protested a parking garage--the loss of a few trees. Everything is green there and waiting, with a few buildings tucked into the piney smell of it all.

Driving into the Empire, you can feel the weight of things pressing down on you: freeways, roads, automobiles. But the houses are lathe and pine, aluminum and faux brick, vinyl siding – all of it light, ephemeral.

A housing division is known, in the industry, as a "cluster" or sometimes as a "pod."

The trees down here are just a bunch of tourists breathing yellow air, like everyone else in Southern California. None of these trees are native. Whatever was here before is gone. What's here today is subdivisions, cul-de-sacs, sprawl.

When it starts to rain outside the funeral home, immediately it brings back the Los Angeles of my childhood for me, the smell of rain after a dry spell, that seems made of nostalgia.

Incidentally, that smell is caused by Streptomyces bacteria. The rain kicks up an aerosol of water and soil, which carries the bacteria to your nose. That's spores you smell.

We have a Petri dish in the botany lab that I labeled Los Angeles. It's full of Streptomyces. Any time I get nostalgic, I just take off the lid and breathe in.

My uncle puts his arm on my shoulder. He lives in Berlin with his wife. I went and visited him there, wandering the dome of the Reichstag, visiting the Hauptbahnhof. All of it glass and light, so you don't feel the buildings press on you.

Maybe my grandfather was right, and they are trying to correct a problem.

Helmut Jahn, who designed the Sony Center in Berlin, says that light, both natural and artificial, is the essence of the design. But maybe he really means lightness, permeability. The Sony Center looks like a giant tent – pitched here today, gone on the next to another European Capital.

On the back porch, my grandfather is gazing out at the pool. "Of course, there's no such thing as the perfect building, the perfect environment. Maybe that was really what the war was about – a chance to smash everything and start all over again."

These conversations, most of them never went anywhere. But it didn't used to matter: I used to think they were a well that would never run dry. But one day you have the last conversation about something. You don't know it's the last until later.

We never even finished that bottle of scotch.

"Of course," my grandfather says, "you never know if starting all over again will make things better. You never know if we're making progress. Basically, people get the buildings that they deserve."

In front of the funeral home, in the parking lot smelling of Streptomyces nostalgia, my grandmother is tolerating a woman telling her that it's okay, because my grandfather is in heaven now. You can see my grandmother's lips twist. She wants to say something about the tooth fairy, but she's too polite.

Everyone is in black. Someone self-sacrificingly puts a black umbrella over my grandmother to keep the rain off.

There are no eaves to hide under.

None of this architecture, after all, was designed for calamity.
​
Or even for a change in the weather.