Good Bones

In the first chapter of his latest book, Our World in Ten Buildings Michael P. Murphy recalls how renovating his own childhood home with his father, undergoing cancer treatment, ignited his interest in architecture. 

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THE HOME 

Poughkeepsie, New York 

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"What was this space originally designed to be?” I asked my dad upstairs, perplexed by the unfinished third floor of the Murphy family homestead. “Do you know anything about the architect? Do you have a sense of what we are restoring it to?” 

“I have no idea. It was built, I think, around 1896. They cared about this place, though. It has good bones.” 

Dad was beginning an aggressive chemo regime, so we were entering a state of wait-and-see. Nonetheless, that next morning, he went back to work. To keep my mind distracted, I decided to chase Dad’s curiosity and take up the herculean task of exhuming the house’s history—if only to get a sense of where to begin. My first stop would be downtown at the county office building. It held all the deeds and documents of the city’s properties. The ground floor was the Department of Motor Vehicles, taxes on floor two, and property on three. Dad worked in the building on the fifth floor, where the county executive’s office was who he worked for. Long, table-height bins filled with files gridded the third floor, a few people hunched over searching through them. 

I caught someone’s attention and asked how I might search for the history of my house on Dwight Street. The person gave me a wide-eyed “what-are-you-doing-here” look and introduced herself as Jennifer Clum. “I was your old babysitter when you were little!” Jenn said. “We were just thinking about your dad. How is he?” she asked with a pause. Jenn toured me through the long archival threads that linked each property together, and we found the original title document of our house. It was written in cursive with a fountain pen. The listed owner was a woman named Mary Howell, and she had inherited the land from J. O. Whitehouse, her father. Jenn also found an old development plan for our neighborhood before its houses were even built. Whitehouse’s estate had been separated into about sixty plots for future construction. Ours and four others were mapped out as the first to be built. On the lower-right corner of the plan was the line Horace Trumbauer, Architect, July 1896. 

I left with printouts and replicas of the original street plan, but most importantly, I had the name of the person who designed our house. Searching for Trumbauer online revealed a trove of information and completed buildings. He had designed grand estates of the newly rich of Philadelphia in the 1920s and 1930s. He had built grand cultural institutions like the Philadelphia Art Museum (where Rocky ended his famous stair run) and one of his most prestigious commissions, the Widener Library at Harvard University—the centerpiece of Harvard Yard. 

Look at that, a famous architect had designed our home, and no one knew it. 

Trumbauer’s archives were held at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. I called them the next day to get some help on where to start, and while they had no plans of our house, they pointed me to an early influence on his work, that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first commissions in Oak Park, Illinois. In 1895, Frank Lloyd Wright had designed the Nathan G. Moore House in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago where he lived and worked. It had an eccentric mix of shapes, different roof types, and asymmetric forms. The house had strong triangular gables, angled church-like windows, and used the long, flat, prairie-style bricks that were later seen in his groundbreaking Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. 

I had walked by the Robie House every day during college on my way to class and long admired its horizontal lines and volumetric shapes. I often remarked how contemporary and stylistically modern it looked even though it was older than many structures around it, built in 1906. It felt out of time. The Moore House was different though, and eclectic—like a bricolage of varying voices fighting for airtime. Wright experimented with a range of materials and shapes with the Moore House, and the outcome was a collage of architectural ideas—some of which he would keep and some he would discard. It looked like a grander, more expensive version of our Trumbauer-designed house in Poughkeepsie. 

As I embarked on this journey, I imagined Horace Trumbauer scouring publications of buildings from that era and finding inspiration from the young Wright for our home. The chimney at the Moore House was a soaring wall shooting through the roof like a razor blade, signaling to the world around it that the house was divided into two halves. In our home, the mantel over the fireplace was festooned with fleur-de-lis carvings. It was grand and ornate and certainly ostentatious for my parents’ humble tastes. 

They didn’t have the money to build their own home, let alone live in the one we had in its heydey. It’d been a bargain stowed away in Poughkeepsie after the moneyed class and industry abandoned it in the middle of the twentieth century. 

When my parents bought it, the third floor was dark and dingy with cheap wall-to-wall carpeting and wood paneling from the 1970s that made it unusable for anything other than storage. The four rooms were filled with boxes, old furniture, junk, and books in piles. I went upstairs with a hammer and box cutter to make a mess. 

One trait I picked up from my father is the ability to sit in any room, no matter what is happening around me, and read. Even though I made my mess on the third floor by day, at night I started pulling books from shelves and learning about architecture.

The word architecture is from the Latin architectura and has two primary definitions. The first is “the art and practice of designing and constructing buildings,” and that makes sense, because it is about making buildings. The second definition of architecture is “the structure of things,” like the chemical architecture of wood fibers. I liked that dual meaning, that architecture could refer to the minuscule invisible structure of materials as well as the very visible and inhabitable structures throughout our world. Architecture is all around us and in everything we touch. 

