The Corridor

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 10: The Corridor

The corridor is the room between the rooms. The corridor is the space that the architect designs not for staying but for passing through, not for the stillness of the bed but for the movement of the body, not for the held but for the carrying, and the carrying is the corridor's purpose, the corridor existing to carry the person from one room to another, from the lobby to the patient room, from the patient room to the garden, from the garden to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the family room, from the family room back to the patient room, the continuous circulation of people through the building, the flow that is the building's life, and the corridor is the vessel of the flow, the channel through which the life of the building moves.

Miriam designed the Orchard House corridors on an October afternoon, the week after the site visit with James, the trace paper spread on the desk her father had built, the floor plan beneath showing the five wings and the central garden, the hand-shape of the building, the fingers reaching outward from the palm, and the corridors were in the fingers, were the bones of the fingers, the structural passages that connected the fingertips to the palm, the patient rooms to the garden, the periphery to the center.

Twelve feet wide. She had arrived at twelve feet through the sequential learning of ten buildings, the corridor width evolving from ten feet at Sage Hill -- too narrow, the width that had allowed the living and the dead to pass too close -- to eleven feet at Lakeview, which was better but still insufficient, to twelve feet at Cedar Creek and every building thereafter, twelve feet being the width at which two beds could pass without proximity, without the small collision that the narrow corridor produced, without the contact between the arriving and the departing that was the corridor's failure, the failure that Miriam had witnessed at Sage Hill on the Thursday afternoon when the woman with lung cancer had turned her head and seen the shape under the sheet and had recognized her future in the body that was passing her, and the recognition had been architectural, had been a failure of the dimension, had been the four missing inches -- no, the twenty-four missing inches, the two feet that separated ten from twelve, the two feet that were the difference between the corridor that allowed recognition and the corridor that prevented it.

Twelve feet was the width at which two beds passed with a clearance of thirty inches on each side, the clearance sufficient to prevent the visual proximity that produced the recognition, the clearance that placed the beds far enough apart that the passing was a passing rather than an encounter, the movement of two objects in the same space without the intimacy that closeness creates, and the prevention of intimacy was not cruelty, was not the denial of truth, was the management of timing, the architectural decision about when the truth should be presented, and the truth should be presented in the room, not in the corridor, the truth should arrive through the window in the form of light, not through the corridor in the form of a body under a sheet.

She drew the corridors with curves. Not sharp turns, not right angles, not the institutional geometry of corridors that turned at ninety degrees and presented, at each turn, the long view of the next straight section, the view that showed the corridor's full length and the corridor's destination, the view that said: this is how far you have to go, this is where you are going, the end is there, visible, the end announced by the architecture before the person has walked the distance, and the announcing of the end was the thing Miriam designed against, the thing she eliminated from her corridors through the curves, the gentle curves that limited the visible length to sixty feet, the distance the eye could comfortably resolve, the distance beyond which the corridor turned, gently, and hid what was ahead, and the hiding was the kindness, the architectural kindness, the decision not to show the end from the beginning but to reveal the corridor incrementally, section by section, curve by curve, the way a story reveals itself paragraph by paragraph, the way a life reveals itself day by day.

The curves had a radius of forty feet. She had determined this through observation and experiment, walking the corridors of her previous buildings with a tape measure and a notepad, measuring the curves she had already built, assessing which felt gentle and which felt abrupt, which guided the body and which directed the body, and the distinction between guiding and directing was the distinction between the residential and the institutional, the curve that guided being the curve of a garden path, the curve that followed the landscape, the curve that suggested rather than commanded, and the curve that directed being the curve of a hospital corridor, the curve that said: turn here, the building requires you to turn here, the building is in control, and Miriam's corridors were not in control, were not commanding, were suggesting, were the architectural equivalent of a hand placed gently on the shoulder, the hand that says: this way, come this way, and the this-way was the curve, and the curve was forty feet in radius, and the radius was the gentleness.

She drew the floor. Cork, the same Portuguese cork she had specified for all rooms, the cork continuous from the patient rooms through the corridors to the common areas, the material unbroken by thresholds or transitions, the floor a single surface that carried the person from room to corridor to room without the interruption of a material change, without the bump of a threshold, without the color shift or the texture shift that would announce: you are leaving one space and entering another, and the not-announcing was the design, the design of the continuous, the design of the uninterrupted passage that let the person move through the building as though through a house, the rooms flowing into the corridors and the corridors flowing into the rooms, the building a single interior, a single held space, the separations between rooms provided by the doors rather than by the floor.

The cork in the corridors would be the most heavily trafficked cork in the building. The nurses walking their rounds, forty times a shift, the footsteps repeating, the path worn into the material the way a path is worn into earth, not by a single passage but by the accumulation of passages, the daily crossing and recrossing of the same surface, and the cork would hold the footsteps, would absorb them, would compress under each step and recover after each step, the recovery the cork's resilience, the material's ability to return to its original shape after being deformed by load, and the returning was the metaphor -- or was not a metaphor, was the material fact that contained the metaphor, the fact of a floor that bore the weight and recovered from the weight and was ready for the next weight, the floor doing what the building did, which was hold and release and hold again.

