The Commission

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 9: The Commission

The call came on a Thursday afternoon in August, three weeks before the site visit in September, three weeks before Miriam stood on the five acres of former orchard east of Bend and looked at the light and drew the first shape of Orchard House on the tailgate of James's truck. The call came while she was in her office on Northwest Glisan Street, the third-floor office above the coffee shop, the office she had occupied for fourteen years, since the lease on the smaller space on Southeast Division had become insufficient for the work, the work having expanded from one building every two years to one building every year, the practice growing the way practices grow when the architect has found her subject, has found the thing she is for, the thing the buildings are for, and the finding produces a kind of gravity, a professional mass that attracts projects the way a planet attracts objects, not through effort but through presence, through the fact of being there, of being the person who does this thing, and the thing Miriam did was design hospices, and the people who needed hospices found her because she was the person who designed them, and the finding was the commission, and the commission was the call.

The man on the phone was named Robert Asano. He was sixty-three years old. He was a retired cardiologist. He lived in Bend, Oregon, in a house on the west side of the Deschutes River, a house that looked east toward the Cascade Range, the same mountains that Miriam would later see from the Orchard House site, the mountains that would fill the floor-to-ceiling windows she had not yet designed, and Robert Asano looked at these mountains every morning from the window of his kitchen, the window that faced east, the window through which the morning light entered and fell on the kitchen table where he ate breakfast alone because his wife, June, had died fourteen months ago in a facility in Bend that was not a hospice but that functioned as one, a facility that had been built as a skilled nursing home and that had added a palliative care wing in 2018, the wing a conversion, a repurposing, a set of rooms that had been designed for rehabilitation and recovery and that had been reassigned, without architectural modification, to the care of the dying, and the rooms did not know what they were for, and Robert Asano had watched his wife die in a room that did not know what it was for, and the not-knowing was the thing he could not forgive, the thing that had brought him to the phone, the thing that had produced the call.

"I want to build a hospice," Robert Asano said. His voice was the voice of a man who had made a decision, a man who had spent fourteen months making a decision and who had arrived at the decision and who was now executing the decision with the directness of a physician, the physician's habit of moving from diagnosis to treatment without the hesitation that non-physicians allow themselves, the hesitation of doubt, of second-guessing, of the wondering-whether that delays action, and Robert Asano had wondered-whether for fourteen months and had arrived at yes, had arrived at the hospice, had arrived at the call.

Miriam listened. She listened the way she listened to all prospective clients, with the full attention that a commission requires, the attention that hears not just the words but the spaces between the words, the pauses, the emphasis, the particular quality of need that each client brings to the first phone call, because each client's need is specific, is personal, is the product of a specific loss or a specific fear or a specific conviction about what the dying deserve, and the specificity of the need is the beginning of the design, the first information, the first data point that the architect collects, the way Lin collected the title and the author and the call number of a new book, the first facts that located the book in the system, that gave the book its place.

Robert Asano's need was specific. His need was the room. His need was the room in which June had died, the room that had been designed for rehabilitation and that had been reassigned to dying without the architectural modification that the reassignment required, the modification that would have changed the ceiling height and the window size and the floor material and the door width and the proportion of the space, the modification that would have made the room a room for dying rather than a room for recovering that happened to contain a dying person, and the happening-to was the thing, the accident of the room, the architectural accident that Robert Asano had experienced as a personal affront, as an insult to June, as the visible evidence that the system did not understand what it was doing, that the building did not know what it was for.

"The ceiling was seven feet eight inches," Robert Asano said. "I measured it. After she died, I went back to the room and I measured the ceiling. Seven feet eight inches. The minimum for a residential space under the Oregon building code. The minimum. They built the ceiling at the minimum and they put my wife under it and the minimum pressed down on her, the minimum was above her every day for the six weeks she was there, the minimum ceiling of a building that had been built to the minimum because the builder had been building to the minimum and the architect had been designing to the minimum and nobody along the chain of decisions that produced that ceiling had stopped and asked: what is this ceiling for? Who will lie beneath it? What will they see when they look up? And the not-asking was the thing. The not-asking was the failure."

Miriam heard the ceiling. She heard seven feet eight inches. She heard the minimum. She heard Walter, the carpenter in Medford, twenty-two years ago, looking up at the eight-foot ceiling of Sage Hill and saying "The ceiling is too low," and she heard the sentence as she had heard it then, as the sentence that changed everything, the sentence that raised every ceiling she had built since, the sentence that was in the nine feet six inches of every subsequent building, the sentence that Robert Asano had arrived at independently, from the other side, from the patient's side, from the dying person's spouse's side, the side that experiences the ceiling rather than designs it, and the experience had produced the same sentence, the same understanding, the same knowledge that the ceiling matters, that the height above the dying person's face is not a dimension to be minimized but a gift to be given, and the giving is the architecture.