The first real theorist of architecture was a Roman builder named Vitruvius. He said that “the ideal building has three elements; it is sturdy (firmitas), it is useful (utilitas) and it is beautiful (venustas).” For something to be sturdy made sense to me. Thoreau knew that if he hoped to immerse fully in nature, his first act was to build a basic shelter. Even the simplest hut of wood and mud creates a shield from the natural elements of a place. If shelter is in a tropical climate, it has to face heavy winds and rain but also moisture and heat. If it is in the northeast of the United States, like my family’s house or Henry Thoreau’s cabin in the woods, the roof has to support snow from a long winter and have a fireplace to keep inhabitants warm during cold nights. 

This is where the architect becomes an engineer, solving for essential sheltering responsibilities in the context where it exists. The sturdiness of a thing, the “good bones” my dad pridefully mentioned our house had, made instant sense to me. To be sturdy, to have firmitas, was to stand up, protect, and keep whoever was inside comfortable, regardless of the climate around them. 

My eyes were opened even more to the idea that a place could offer many uses, more than simple protection. Architects call these uses the “programs” of the space—places to sleep, eat, rest, store our things, entertain our friends, and live much of our lives. And often the first act of architecture is to determine how much space is needed for those uses now and in the future. Too much space can be excessive, expensive, and useless—but too little can feel cramped and poorly planned. As a family adds children and elderly parents, or shrinks as children leave and the nest empties, this balance of usefulness changes. A well-designed house anticipates—it remains useful as it evolves, by being adaptable to the evolving needs of its inhabitants. 

In addition to our downstairs, our house had four bedrooms on the second floor, a grand porch, and a basement for storage. These were all used as intended. The kitchen, however, was used differently than it was designed. It was small and closed off from the rest of the house and was accessed through a single door. Today in houses we see open plans of kitchens that blend into living rooms, but old houses closed off rooms to protect heat and to separate the spaces used for making the food from ones where the food was eaten. We still crowded ourselves around the kitchen island to surround my mother as she cooked, but changing the physical structure of the home to make this perhaps easier—an open plan, as it is called today—wasn’t practical. We adapted to it and it to us by squeezing more chairs around the island and putting a second fridge in the basement. It felt crowded and compact but full of life and energy. 

‍An architect has to be a kind of fortune teller. Programming a house is about stress testing its limits to reveal how the house will function effectively and pleasantly in the future, despite who it was designed for. Every home contains little tells or insights about a family’s behavior to inform this. A hospital bed in the living room would suggest stairs may be too difficult to manage and aging in place might need to happen elsewhere. A pile of wine boxes on the floor might suggest the need for more storage (to which Frank Lloyd Wright would likely object, insisting on having less stuff as the answer to most things). If all your children move home after an illness and the empty nest feels crowded again, renovating the attic might release some built-up pressure. When my dad came home from the hospital, our family stress tested the home anew, and Dad and I set to work customizing the space for this new normal. 

Back upstairs I ripped off the paneling in one of the third-floor rooms. The nails came out easily, bringing old plaster with them and creating clouds of dust. I found ancient floral wallpaper underneath that was covering a plaster wall. Holes revealed wood lath and the framing structure beyond. Someone had once attempted to strip off the wallpaper as it was ripped in many places—I wondered if the pieces still hanging on had been left by Mary Howell herself. They were torn and stained from water damage. 

The doorframe had children’s scribbles, recording their heights.

Thomas, 2'8" 

Margaret was here 

Adam, 3'5" 1970 

Surely no one else had seen these markings in decades. I created a pile in the center of the room as I ripped down layer after layer, revealing the many hands of the long relay race of stewards who had held this place together before me. Stripped down to its essentials, I saw how small and dark the room was. I was inspired to break through the wall to the next room and connect it with glass doors like the ones in the living room below. My other uncle Mike, my father’s brother by marriage, was a carpenter, and he said the wall was not structural, so we could knock through it, squeeze in a wood doorframe, and find an old French door from a salvage place he knew up the river. He showed me some carpentry tips and instructed me on fastening drywall panels to ceiling and walls, taping the seams, and covering them with joint compound.

Dad came home from work in astonishment to see the reframed third floor open and new. I imagined his chair in the new sunlit room and us sitting there in silence. 

“It’s been five weeks,” he said. “I’m still here.” 

I had forgotten all about the deadline. 

“Well, block out some time,” I told him. “We are ready to paint.” 

Now I was an adult, and I was picking up my father’s paint brush. I was making this house my own. The architect’s third responsibility, beyond being an engineer or a social scientist, is its highest and most difficult achievement—to design spaces that are so beautiful they become art forms in their own right. As simple as applying a coat of paint or refinishing a surface, it can do so much to visually reawaken the latent beauty of a space. 

