The Site

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 1: The Site

The land had been an orchard for forty years before the trees stopped producing, and the trees had been removed for three years before Miriam Chen stood at the edge of the property on a Tuesday morning in September and looked east toward the Cascade Range and did what she always did first, before measurements, before soil reports, before the conversations with county planners about setback requirements and water table depths and the particular local ordinances governing the construction of healthcare facilities in Deschutes County, Oregon, which were more numerous than one might expect for a county with a population that could fit inside a mid-sized football stadium. She looked at the light.

The light at seven-forty in the morning on a September Tuesday in Bend, Oregon, at an elevation of thirty-six hundred feet above sea level, on a five-acre parcel of former orchard land east of the Deschutes River, came from a direction that was not quite east and not quite southeast but some intermediate angle that would shift fourteen degrees between this morning in September and the mornings of December when the dying, who would by then occupy the building she had not yet designed, would lie in beds she had not yet specified and look through windows she had not yet drawn toward a horizon that would hold the mountains the way the mountains always hold the horizon in central Oregon, which is to say with a kind of geological patience that makes human time seem impertinent.

She stood in the grass -- not orchard grass anymore, but the volunteer grass that comes after agriculture, the grass that arrives when human intention withdraws -- and she turned her body forty-five degrees and looked at the way the light moved across the property, the way it found the low spots and filled them, the way it climbed the gentle rise at the western edge where the building's entrance would eventually face the road, the way it behaved like a liquid, like something poured, which is how Miriam had always thought about natural light, not as illumination but as a substance, a material as real as the concrete and wood and glass she would specify in the drawings that would eventually become the building that would eventually become the place where people would come to die.

James Okoro walked beside her. He carried a clipboard and a laser distance measurer and a thermos of coffee that he had purchased at a drive-through in Bend proper, and he did not speak while she looked at the light because he had worked with Miriam Chen on two previous projects and he understood that the looking at the light was not casual observation but professional practice, that she was reading the site the way a surgeon reads an X-ray, and that what she found in the light would determine everything that followed -- the orientation of the building, the placement of the windows, the angle of the corridors, the position of the patient rooms, the relationship between interior and exterior, between the built and the given, between the thing she would make and the thing that was already there, which was the light, which had been there before the orchard and would be there after the building and would be there after the building was gone, because light does not require permission from architecture, though architecture can choose how to receive it.

"The morning light comes from there," Miriam said, pointing toward a notch in the foothills where the sun had risen forty minutes ago and where it would rise tomorrow and the next day with slight variations that she would chart on a solar path diagram when she returned to her office in Portland, a diagram that would show the sun's arc across this specific piece of sky for every day of the year, because the dying die on all days of the year and each day's light is different and the architect's obligation is to understand every variation, not to control the light -- light cannot be controlled -- but to receive it, to design the receiving of it, which is what windows are, which is what her entire career has been: the design of receiving.

James wrote on his clipboard. He noted the direction she pointed. He noted the time. He would note these things throughout the morning -- the angles, the temperatures, the quality of the air, the way the wind moved through the property from the northwest, carrying the dry sage smell of the high desert, the sound of traffic from the road a quarter-mile to the west -- because James understood that building was not the imposition of a structure upon a site but the negotiation between intention and condition, and the conditions had to be recorded with the same precision that the intentions would later demand.

They walked the perimeter. Five acres. The property was roughly rectangular, longer on the north-south axis, sloping gently down from the northwest corner to the southeast, a grade of perhaps two percent that would matter for drainage and for the feeling of approach -- whether a person arriving at the building would walk uphill or downhill, which is not an insignificant question when the person arriving may be arriving for the last time. Miriam preferred a level approach. She would grade the entrance if necessary, because the last walk should not be uphill. She had learned this at Sage Hill, her first hospice, twenty-two years ago, where the entrance sloped upward and families arrived breathless and flushed, and breathlessness was not the feeling an architect should impose upon people who had come to say goodbye.

The old orchard stumps were still visible in places, cut close to the ground but not removed, the root systems still present beneath the soil in the way that removed things persist beneath surfaces, which is a fact about orchards and also a fact about buildings and also a fact about people, though Miriam did not allow herself that metaphor, not yet, not on a Tuesday morning in September when her work was measurement and observation and the disciplined recording of what was there before she began to imagine what would be there instead.

"The stumps," James said.

"They'll need to come out."

"Root systems too. Forty-year apple roots go deep."

"I know."

