(floor)plans

In high school, a teacher recommended that I explore architecture on "career day," and teamed me up with a local firm, a husband and wife team, who were early practitioners of the Shingle-Style trend that exploded in the last decade.  But I'd loved floor plans for years and years before that.  My childhood attempts at fiction were always accompanied by elaborate floor plans for the characters' houses, some of them cribbed from the summer home and garden tours so popular in our area.  I could read whole story arcs into a two-bedroom bungalow: romance, tragedy, perfidy.  In college, Professor Y., learning of my interest, suggested that I "redesign" our classroom, which probably dated from the nineteen fifties.  I duly plodded over to the facilities management office where the archivist, surprised and delighted to see an actual student, supplied me with maps of the entire campus, whatever I wanted.  I took home not only the building plan that I needed for my project, but floor plans of other buildings as well.  I hung them on my walls; I considered them art.

This fixation last well until my adult years.  I'd browse online real estate listings and scour newspapers and magazines for the floor plans advertising all those new luxury condominiums which, at their pre-crash peak, seemed to be thrown up by the week.  As recently as a few years ago, I'd plot out imaginary apartments or houses when I couldn't sleep.  Here is where I will store my books, this is the best way to organize a closet or a kitchen, this wall should come down.  It was a form of narrative, like writing paragraphs or character outlines to scale, only this time, the character was me.  But there was never any substance to these plans, and eventually I stopped making them.

Now I draft my own plans - base, site analysis, conceptual, presentation, planting.  Certainly the process requires more analysis and observation than my fantasy plans ever did: it is a bit like that long-ago project for Professor Y.   "No winter interest," "sick tree will have to be removed," "planned location of patio," "tenants living above will require garden access," "this dogwood houses vast bird colonies in winter."  These spaces do not belong to me.  I am invited into other people's homes to listen to other people's narratives: "I dislike my neighbors and would like more privacy in the yard," or, "my partner and I hate pastels."  And yet the plans do belong to me, in a way that those floor plans collected from newspapers and magazines and real estate agencies never did.  Last night I worked happily until midnight, lit by lamp and candles, fueled by music.  In a way, each project is mine: my design, my imagination, the pen or pencil in my hand, each mark I make on a page, on a site.