"I don't want another person to die under a seven-foot-eight ceiling," Robert Asano said. "I don't want another family to sit in a room that was designed for something else. I want to build a hospice. A real hospice. A building that knows what it is for."

"Tell me about the site," Miriam said, because the site was the first question, was always the first question, was the question that preceded the design the way the land preceded the building, and the question about the site was the question about the light, about the orientation, about the relationship between the building and the world it would inhabit.

"Five acres east of Bend. Former orchard. Apple trees, mostly removed, some remaining along the north boundary. The property faces the Cascades. The morning light comes from the east, from the mountains."

"I know that light," Miriam said, and the knowing was professional, was the accumulated knowledge of ten buildings sited in Oregon, buildings in Portland and Eugene and Medford and Corvallis, but the knowing was also personal, was the knowledge of a daughter whose mother was dying in a room that faced east, a room in Portland, a room that Miriam had designed, and the east-facing light in Portland was different from the east-facing light in Bend -- softer, grayer, filtered through the marine layer -- but the facing was the same, the orientation was the same, the decision to place the dying where they could see the morning was the same, and the sameness was the practice, was the twenty-two years, was the thing Miriam had been doing since Sage Hill.

Robert Asano had the land. He had the funding -- a combination of his own savings, the savings of a cardiologist who had practiced for thirty-five years, and a grant from a foundation that funded rural healthcare facilities, and a smaller grant from the county, and the total was sufficient, was more than sufficient, was enough to build the building Miriam would design without the compromises that insufficient funding imposed, without the reduction of the ceiling height or the narrowing of the corridors or the substitution of vinyl for cork or standard glass for low-iron, the compromises that Miriam had fought against in every building and that she would not need to fight against in this one, because the funding was there, because Robert Asano had provided the funding the way he had provided the site, with the completeness of a man who understood that a building requires resources and that the resources must be adequate to the building, the way a structural system must be adequate to the load.

"I've seen your buildings," Robert Asano said. "I visited Ridgeline. I visited Cedar Creek. I drove to Portland and I visited Evergreen House. I sat in the common area at Evergreen House for two hours and I watched the light come through the windows and I watched the corridor and I watched the people -- the patients in the wheelchairs, the families walking, the nurses moving through the building -- and I saw what the building was doing. I saw the building holding them. I saw the building knowing what it was for. And I sat there and I thought about June, about the room where June died, the seven-foot-eight ceiling and the thirty-two-inch door and the vinyl tile and the window that faced the parking lot, the window that showed June the parking lot every morning for six weeks, the parking lot where I parked the car when I came to visit her, and June's last view was asphalt and automobiles, and I thought about that, sitting in Evergreen House, sitting under the ceiling that was -- how high is it?"

"Nine feet six inches."

"Nine feet six inches. And I sat under the nine-foot-six ceiling and I looked through the east-facing windows and I saw the trees and the sky and I thought: June deserved this. June deserved this building. June deserved this ceiling and these windows and this light. And the people who will die in Bend after June, they deserve this too. They deserve a building that knows what it is for."

Miriam did not speak for a moment. She held the phone and she listened to the silence on the line, the silence that was not empty but full, the silence of a man who had said the thing and was waiting for the response, and the silence was the same silence that occupied the space between a question and an answer, between a need and a response, between a commission and an acceptance, and Miriam sat in her office on Northwest Glisan Street and she thought about the eleven buildings, the ten she had completed and the one this man was asking her to design, and she thought about Room 6 at Evergreen House, where her mother was lying under the nine-foot-six ceiling, looking through the east-facing window at the Portland sky, and she thought about the fact that she was being asked to design another building for the dying while her mother was dying in a building she had already designed, and the simultaneity was the thing, the personal and the professional occupying the same moment, the daughter and the architect occupying the same body, and the body held both, the way a room holds both the person and the light.

"I'd like to visit the site," Miriam said.

"When can you come?"

"September. The first week. I want to see the September light."

"Why September?"

"Because the light in September is the middle light. Not the extreme light of summer, not the low light of winter. The middle. If I understand the middle, I can design for the extremes. And the dying die in all seasons, and the building needs to hold all of the light."

Robert Asano was quiet. Then he said: "You talk about the building the way I talked about the heart. As though it does something. As though it has a function that goes beyond the mechanical."

"It does," Miriam said. "The building holds. That's its function. Not structurally -- structurally, the building resists gravity, resists wind, resists seismic force. But functionally, the building holds. The building holds the person. The building holds the dying. The building holds the light that falls on the person who is dying. And the holding is the architecture."

She heard him breathing on the phone. She heard the breathing of a man who had lost his wife in a building that did not hold, a building that contained but did not hold, and the difference between containing and holding is the difference between a box and a room, the difference between a facility and a home, the difference between the seven-foot-eight ceiling and the nine-foot-six ceiling, the difference that is measured in inches but experienced in dignity.

