Materials

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 11: Materials

The sample board was four feet by three feet, a sheet of medium-density fiberboard onto which Miriam had pinned and glued and taped the materials she was considering for Orchard House: six samples of cork flooring, three samples of acoustic plaster, four samples of wood trim, two samples of stone for the bathroom floors, eight paint chips in variations of warm gray, three types of glass, two types of door hardware, and a piece of the Portuguese cork she had used in every building since Lakeview, the cork that was harvested from living trees, the bark stripped without killing the tree, the material that regenerated, that grew back, that returned after being taken, which was a property Miriam valued in a material for reasons she could articulate -- renewability, sustainability, the ethical dimension of using a material that does not require the death of the source -- and for reasons she could not articulate, reasons that had to do with the fact that she was selecting materials for a building where people would die, and the materials that surrounded the dying should be materials that know something about continuation, about persistence, about the coming-back-after-being-stripped-away, and cork knew this, cork was this, cork was the material expression of resilience, and the dying deserve to be surrounded by resilient things.

She had brought the sample board to the construction trailer at the Orchard House site, the temporary structure that James had set up at the northwest corner of the property, the trailer that would serve as the project's nerve center for the duration of construction, the place where drawings were reviewed and decisions were made and the phone calls happened and the emails were sent and the daily business of turning a design into a building was conducted with the organizational precision that James brought to all projects, the precision that Miriam relied upon, the precision that made possible the transformation of her drawings into physical structure, because drawings are not buildings, drawings are instructions for buildings, and the instructions require a translator, and James was the translator, and the translation was the construction.

James sat across the folding table from Miriam, the sample board between them, the October light coming through the trailer's window -- a small window, not a good window, a window that was adequate for a temporary structure but that would have been unacceptable in a permanent one, and the unacceptability of the window was a measure of the difference between the trailer and the building it was helping to produce, the difference between the temporary and the permanent, between the adequate and the good, between the shelter and the architecture, and the difference was materials, was always materials, because the materials are what the body touches and the eye sees and the nose smells and the ear hears, and the sum of these sensory encounters is the experience of the building, and the experience of the building is the architecture.

"Cork," Miriam said, pointing to the samples. "Portuguese. Same supplier as Evergreen House. Same species -- Quercus suber. Same harvest method. The cork is stripped from the tree in summer, when the bark separates most easily, and the tree regrows the bark over nine to twelve years, and then the bark is stripped again, and the cycle continues for the life of the tree, which can be two hundred years, two hundred years of stripping and regrowing, of being taken from and coming back, and the cork that comes from these trees is the cork that will be under the feet of the people who walk through this building, the nurses and the families and the patients who can still walk, and the cork will be warm and quiet and soft, and the warmth and the quiet and the softness will be the floor's contribution to the room, the floor's way of saying: I am here, I am beneath you, I am holding you up, and I am doing it quietly, without the click of tile or the coldness of concrete or the institutional echo of linoleum, I am doing it with the warmth and the quiet of a floor that was designed for a home."

James examined the samples. He turned them over. He bent them. He pressed his thumbnail into the surface and observed the indentation and the recovery, the cork compressing under the nail and then returning to its original shape, slowly, the way cork returns, the way resilient materials return, and the returning was the test, the proof that the material would perform, that the thousands of footsteps and wheelchair wheels and gurney casters that would cross this floor over the building's life would compress the cork and the cork would recover, would return, would maintain its surface and its function and its warmth and its quiet for years, for decades, for the duration of the building's service.

"Fire rating?" James said.

"Class B. Meets code without treatment. Cork is naturally fire-resistant -- the cellular structure traps air, and the trapped air insulates against heat transfer. It's one of the reasons I use it. I don't have to apply chemical fire retardants, which outgas, which produce the smell that new buildings have, the institutional smell, the chemical smell that says: this building is new, this building has been treated, this building has been processed, and the smell of processing is the opposite of the smell of home, and the smell of home is what I'm designing."

