Time Isn’t a Constant

Time isn’t a constant. It resembles nothing like a perpetual metronome, not even a continuum, though it’s the theory we operate on. If you’ve ever been through a major vehicle accident, it slows down, or else happens in a flash of time you can’t separate before and after in your mind. “One moment I was entering the intersection, then all I saw was this blue streak and WHAM!”

The nuns taught that time can be split into days, hours, minutes, seconds, all precisely measured, but of course that’s just a mathematical model. Measuring close to the immeasurable has kept science professors and nerds occupied for quite some time.

“The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is defined as 299,792,458 meters per second… It is exact because, by international agreement, a meter is defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. According to special relativity, c is the upper limit for the speed at which conventional matter, energy or any signal carrying information can travel through space.”

from Wikidpedia article on the speed of light

But time is not constant.

Birds talk furiously of one time after a spring shower and more hushed and hesitant in the midst of a snow storm. Time in spring is starting over, the azaleas and dogwoods to remind us. Trees lean, pushing out the first pale green bits. They’ll pass through summer in a surge, continuing season after season, each fall signaling yellow and red when it’s time. Fishermen (mostly men) cast lines in their spare time away from work, and the time they wait patiently for a strike feels nothing like the time spent at their jobs.

The sun goes into the west, and a jet flying at altitude travels so many hundred miles an hour working to catch up. The time we live never repeats.

One year heading well into a second, and this modern pandemic is continuing its destruction. Some have gotten their shots, others refuse them, and still others, having no option, try to hold no opinion. It’s a pandemic like none have witnessed in our lifetime. Despite the declaration, “the revolution will not be televised,” this one was.

Time stops for the dead; the living stop for a virus. The nightmare of surviving unconscious on a ventilator. The torture of having the life pressed out of you for a disputed twenty-dollar bill. The time it takes for either.

At the millennium’s turn, when the West Nile virus decimated the crow population in the Mid-Atlantic, it seemed an absence not sure to be recovered from. How many crows? The large majority of them, remembering how quiet it was afterward. This evening the song birds behave like nothing much ever happened. And the crows have returned to their opinionated ways in the afternoon—after 12—second half of a day. When the eagles are soaring on thermals, the crows trail behind like shadowing attendants.

We’re waiting on the Brood X cicadas to emerge in the Mid-Atlantic–all ten billion of them. They’ll be coming shortly when the ground reaches the correct temperature—usually early May. Seventeen years ago, I set aside a well preserved exoskeleton from one of the emerging larvae. Not having a better place, I stashed it in the medicine cabinet. Cicada larvae crawl out of the dirt, climb a tree, shed their skins and have a few days to make music, find love and die. Seventeen years spent as grubs in the dirt then a momentary bliss.

Seventeen years is the time of their lives, and a sizable chunk of our own.

Seventeen years ago, Maddie the husky would sit on the lawn watching them struggle in flight a few feet overhead. She’d snag one or two and continue watching for the next. Sushi cicadas. Maddie’s been gone years ago. When I saved the cicada shell, it was an odd pledge to shake hands with myself in the future, realizing there was no way Maddie would be around to celebrate. So Layla will need to celebrate on her behalf. I lost the cicada skin years later during our house renovation.

Rhythm in music is a common measure of time. Beethoven’s is one kind, and Eric Clapton’s is another. The beauty in Beethoven is how elastically he stretches and contracts time signatures, and the needle sharp attacks Clapton strikes on are his own way of keeping time.

We’re waiting out the tree at the leading edge of the cove to give up the ghost. It’s been leaning toward the water for as long as we’ve lived here, and it’s been blocking the longest view across the lake for the same time. Though I wouldn’t whack a tree for being in the way—that’s not a selfishness I wish to live with. Would you tell a person she’s in the way? Maybe at an Eagles’ concert when she’s wiggling her no-longer teenage butt just in from of you. Time worked on you, too.

Years back, when it wasn’t leaning quite so far, the tree’s owner pulled his pontoon boat out from the dock, stood up a ladder in the middle of the boat and climbed to do tree surgery with a hand saw. At the time, it didn’t seem a too wise move, confirmed when the ambulance hauled him away. He survived to learn an important lesson about boat motion, gravity and ladders. The unlucky man’s house caught fire later and needed a total rebuild. Though the tree—now a foot at best above the water—is still leafing out in the springtime.

