The
House You Live in
By Bobby Neal Winters
I like watching other people work with concrete. This may be
because my father was a truck driver who hauled bulk cement to road
jobs and ready-mix concrete outfits. In the summer, of 2007, we did an
addition to our house and I enjoyed watching the masonry crew pour the
footings and then lay the cinder block foundation.
Once you have the foundation, you attach a floor to it and
then you put up the two-by-fours that frame the walls. Then you put the
roof on. Once the roof is on, you can hang the drywall. That’s how we
do it here. My house is an old house, so there are parts of it that
have lathe and plaster walls instead of the gypsum drywall.
I imagine one can follow a line of historical continuity all
the way back to the way things were done in England.
My family and I spent July of 2009 in Asuncion, Paraguay
where I was teaching Introduction to Analytic Processes
at Universidad Catolica. We stayed at a bed and breakfast called El
Rinconcito while we were there. During that time, another house was
being constructed across the street. This house was made from brick,
and it was interesting for me to see how they did it.
Instead of just pouring a foundation, they had poured a
frame. They must have had forms in place to hold the concrete in place
while it was being poured, but they were gone by they time we arrived.
Within the concrete, they had put four-inch PVC pipe as conduit for
plumbing and electrical connections.
The
roof was framed by four-by-sixes and constructed out of ceramic tile.
When we first arrived, they were in the process of laying the
brick. Each of the bricks was six inches by six inches square and two
inches thick. They would’ve stopped about any bullet you could’ve shot
at them. Before we left, they had the exterior walls up and were putting
stucco over the brick.
I feel safe in
guessing that the PVC pipes within the concrete framing is a fairly
recent innovation.
One weekend while we
were in Paraguay, we took at tour of eastern Paraguay where the old
towns have such names as Jesus, Trinidad, and Encarnacion. There are
old missions in this area which were abandoned in the 1700s. In looking
at them, I saw a continuity in the architecture with the house across
from El Rinconcito. I imagine there is a continuity in construction
techniques as well.
These old missions,
with the churches, the monk’s quarters, and the walls surround them,
were built by people who’d come over from Spain and brought their
techniques with them. Those had come from the old Roman/Mediterranean
tradition.
It sort of reminded me
of a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy
by Gregory Dix who follows the shape of churches as they evolved from
the Mediterranean-style homes used as church-houses in the early
Christian era to the sorts of churches I saw in Paraguay in the old
missions.
Every generation learns by watching the
generation before it. We hope to keep the good stuff and to add to it
what is needed for the present age. The PVC pipe as conduit in the
concrete framing struck me as a clever solution to marrying the solid
construction of the ancient era to the modern amenities of indoor
plumbing, electricity, and even computer network cables.
When I visited Siberia, during June of the year 2000, the
group I was with was taken on an excursion to to the village of Balshoye
Galoustnoye. While there, we visited an American ex-patriot who was
building his own traditional Siberian home. It was made of huge logs
from the larch tree.
There was no
foundation as we understand it and the larch logs sat on the ground to
allow for the expansion and contraction due to the extreme winters. The
logs in the wall were made to fit together tightly and the cracks were
sealed with mortar to keep the Siberian wind from whistling through.
In the middle of the house was a huge oven. It was designed
so that the grandmother and the baby could sleep on top of it.
Each of the houses I’ve described has a particular appearance
on the outside. They represent particular styles that are recognizable
to folks who’ve been around the block a time or two. What you see on
the outside builds particular expectations for structure on the inside.
You see the stucco and the tile roof, and you expect the connections
going back to the Caesars.
This sort of
architecture manifests a depth of knowledge that has been tested by
time.
The Siberian home embodies wisdom as well.
It doesn’t have the grandeur the brick house picked up through the
various empires on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but it
embodies the simple wisdom of survival.
In
my mind, these the houses in Asuncion and in Balshoye Galoustnoye are
represent a deep, durable sort of reality that I hold dear. When we
juxtapose the typical American house against these two we see that it is
something different. There is more emphasis on the surface in the
American house than in the depth. This is not necessarily meant as a
criticism; it is simply an observation that might be a window to another
aspect of the real world.
The sheet rock
and two-by-fours that form my walls are descendants of the lathe and
plaster. The lathe and plaster hearken back to the chinking between the
logs in an house not too different from the larch house in Siberia.
When sheet rock is hung, there are gaps between the pieces. These gaps
are first taped and then mudded over in the same spirit that stucco is
put over the bricks in the brick house in Paraguay. Pipes and
electrical wire and run within the walls between the sheets of drywall,
and you can put insulation in between as well.
But
what is on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what’s
on the inside. There are thousands of different types of siding each
designed to give a different impression.
