How to Own a Building

Winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by Judge Steven Church
(Runners-up: Kirby Wright, "Ladder of Glass," and Garrett J. Brown, "Galileo in the Uecker Seats")

[New York City]

For years, people saw only the ugly rectangular shapes, like two steel pillars hoisting the sky. Too tall, uninventive. Architecture should serve a city's beauty, draw the eye to glory, incite homesickness when miniaturized in a snow globe. A beckoning arch, a gravity-shunning curve, a wall of mirrored glass that gives a neighboring building its own inverse twin.

Their ugliness was infamous, memorialized for decades before their ghosts lit the skyline. Philippe Petit didn't see ugly. His eye was trained to other details. Petit, the tightrope walker, the funambulist, saw purpose, a way to make a city come to a standstill and gaze up at what seemed impossible. Where others saw grandiose suicide, he saw possibility.

What he saw: two buildings of equal height spaced fairly close to each other. And, oh, they were tall, taller than anything. He knew the wind, he anticipated the sway of the topmost floors, and he reckoned the arrival of the police helicopters. Then, on the wire no one could see from the ground, he stepped out and walked on air above the city. His feet were sure, and what he saw, what he felt from the buildings holding him up, approximated love. He fell in love with the ugliest buildings in the world, and people watching from the street split open with wonder.

What is the excuse people use when they don't want to draw a picture? I can't draw a straight line. The idea being that lines are the simplest elements of design. Inability to draw a line speaks of more humiliating inabilities when it comes to circles, proportions, and vanishing points.

It truly is difficult to draw a straight line. Our eyes are always moving, our hands brace against the finest of tremors, and somehow motion and straight become bitter adversaries. Blame kindergarten and rulers and angles. Blame structure forced on human perception unable to view the world through a protractor.

There's not much to say about a straight line in architecture. Straight lines hold up buildings, making them indispensable. But line after line after line, column, pillar, minaret, here is where you might seek to understand your wavering drawing skills. Repeating linear structures mimic movement. They take the eyes over and across, back and forth, waves on the sea, direction forced by perspective, larger lines in front, smaller in the back, all an illusion drawing sight to the infinite. Recent research suggests that gazing at stripes can precipitate migraines in some people. Lines force movement of the eye on its thick stem, hallucination really, possibility and passage imparted by a static structure, neurological overload, a journey toward the vanishing point.

Structures, like people, can be extroverts or introverts. Extroverted buildings are those that allow people to climb, structures no more than lines that reach into the sky and deliver their human contents upward. Grandiose, vast, piercing—delivering these qualities to people who live and work among dizzying staircases and elevators whose speed and range adjust cerebral blood pressure. Buildings that sway, subject to the wind and traffic helicopters. Structures that, at their most extroverted, at their very tops, reward an exhilarating climb with a view that dilates the femoral blood vessels and weakens the legs with what can never be identified properly as terror or sexual arousal. A two-minded moment of delight at being on top of the world holding hands with the universal imp of the perverse, the imp that whispers what would happen if you jumped, you know you want to, how extraordinary, how awful.

[Moose Lake]

Children in other regions might learn about World War I or the influenza epidemic, but in northern Minnesota, 1918 is the year of the fire. Started by a spark on dry wood, it spread for miles, wiping out an entire county, driving people and animals into lakes where they couldn't go deep enough underwater, where they couldn...