She walked to the center of the property and stood where the building would be. She did not know yet that the building would be here, in this exact spot, but her body knew. Twenty-two years of siting buildings had given her a physical understanding of placement that preceded the intellectual understanding, the way a musician's fingers know the note before the mind names it. She stood in the center and she turned slowly, a full rotation, and she saw: the mountains to the west and south, the foothills to the east, the flat high-desert plateau to the north, the road to the west, the neighboring properties -- a house to the north, fallow farmland to the south, undeveloped BLM land to the east. She saw the sky, which in Bend is a different sky than the sky in Portland, where she lived, where she worked, where her mother was at this moment lying in a hospital bed in a room Miriam had designed, though she did not allow herself that thought either, not yet, because the work of siting a building requires the full attention of the architect and the full attention of the architect is a finite resource that must be allocated with the same precision as square footage and structural loads and the angle of glass to the morning sun.

The sky in Bend is wider than the sky in Portland. Portland's sky is framed by trees, by the West Hills, by the close gray clouds that sit on the city for seven months of the year like a lid on a pot. Bend's sky is open. It extends. It goes on in all directions with a clarity that is a function of altitude and aridity and the absence of the marine layer that defines the Willamette Valley. This sky, this open sky, would be the context for the dying, the visual field that the windows would frame, and the framing of sky is the architect's primary task in a hospice building, because the sky is the thing that goes on, the thing that continues, the thing that does not end when the person looking at it ends, and the continuity of sky is not a comfort -- Miriam did not traffic in comfort, which she considered a lesser architectural goal, a word used by people who did not understand the difference between comfort and dignity -- but a fact, a visual fact, the fact of ongoingness made visible through glass.

She pulled a compass from her pocket -- a real compass, brass, analog, not a phone application -- and she confirmed what her body already knew: the property's long axis ran roughly north-south, and the eastern exposure, the exposure she would give to the patient rooms, faced fifty-four degrees from true north, which would capture the morning sun from its first appearance above the foothills through its climbing toward the midday position, which meant the patient rooms would receive light for the first six hours of each day, which was the time when the light was gentlest, when the light was most like itself, before the afternoon sharpened it and the western exposure turned it into something aggressive, something that heated and glared and forced the closing of blinds, which Miriam refused to design into her buildings because a blind is a refusal of light and a hospice building should never refuse light, should never say no to the thing that the dying will see last.

"East and south," she said to James. "Patient rooms on the east and south wings."

He nodded. He did not ask why. He knew why. He had built two of her buildings and he knew that the patient rooms always faced east, always received the morning light, and that this was not aesthetic preference but professional conviction, the conviction of a woman who had spent twenty-two years studying the relationship between light and dying and who had concluded, through observation and through the particular empiricism of architecture, which is the empiricism of built things observed over time, that morning light is the light in which people should die, not because morning is a metaphor -- Miriam distrusted metaphor in architecture the way she distrusted sentimentality in medicine -- but because morning light has specific physical properties: lower angle, longer path through atmosphere, warmer color temperature, reduced intensity, a quality that photographers call golden and that Miriam called, simply, appropriate.

They spent three hours on the site. Miriam took photographs -- not artistic photographs but documentary photographs, the kind an architect takes to remember conditions, the way a detective photographs a scene: every angle, every detail, the quality of the soil, the condition of the existing trees along the northern boundary, the exact position of the utility easement that ran along the western edge, the drainage pattern visible in the way the grass grew taller in the low spots where water collected after rain. She photographed the mountains from six different positions because the mountains would be visible from the patient room windows and the question of which mountains, which peaks, which specific formations of rock and snow and treeline would be framed by the glass was a question that required documentation and consideration, because the last view a person sees should not be accidental.

James measured. He walked the property with the laser measurer and established distances and angles and the locations of existing features -- the utility poles, the property markers, the remnant irrigation infrastructure from the orchard days, the old equipment shed at the southeast corner that would need to be demolished, the gravel access road from the main road to the property that would need to be widened and paved and brought up to the standards required for ambulance access, because the building code does not exempt buildings from emergency access requirements simply because the emergencies that will occur inside them are the slow emergencies of dying rather than the sudden emergencies of accident or acute illness, though the codes do not make that distinction, which is one of the many ways in which building codes fail to understand what buildings are actually for.

At eleven o'clock they sat on the tailgate of James's truck and drank the remaining coffee, which was cold, and looked at the site from the western edge where the road was, which is where visitors would first see the building when it existed, and Miriam said: "An orchard."

"Was an orchard," James said.

"The apple trees. Some of them are still alive at the northern boundary."

"I saw them. Six or seven, maybe. Unpruned. Wild."

"We should keep them."

James looked at her. He had a way of looking that was neither questioning nor agreeing but simply attending, a quality of attention that Miriam valued more than agreement, because attention is harder than agreement and more useful, and the attention of a good builder is the thing that makes the architect's vision buildable, which is to say real, which is to say present in the world in a way that drawings are not.

"We should keep the surviving trees and we should plant new ones," Miriam said. "The central garden. Apple trees. From the original rootstock if possible. The building should remember what the land was."