"September," Robert Asano said. "I'll be there."

He was there. He was standing at the edge of the property when Miriam and James arrived on the Tuesday morning in September, standing in the grass that had come after the orchard, the volunteer grass, the grass that arrives when human intention withdraws, and he was looking east, toward the mountains, toward the morning light, the same light Miriam would look at for the next three hours, the light she would chart and photograph and record and carry back to Portland and think about while she drew the first floor plan of Orchard House, the plan that would evolve through twenty-three revisions over the next four months into the building that James would build.

Robert Asano was a thin man with gray hair and the steady hands of a surgeon, the hands that had held hearts, that had made the incisions and the sutures and the bypasses that kept hearts beating, and the hands were steady the way David's hands were not, the steadiness the residue of a career spent controlling the uncontrollable, saving the unsaveable, extending the lives that would eventually, despite the cardiologist's interventions, end, and the ending was the thing Robert Asano had not been able to control, had not been able to bypass or suture or repair, the ending that was June's dying, and the dying had happened in the wrong room, and the wrongness had produced the commission, and the commission had produced this morning, this meeting, this standing on five acres of former orchard in the September light of central Oregon.

They walked the property together, Miriam and James and Robert Asano, the three of them walking the perimeter and the interior, the five acres of grass and stumps and remaining apple trees, and Robert Asano pointed out the features of the site -- the neighboring properties, the road, the utility easement, the drainage patterns he had observed during winter rains -- and Miriam listened and looked and noted and held the compass and measured the angles and did the work she always did on a site visit, the work of understanding the land before imposing upon it.

At eleven o'clock, sitting on the tailgate of James's truck, drinking cold coffee, Robert Asano asked the question. He asked it the way he had asked clinical questions during his thirty-five years of cardiology, directly, without preamble, the question a probe, an instrument inserted into the conversation the way a catheter is inserted into a vessel, to find the thing that needs to be found.

"How do you design a room for someone to die in?"

Miriam looked at the site. She looked at the light. She looked at the mountains and the sky and the grass and the stumps and the surviving apple trees along the northern boundary, and she said: "I don't design a room for someone to die in. I design a room for someone to live in. The last room they'll live in. And the last room should be the best room. The last room should have the most light and the best materials and the highest ceiling and the widest door and the best view. The last room should be the room the architect designs with the most care, because the person in the room is doing the hardest thing a person can do, and the room should be equal to the hardness."

Robert Asano looked at her. He looked at her the way he had looked at echocardiograms for thirty-five years, reading the image, reading the structure, reading the function of the organ on the screen, and what he was reading now was the architect, was the person who would design the building, was the woman who had said the thing about the last room being the best room, and the reading produced a diagnosis, a clinical finding, and the finding was trust.

"Build it," he said.

Miriam nodded. She uncapped the felt-tip pen. She pulled the roll of trace paper from behind the seat. She laid the trace paper on the tailgate. And she drew the first shape of Orchard House, the shape that was not a floor plan but a gesture, the open hand, the reaching, the fingers spread toward the mountains and the light, and Robert Asano watched her draw and he saw the shape and he saw in the shape the thing he had been looking for since June died, the thing that was not revenge against the seven-foot-eight ceiling and not memorial to June and not philanthropy and not guilt but architecture, the architecture that knows what it is for, the building that holds the dying with the same care that the cardiologist had held the hearts, the same precision, the same attention, the same refusal to accept the minimum, the same insistence that the thing that holds a life should be worthy of the life it holds.

The commission was the phone call and the site visit and the trace paper drawing and the handshake and the contract that would be signed three weeks later in Miriam's office on Northwest Glisan Street, the contract that specified the scope and the fee and the schedule and the deliverables, the contract that was the professional agreement between the architect and the client, the document that made the building official, that authorized the design, that commenced the process that would produce the drawings that would produce the construction that would produce the building that would produce the rooms.

But the commission was also the ceiling. The commission was the seven feet eight inches. The commission was a cardiologist standing in the room where his wife had died and measuring the distance between her face and the surface above it and finding the distance insufficient, finding the distance an insult, finding the distance the visible evidence of a building that did not know what it was for, and the finding was the commission, and the commission was the building, and the building would have ceilings of nine feet six inches and windows from floor to ceiling and cork floors and solid wood doors and low-iron glass and corridors twelve feet wide and a kitchen with a six-burner range and a garden with apple trees, and the building would know what it was for, would know from its foundation to its roof ridge, would know in every material and every dimension and every proportion, would know because the architect knew and the builder knew and the client knew, and the knowing was in the building, was the building, was the architecture, was the thing that Robert Asano had asked for and that Miriam had spent twenty-two years learning to provide.

A building that knows what it is for.

That is all a hospice needs to be. A building that knows.