Light Leaving the Sky—photo by William E Evans © 2021

Architecture as Metaphor

It’s been with us for a while. Wright nominated architecture as the mother of the arts. Well, it’s a mother to be sure.

With ample forests in America, our forefathers merrily squared logs into studs and planed planks for siding. Europeans, who’d finished off their forests long since, made use of stone and brick as the primary materials for anyone with a name. Wattle and thatch was good enough for the poorer publicans.

In the years after the Roman Empire collapsed, stealing stones from previous buildings was common—especially the nicer face stones, which helped create the Roman and Greek ruins today’s tourists like photographing.

Dressed stone was harder to come by in the Colonies—bad roads and no tractor trailers to haul it. So the compromise was brick—and undressed stone covered in stucco. Wood was the cheapest building material and itinerant carpenters carried their templates for cornices, balustrades, pineapple finials and column capitals from town to the next—for those who could afford the decoration.

The U.S. Capital’s stone is Virginia sandstone, so it’s not weathering too well, though it made it past the recent patriot riot.

The earliest Colonial residences weren’t much to brag about, and thus began the nation’s inferiority complex, always comparing theirs to Europe. Like hands and penises, evidently. Glass was scarce so windows were small and few, and the glass was wavy with distorting effects until float glass was invented.

Nowadays you pay extra for the tiny panes of wavy glass because it’s machined authentically.

Concerned of being outdone, the Europeans began their revivals early—Greek and Roman (aka Georgian) even Egyptian and Oriental revivals were the beginning creep of metaphor. Christopher Wren and his bewigged brethren smothered the earlier Tudor in Greek and Roman Revival—English Baroque it was dubbed. Pugin, the high priest of English Gothic, even William Morris and the Arts and Crafts folkies, were digging through the history bins searching for the next big trick. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin—with a name as gothic as that, could you blame him?

And the Colonials weren’t distant enough across the Atlantic to avoid catching the disease. Tommy Jefferson returned from Paris with Greek Revival on the brain, and his fellow Virginians never since forgot. There’s an entire town in Virginia recreated in ‘historic’ Georgian. It’s even called Historic Williamsburg. Paid for in large part by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the little wife, Aby—rich folk remembered more fondly as philanthropists.

Thus we come to the present day’s profusion—confusion.

Some Metaphors Are More Important than Others

In the modern American daydream, there is an anticipated dividing line between residences and corporate headquarters.

Residences should be welcoming and convey tradition and cozy comfort. Nothing says home like pineapple finials. Ask Martha Stewart. When is a twenty-five thousand square foot Colonial not considered in the best of taste? Out of scale, man.

I’ve held a very strong position that before the wealthy among us are granted permission to create palaces and Trump towers, they should be required to take courses and pass examinations to learn better taste—with semi-annual renewal certifications required.

This isn’t simply an American illiteracy. Who do you think they learned it from? Dr. Cooledge pointed out a seventeenth century English lord and his wife who couldn’t agree on their manor’s style, so the front became Greek Revival and the rear was Tudor. Cooledge said they later separated. He could always stick the landing.

But golden escalators? Gad.

Or GAWK! as Bill the Cat would say.

Bill the Cat’s meditation on Newt

property of Berkeley Breathed

“Born the illegitimate kitten of Jim Davis' Garfield, Bill the Cat's character was raised in Dubuque, Iowa, left for New York to become a film star and left his girlfriend, Sally, behind. Some of Bill the Cat's film roles include the leads in Orangestoke: The Legend of Bill, Lord of the Monkeys and Terms of Bill's Endearment. During this period, he drank heavily, used illegal drugs, and "free-based Tender Vittles" until his friends helped him to recover. On September 30, 1983, Bill drove his Ferrari into a cactus at 140 miles per hour, dying instantly in the crash (the media, not wishing to divulge the true nature of Bill's death, claimed that he died of acne). The only part of Bill that was salvaged from the wreckage was his tongue, which young genius Oliver Wendell Jones used to clone Bill and bring him back to life. In the latter months of 1984, Bill's bid for the American presidency was effectively ruined by his decision to run off and join (and end up leading) the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult in Oregon, only to be "rescued" and deprogrammed several weeks later by a humorous application of the Ludovico technique (by forcing him to watch reruns of Leave It to Beaver); this was ultimately unsuccessful and Bill was sent off to the Betty Ford Center. In the video A Wish for Wings That Work Opus professes to have saved Bill from a lab where his brains had been replaced with tater tots.”