She did not say: because the people who will die here should be surrounded by things that have lived and are living and will continue to live, because the presence of living things around the dying is not a comfort -- she still refused that word -- but a context, a statement about the nature of the place, which is that it is a place where dying happens inside of living, enclosed by living, held by living, the way a room holds a person, the way a building holds a room, the way the land holds the building, the way the sky holds the land. She did not say this because she did not need to say it. The decision to keep the trees said it. Architecture speaks in decisions, not in explanations.

She pulled a roll of trace paper from behind the seat of James's truck and she laid it on the tailgate and she uncapped a felt-tip pen -- black, medium point, the same brand she had used for twenty-two years, because an architect's hand develops a relationship with a specific pen the way a writer's voice develops a relationship with a specific syntax, and the relationship between hand and pen is part of the design process, part of the thinking, and to change pens would be to change the thinking, which is not something an architect does lightly.

She drew the property boundary first. A rectangle. Then the contour lines -- the gentle slope from northwest to southeast. Then the trees at the northern boundary. Then the road. Then, without pausing, without lifting the pen, without the hesitation that would indicate uncertainty, she drew a shape at the center of the property. It was not a floor plan. It was not a design. It was a gesture -- the first gesture, the mark that says: here. The building will be here. The rooms will be here. The windows will face this direction. The dying will look this way.

The shape was organic. Not rectangular, not the institutional rectangle of a hospital or a clinic or the kind of healthcare facility that treats the sick the way a factory treats raw material -- as something to be processed, moved along a corridor, discharged or expired with equal bureaucratic efficiency. The shape Miriam drew on the trace paper was more like a hand, open, fingers spread, reaching outward from a central palm. Wings. Corridors radiating from a center. Patient rooms at the tips of the fingers. A garden in the palm.

She drew the compass rose. North at the top. East to the right, toward the mountains, toward the morning light, toward the direction from which the sun would come each day to enter the windows she would draw and pass through the glass she would specify and fall on the beds she would place and touch the faces of the people who would be dying in the rooms she would design, the eleventh set of rooms, the eleventh time she had designed the space in which the final thing happens, and the first time the designing was accompanied by the knowledge that her mother was in one of those rooms right now, a room Miriam had designed seven years ago, a room in Portland, a room with an east-facing window and a ceiling height of nine feet six inches and cork floors and walls painted the particular shade of warm gray that Miriam had specified after testing fourteen samples under morning light conditions and selecting the one that neither warmed nor cooled but simply held, simply received, simply was.

She did not think about Room 6 at Evergreen House. She thought about the site. She thought about the light. She thought about the five acres of former orchard that would become, over the next twelve months, through the accumulated decisions of architect and builder, through the pouring of concrete and the raising of walls and the installation of glass, a building. Her eleventh building. Her eleventh set of rooms for the dying. She thought about the light and the light thought about nothing because light does not think, light simply goes where physics sends it, which is everywhere, which is through every window, which is into every room, and the architect's task is not to create the light but to design the receiving of it, to make the room worthy of the light that enters it, which is the same as making the room worthy of the person who lies in it, which is the same as making the room worthy of the dying that happens in it, which is the only task Miriam Chen has ever understood as her own.

James watched her draw. He did not speak. The pen moved on the trace paper and the shape emerged and the shape was the first shape of Orchard House, the shape that would be refined and revised and redrawn dozens of times over the coming months but that would retain, in its final form, the essential gesture of this first drawing on the tailgate of a truck on a Tuesday morning in September: a hand, open, reaching, offering the thing that architecture offers, which is space, which is the held air between walls, which is the room, which is the place where everything that matters happens -- the living, the dying, the light.

Miriam capped the pen. She rolled the trace paper. She looked at the site one more time, the five acres of grass and stumps and surviving apple trees and the mountains beyond and the sky above and the light, always the light, the light that would be here tomorrow and the next day and the day the building opened and the day the first patient arrived and the day the first patient died and every day after, the light that was the site's first gift and the architect's first responsibility, and she said to James: "We'll start the program next week. I want to live with the site for a few days first."

She meant: I want to carry this light inside me while I work. She meant: I want to remember this morning, this particular quality of September light in Bend, Oregon, when I am drawing windows in my office in Portland. She meant: I want the building to remember this morning the way I will remember it, as the morning when the eleventh room began.

She did not say any of this. She got in the truck. James drove them back to Bend, to the hotel where they had separate rooms, where Miriam would spend the evening reviewing the photographs and the measurements and the trace paper drawing and the notes she had made in her black notebook, the notebook she carried to every site visit, the notebook that contained the first marks of all eleven buildings, the accumulated record of twenty-two years of standing on land where buildings would be and asking the question she always asked first, the question that was not about the building but about the light, because the building was the thing she would make but the light was the thing that was already there, and the architect's first task is always to understand what is already there before adding the thing that is not yet there, which is the building, which is the rooms, which is the space where the dying will lie and look through the windows and see the light, the last light, the light that is always first.