As I bonded with the physicality of the house, through stripping and sanding and refinishing, I began to intimately understand how it all came together. This wasn’t merely a box full of people, and it wasn’t the drawings and schematics I’d make a living creating later in my life. It was a joining of crafted materials used to create that visual composition of paint and wood, window and wall. I came to think about the craftsmen who spent weeks making the wood trim or the stained-glass window, and the love and care they put into their work. I imagined workers’ hands on all the surfaces that I was now touching and felt a connection across time and space. I felt bound to this place and to the people who built it. 

Dad started coming home early from work to get in a few hours of painting before dinner, and I was happy to oblige. He loved the meticulousness and certainty of the task. He bought a small quart of silver paint, which he used to touch up the radiators and suddenly these rusty old beasts popped with reflective sheen. We bled them out for the first time in perhaps thirty years. For the floor trim, he insisted we use Benjamin Moore’s eggshell white. 

He lay on his side on the wooden floor in the third-floor hallway, propped up on his elbow, with a small paintbrush in his left hand. Without taping, without a cloth to protect the floor, he painted the trim perfectly with no drips. He was comfortable thinking through the moves on the chessboard left to him, and he did so without equivocation. From his spot on the floor, he asked me, “What do you think you’re going to do, Michael?” 

I was busy rolling primer paint on the wall—a task that required much less precision. “I left everything behind in South Africa,” I said, not knowing what exactly that was. “I thought I wanted to be a writer, a journalist maybe, but I had to come home to be with you.” 

“I did not want you to come home for me,” he said. “Your life is more important. You can’t wait for me. What do you think you’ll do?”

In the weeks since my birthday, in the time I’d been working in that old attic space, I felt as if I had been reborn. I was not incrementally growing but instead transported forward in a singular burst into a new shell of adulthood. 

“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “You know, this work with you, this house. I like it. It is nice to see the change. I wonder if I might want to study architecture.” 

My father hardened himself and looked me in the eye. 

“I think that is a wonderful idea.” 

By May, as the seasons changed, so did our house. The third floor was finished, and I moved my bedroom up there. It felt different to sleep in the room instead of work on it. I was proud of it, and after touching almost every square inch of its surfaces, the space felt like it was truly mine, even though it had had many owners over its 110 years of life. 

I saw the house evolve when we toiled to make it so. Remaking the house left evidence of our own existence in the world. My father wanted to leave something behind for us, and he wanted to see the change he desired actualized in the real world. He wanted to recognize that he restored it himself and know it would not have happened without him. The building was his legacy. 

Restoring the third floor during that winter, I realized, filled an unconscious need to avoid facing my father’s imminent death. I focused on what little my hands could do and on the small world I could control. Maybe I was tuning into what Thoreau had found at Walden Pond, what he called “the unconscious beauty of life.” Thoreau continues: 

“What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder—out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life.” 

I started to plot the rest of the projects on my father’s list. Next was the living room, and when the weather warmed, the outside tasks like the porch, finishing the clapboard painting, and finally fixing the leaking roof. 

What makes a house into a home? The home is not so much a singular place as it is an emotional experience that only a place can elicit. Home is the projection of that feeling, and even an existential condition, where our minds begin to shape elemental relationships. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space argued that the house “shelters daydreaming” and so provides the foundation of all image-making in the mind. He says that the house “is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind… It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world.” 

Neuroscientists have begun to study these phenomenological conditions and people’s reflection of them. Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has explored this sensation, the feeling of “hominess” in our consciousness. Through his work, Chatterjee has found that the human brain responds to aesthetic compositions such as symmetry, balance, rhythm, and color in ways that show consistent physiological responses across cultures, in ways that demonstrate how architectural aesthetics trigger pleasure receptors in our brains. 

Chatterjee has argued that even though contexts vary, that sense of “home” is universal and is elemental to the human mind. The brain seeks comfort in this feeling, strives to re-create it, and is attracted to spaces that draw it out in us. This attraction leads us to pursue aesthetic choices to elicit that warm feeling in the spaces we frequent throughout life, to search for the hominess in the world around us. The mind craves security, and no other space elicits the deeply hardwired emotions of nostalgia and comfort, memory and consciousness like our homes. 

Three weeks turned into eighteen months. As the seasons progressed and the calendar turned over, Dad carried on. There he was, more often than not, standing guard out front of the house, still in his paint-stained shirt, holding his glass of Canadian Club and Diet Coke. The doctors told us he was in remission and his outcome unclear. While stage four cancer is, for all intents and purposes, a death sentence, Dad’s future was hopeful. 

“I love standing here at the end of the day admiring what we’ve done,” he told me. 

It was his favorite thing to do, seeing the changes and planning what was next. 

“Working on this house with you, Michael—it saved my life.” 

I thought just possibly it had also saved mine.

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This excerpt is from Our World in Ten Buildings by Michael P. Murphy with permission from One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.