from the biographical notes on Bill the Cat

Corporate headquarters should convey great thinking and aspirational genius. On occasion the line gets distorted, and thus Recalling the Apple torus: “Apple’s New Campus Sucks” as told in Wired Magazine.

We in Northern Virginia live among the elite and the privileged—even if helicopters are going back and forth above us. So we sometimes receive mailings intended for others.

Charles M. Goodman was a successful mid-century architect, best known for the Hollin Hills residential development south of Alexandria, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Two of his more modest houses are just a mile down the road from our house. I’d walk down and take a photo to show you, but they’re neighbors, and I should respect their privacy. However, for the record, I’m glad he passed through.

Goodman- designed house in Hollin Hills—photo by Clarissa Peterson, 2010

Might be called ‘miesian’ for the geometries Ludwig Mies van der Rohe taught. But study the proportions and you have Andrea Palladio. Mies might have struggled with this, but Goodman had learned how to site a house.

Goodman-designed house in Hollin Hills—photo by H49HHN, 2017

I’ll admit to being puzzled by the Sotheby’s post card. This doesn’t resemble any residence by Goodman that I’ve seen. A later modernist architect, Mark McInturff, is credited with a renovation, but likewise, this doesn’t look like anything he’s done either. The house address is given as Chain Bridge Road in McLean, though you can’t see it from the road. Chain Bridge Road is a narrow two lane road pressed with trees and no sidewalks—and ten thousand cars an hour during rush hour, including the occasional cyclist with a death wish hoping to cross the Potomac.

We thought briefly about looking for a house in McLean. The rolling hills and woods are attractive, and the Potomac River along this immediate stretch lies just the far side of the road. But it’s an impossible road to walk a dog, and the only time you see a neighbor is waving at her emergence from her hidden sanctum in the Range Rover—or when she drives over for dinner to your place. McLean carries only a vestige of Colonial times when properties were farm size. We chose to look for a house in Lake Barcroft instead. The road’s not any wider, but there are no traffic jams except when our neighbors are congregating.

I’d even take a nicely detailed Colonial over this Corporate Headquarters.

Goodman designed a high-rise and townhouse complex named River Park.

Goodman- designed River Park townhouses photo by AgnosticPreachersKid

The River Park townhouses more closely resemble the Sotheby residence in their composition of glass and masonry planes—leaving aside the barrel vaults. What seems different in the McLean house are the panel infills and spandrel elements finished in dark anodized metal. The overall effect might be 1970s collegiate style, or low-rise corporate.

House as Metaphor

Is there a clear difference between Disneyland and rationally designed architecture? Both offer metaphor, if one is more literal minded than the other. One can choose to live in a hobbit hole with a round door. Some homes, e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright’s, are integrated into the landscape, and other not so much. And if you wander small towns, like ‘little’ Washington Virginia, the clapboard plainness feels authentic in a way make-believe developments will never attain.

It has something to do with scale, to begin with. A 25,000 square foot mansion on a ten acre lawn in McLean pretending to be a French chateau is rather obvious. And since no one sets out those lawn jockeys on their lawns anymore, the antebellum theme is more difficult to pull off.

A 12,000 square foot mid-modern villa could be better suited, though it still leaves the question: why call a corporate headquarters home?

Sotheby’s postcard ad for Chain Bridge Road house, 2021

“$2, 560,000—delightful home designed by architect Charles Goodman, with a perfect renovation by the contemporary Mark McInturff, FAIA and completed by Added Dimensions Construction.” from Sotheby’s ad.

A bit like Mies. I wonder if Charles Goodman received any residuals.