James wrote on his clipboard. He wrote the specification: cork flooring, Portuguese, Quercus suber, Class B fire rating, natural finish, no chemical treatment. He wrote with the handwriting of an engineer, precise, legible, each letter formed with the deliberate attention of a person who understands that what he writes will be read by subcontractors who will order the material and install it, and the clarity of his writing is the first link in a chain that ends with the material on the floor, and if the first link is unclear the last link will be wrong, and the wrongness will be in the floor, will be in the building, will be under the feet of the dying, and the wrongness cannot be tolerated, because the dying deserve precision, deserve the right material in the right place installed in the right way.

"Wood," Miriam said. She pointed to the trim samples. "White oak for the door frames and the baseboards and the window sills. Not oak veneer over MDF. Not wood-look laminate. Real wood. Solid wood. White oak, quarter-sawn, finished with natural oil, not polyurethane. Polyurethane produces a plastic sheen, and the plastic sheen is a lie."

She could hear herself, could hear the intensity of her own convictions, the force with which she argued for materials that most clients would consider interchangeable -- oak versus oak veneer, cork versus vinyl, stone versus ceramic tile. She understood that the dying person lying in the bed would not consciously distinguish between real oak and oak veneer on the window sill. The conscious distinction was not the point.

"The ceiling," James said.

"Acoustic plaster. Continuous surface, no visible grid. The same system I used at Evergreen House -- a sprayed-on acoustic substrate, then a skim coat of plaster, then paint. The result is a ceiling that looks like a plastered ceiling in a house, smooth and continuous, with no T-bar grid, no acoustic tile edges, no institutional geometry. The ceiling is the surface the dying see most, James. The ceiling is the last sky. And the last sky should not have a grid."

James looked at her. He had the look he sometimes had during material discussions, the look that was not skepticism but assessment, the builder's assessment of the architect's specification, the practical evaluation of whether the specified material would perform as intended, whether it could be installed within the budget, whether the subcontractors available in central Oregon had experience with the material, whether the material was available in the quantities required, and these practical considerations were James's domain, were the builder's contribution to the design, the contribution that grounded the architect's vision in the realities of construction, and the grounding was necessary, was essential, was the thing that made architecture buildable rather than theoretical.

"Acoustic plaster is more expensive than tile," James said.

"I know."

"And the application is more labor-intensive. We'll need a specialty subcontractor. There may not be one in Bend."

"There's one in Portland. Hennessey Acoustics. I've used them on three projects. They'll travel."

"That adds cost."

"I know what it adds. I've budgeted for it. The ceiling is not negotiable, James. The grid is not acceptable. The grid is the visible structure of the institution, the grid is the thing that says: you are in a facility, you are under a system, you are beneath a ceiling that was designed for efficiency rather than dignity, and I will not put a grid above the dying. I will not put a grid above anyone, but especially not above the dying, because the dying look up, the dying spend their last days looking at the ceiling, and the ceiling should be worthy of being the last thing they see after the window and before the closing of the eyes."

James wrote the specification. Acoustic plaster, continuous surface, no visible grid, specialty contractor, Hennessey Acoustics. He wrote it without further argument because the argument was over, had been over before it began, because James understood that some of Miriam's specifications were negotiable and some were not, and the ceiling was not, and the not-negotiable items were the items that defined the building, that made it Miriam's building rather than a generic hospice, and the definition was worth the cost, was worth the specialty contractor from Portland, was worth the additional labor and the additional time, because the building would stand for fifty years and the ceiling would be the last sky for thousands of patients over those fifty years and the quality of the last sky was worth the cost.

"Glass," Miriam said. "Low-iron for the patient room windows. All sixteen rooms. The east-facing windows and the garden-facing windows."

"Low-iron is twice the cost of standard float glass."

"I know. Standard float glass has a green tint. The iron content in the silica produces a green cast, and the green cast distorts color. The dying look through the windows and they see the mountains, but the mountains through standard glass are greener than the real mountains, and the greenness is a lie, a material lie, the glass imposing its own color on the world, and the world's color is not the glass's to change. Low-iron glass is clear. Low-iron glass shows the world as the world is. The mountains are the color of mountains. The sky is the color of sky. The snow is the color of snow. And the accuracy of color is a form of honesty, and honesty is a form of respect, and respect is what the dying deserve, and I will not put a green tint between the dying and the world they are leaving."

She heard herself again. She heard the repetition, the insistence, the return to the same theme -- the dying deserve real things, the dying deserve honesty, the dying deserve respect. It was not rhetoric. It was the load-bearing principle beneath every specification.

