MICHIGAN

I WANT PLACE. I mean, I want place. Place is the most important thing to architects. Place is the most covetable desire. Place can rip all of your neuroses off in a moment. Genus loci, the spirit of a place, is never discussed in architectural theory today. It's cheesy. It's theory for the New Taliesin school of quack-dom. It's unfair and un-PC, too, because it has to do with having something special before the building, and making the building into what was meant to be there. With the current emphasis on digital design, it's hard to see a direct correlation with whatever the nature on the site predicates, and only a few lucky rich kids can make a building in a place. But place is out there and man, it's so much more powerful than any cold steelscape or surreal pocket created to hold a cocktail party.
A house on Old Mission Peninsula in Michigan was place for me recently. Place starts with the journey. The tiny plane in which I flew in, the rental car on wet leaves road, the makes and years of the other cars driving, the smell at the corner where the drugstore is.
Place is also time. The house was built in 188o. It was re-done as a country home in the early 1960's and is in perfect mint condition with all of Buckminster Fuller's original printings on the bookshelf. All of the furniture is painted a plain green color that's too standard to possibly still be considered a color these days. It gets quiet during the week, when the weekend wine tourists are gone. We made chili, watched football, and the ceilings were just a little bit lower than eight feet- as if the house was built with a different system of measurement. Nuances like this made the place what it was. What it was... it was a reassurance. I raked leaves when I was there and we made a fire. I stared into the coals when the fire was dying. I knew that I was on a tiny finger of land, tucked into bed by an awesome lake. It wasn't the middle of nowhere, it was the end of somewhere. I was safe in bed, geographically.
I would go back there to spend the rest of my life. I don't know what I'd do; maybe I'd teach at the nearby college. I don't know how long I would stay either, because I get to thinking about place, and place also has to do with change. Change itself is the place where I live. Five years ago people asked me where I was from and I told them "Miami International Airport." It's comforting to know that you can go someplace else. That someplace else, right now, is Michigan.