The Unsung Designs

People who design buildings must combine form and function. Their designs excite the brain while holding gravity at bay. Function designers are willing to sacrifice aesthetics for practicality. Our work doesn’t have to be pretty, just stand up to a stiff wind.

As the summer wears on, I delight in the garden support constructions of friend John, a retired physician. It has never surprised me to learn that a person I first knew as a surgeon turned out exquisite furniture in a woodworking shop clean enough to perform surgery. Whether you’re building stringbean supports or repairing broken bodies, your brain, eyes, and hands have got to be working together.

 John, a pediatrician, once helped design a device that removed skin lesions by freezing. These days, he more often designs what look like tram systems of cane poles to support vegetables that haven’t the sense to stop growing.

In my garden, there is a whimsical birdhouse made of metal, round in its body, and topped by a conical roof. It’s ornamental, not meant for occupancy, because the roof isn’t attached. The roof sits atop the bird house until the wind blows it off or it’s unseated by the vibration of a passing garbage truck.

Each year, little brown birds build intricate nests that fill the cylinder of the ersatz bird house. When the top blows off, and I discover the event soon enough to reseat the roof, the family of birds stays on. My inattentiveness may cause occupants to leave early. This I regret, but, as I’ve said, it’s an ornamental house that birds have adapted to their use.

My Uncle Floyd once designed an air conditioner as impractical as my bird house. He stuffed hay between two sides of wire to make a straw sandwich. The hay burger he attached to one side of a window fan he stuck in a window. He rigged a garden hose to drip water through the straw. In theory, a breeze passed through the dripping hay to cool the room.

This might have worked out West where the humidity is low, but my uncle’s design studio was in humid south Arkansas. I became his guinea pig when I arrived by train for my summer stay. After one night under the contrivance, I awoke to find my pajamas and bed clothes soaked.

“That’s it, Floyd,” said my Aunt Lucille. “Get rid of that thing or you’ll be the one to tell your sister her son drowned in his sleep.”

As I’ve grown to something approximating adulthood, (I’m seventy-seven this month) I’m attracted to things colored screaming neon: green, orange, yellow, blue. It started with water pistols and persists in my choices of smart phones. 

I’ve designed a few things of my own; for instance, garden gate hinges from the leather tops of worn out Birkenstocks and a shed door closer that employs a coat hanger and weight. One of my grandsons calls my mechanical doodles “Pop-built.”

“Is this Pop-built?” Emerson asked as we hauled our bicycles across my favorite piece of neighborhood designwork. It’s a stile for pedestrians and cyclists. The land bridge lets residents of adjoining neighborhoods avoid Highland Road south of LSU by passing through a hedge on a low ridge. There is a gap in a fence left from the days when cattle grazed. Going through fence and hedge over the stile is like stepping through a time portal. I didn’t build the stile. It’s made of concrete, a medium I’ve never mastered. There are steps for feet and a ramp running beside the steps for the wheels of bicycles. It is the design work of a psychiatrist who lives across the street. Another example of a medical person turned practical clinician.

My father-in-law—the family’s first Emerson—quoted Shakespeare, understood the stock market, and was the kind of teacher who taught his children things they needed to know. He hung his old suits on a post by the barn as a scarecrow and clothes horse. He designed a board and batten house for his tree farm, using lumber milled from trees on the place. He designed a hog barn, which became an outdoor bathroom for a granddaughter who refused to potty in the woods.

[Read more essays like this from writer Ed Cullen, here.] 

 As my street’s stand-in grandfather, I have made friends with a neighbor named Ory, four. Early this summer, Ory followed a simple pattern I dug in my garden to plant seed potatoes in hopes of getting French fries. Brother Anders, two, provided comic relief, spinning the propellors of whirlygigs I’ve restored after visits from other short people.

Ory and Anders arrive at my frontyard garden in an electric car. The boys have placed Anders’s scooter in the car’s open trunk. They are men of the open road with designs on travel, until their mother discovers they’ve momentarily escaped the pull of her gravity. She reins them in with a voice designed over the ages to exact obedience