James studied the glass samples. Two pieces, each six inches square, one standard float glass with its faint green tint, one low-iron glass that was clear, truly clear, the clarity of air, of nothing, of the absence of material between the eye and the world. He held them up to the trailer window, one in each hand, and looked through them at the October sky, at the mountains visible in the distance, at the foothills where the morning sun rose, and he saw the difference, saw the green tint in the standard glass, saw the clarity in the low-iron glass, and the seeing was the argument, the seeing was the justification, the seeing was the proof that the specification was not extravagance but precision, not luxury but honesty.

"How do you know what they need?" James said.

The question was not about the glass. The question was about all of it -- the cork, the wood, the plaster, the glass, the thirty-six-inch doors, the nine-foot-six ceilings, the twelve-foot corridors, the art at forty-two inches, the kitchen with the range and the oven, the garden with the apple trees. The question was about the accumulated knowledge that produced these specifications, the knowledge that said: this is what the dying need, this is the material, this is the dimension, this is the proportion, this is the light, this is the thing that will hold them, and the holding is the architecture, and the architecture is the materials.

"I listen to the rooms after the patients leave," Miriam said. "The rooms tell you what worked and what didn't. The rooms remember."

She said it simply, without elaboration, because the statement was simple, was the simplest expression of her practice, the practice of returning to her buildings after the patients had died and the rooms had been cleaned and the beds had been remade and the rooms were empty, waiting for the next patient, and standing in the empty rooms and listening. Not listening for sound -- the rooms were silent, or nearly silent, holding only the ambient sounds of the building's mechanical systems, the HVAC, the hum of the electrical panel, the distant sounds of the kitchen and the corridor. Listening for something else. Listening for the room's memory of the person who had been in it, the residual presence that Miriam believed rooms held, the way cork holds the impression of a footstep -- briefly, temporarily, the impression fading as the cork recovers, but present for a moment, the record of the pressure, the evidence of the passage.

She listened and the rooms told her things. They told her that the cork was right, that the warmth of the cork was felt even by the patient who could no longer walk on it, felt through the feet of the visitors, through the quiet of the nurses' footsteps, through the absence of the institutional echo that tile and linoleum produced. They told her that the ceiling height was right.

They told her that the windows were right, that the east-facing glass admitted the morning light with the gentleness she intended, that the low-iron clarity showed the world without distortion. They told her that the walls were right, that the warm gray received the light without commentary, that the rooms were quiet without being silent.

And they told her things she had not expected, things the rooms taught her that she could not have learned from drawings or from theory, things that only the inhabited room can teach. Miriam returned to her buildings after the patients died not to admire her work but to learn from it.

James put down the glass samples. He picked up his pen. He wrote the remaining specifications on his clipboard: low-iron glass for all patient room windows, white oak trim throughout, stone tile for bathrooms -- Vermont slate, honed finish, radiant heat beneath. He wrote with the precision of a builder who understood that each specification was a commitment.

Miriam gathered the sample board. She gathered the specifications. She gathered the trace paper rolls and the pen and the compass and the notebook and the professional apparatus of twenty-two years of practice, and she placed them in the car, and she drove back to Portland. On the way she stopped at Evergreen House, because she stopped at Evergreen House every day now, because her mother was there, because Room 6 was there.

She pushed open the thirty-six-inch door. She walked across the cork floor. She sat in the visitor's chair. Lin was sleeping. The afternoon light from the corridor -- not the morning light, not the east-facing light, but the reflected, indirect light that filled the room in the afternoon, the light that bounced off the corridor walls and entered Room 6 through the open door -- lay on the bed and on Lin and on the warm gray walls, and the light was soft, was diffused, was the light of a room that was holding a sleeping woman, and the room was quiet, the cork absorbing the sound of Miriam's breathing, the plaster absorbing the hum of the medical equipment, the quiet holding the sleeping and the sleeping holding the quiet, and Miriam sat in the chair and she looked at the materials she had specified seven years ago and she saw them holding her mother and she knew that the holding was real, was material, was the physical fact of surfaces supporting a body and walls enclosing a space and a ceiling lifting above and a floor lying beneath, and the physical facts were the materials, and the materials were enough.

They had to be enough.

They were the only thing she could give.