She drew the walls. Warm gray on both sides, the Benjamin Moore HC-172 that was the building's signature color, the color that received light without commentary, the color that held whatever the light brought -- the warm gold of morning reflected from the east-facing windows of the patient rooms, the cool white of the LED task lights at the nurse's station, the amber glow of the night-lights that guided the corridor at two in the morning when the patients were sleeping and the nurses were walking their rounds and the building was in its nocturnal mode, the mode in which the corridor was not a passage for the living and the dying but a passage for the caring, the nurse's passage, the twelve-foot-wide, cork-floored, warm-gray channel through which the care moved in the hours when the patients slept.

She drew the art. The art at forty-two inches. She had specified the hanging height for all her buildings -- forty-two inches from the finished floor to the center of the piece -- and the height was not arbitrary, was not the standard gallery hanging height of sixty inches, was lower, was the height at which art was visible from a wheelchair, the height at which a person who was seated rather than standing could see the painting without tilting the head up, without the neck extension that the sixty-inch height required, and the neck extension was pain for many of the patients, and the pain was unnecessary, and the unnecessary pain was the thing Miriam designed against, and the forty-two inches was the design against, was the correction, was the architect's adjustment of the standard to accommodate the particular, the particular being the person in the wheelchair who deserved to see art at their eye level rather than at the eye level of the standing, the healthy, the people who did not need the corridor's accommodation.

She specified the art itself. Watercolors. Pacific Northwest landscapes. She had always specified landscapes for the corridors, not abstracts, not portraits, not the art that demanded interpretation or provoked thought but the art that offered recognition, the art that showed the world the patients had lived in, the mountains and the rivers and the forests and the sky that the patients had seen from their cars and their porches and their hiking trails, the world made small and hung on a wall at forty-two inches, the world brought inside, the world made available to the person who could no longer go outside, and the availability was the art's gift, the gift of the familiar, the gift of the world reduced to a scale that the corridor could hold.

She drew the lighting. The corridors required two modes -- day and night. The day mode was indirect warm-spectrum LED, the light bounced off the ceiling rather than aimed at the floor, the reflected light softer than direct light, the reflected light the architectural equivalent of Portland's diffused light, the light that came through clouds rather than through clear sky, and the softness was the design, the design of the gentle, the corridor lit by gentle light during the hours when the patients were awake and the families were visiting and the building was in its diurnal mode.

The night mode was different. The night mode was amber LED at the base of the walls, the lights recessed into the cork baseboard, the light at ankle height, the light sufficient for navigation but insufficient for full visibility, the light that said: the corridor is here, the floor is here, you can walk, but the walking is in the dim, is in the quiet, is in the mode of the building that respects the sleeping, that does not flood the corridor with light at two in the morning when the light would travel under the doors and into the patient rooms and interrupt the threshold state, the between-state that the dying inhabited more and more frequently, the state that required the dark, required the quiet, required the building's cooperation, and the building cooperated through the night mode, through the amber LEDs, through the architectural decision to let the corridor be dark while the corridors of hospitals blazed with the institutional light that said: we never close, we are always on, we are the building that does not sleep, and Miriam's building slept, or at least dimmed, at least quieted, at least became the nocturnal version of itself, the version that the dying needed.

She drew the corridor for three hours. She drew it with the attention she brought to all drawings, the attention that was professional and that was personal, the attention of a woman who understood that the corridor was the thing between the things, the passage between the rooms, the space that carried the person from one holding to another, and the carrying was not nothing, the carrying was not merely transit, the carrying was its own experience, its own architecture, the experience of moving through a twelve-foot-wide, gently curving, cork-floored, warm-gray space with art at forty-two inches and light that was gentle by day and amber by night, the experience of being in the between, of being neither in the room one left nor in the room one is approaching but in the corridor, in the passage, in the space that belongs to neither room but that connects both rooms, and the connecting is the corridor's architecture, the corridor's purpose, the corridor's gift.

She thought of the drive. She thought of the three hours and twelve minutes between Portland and Bend, the corridor between the two buildings, the passage between the room where her mother was dying and the building she was designing for other mothers to die in, and the drive was a corridor, was the space between the rooms, and the space between the rooms was one hundred and sixty-three miles of road, and the road was the corridor, and the corridor was the thing that held her while she moved between the two holdings, between the mother and the building, between the grief and the work, and the holding of the corridor was temporary, was the holding of transit, was the holding that lasted only as long as the passage, and then the room, and then the permanent holding, the holding of the walls and the ceiling and the floor and the window and the light.

She finished the corridor drawing. She capped the pen. She looked at the trace paper. The corridors curved through the floor plan like rivers through a landscape, following the building's geometry, connecting the wings to the garden, connecting the rooms to each other, the corridors the circulatory system of the building, the channels through which the life of the building flowed, and the flow was the design, and the design was the corridor, and the corridor was the room between the rooms, the space that carried, the passage that held.