A "Nothing Here" Place

"There's nothing here," Rhonda's son said as they drove into Kansas. Rhonda is a native Kansan who has lived for a decade or two in another state. She knew what her son meant, but knew also that he was missing a lot of what is important about Kansas. The people, in particular.

Earlier this week, in the Home Environment class I'm teaching this semester, I had talked about the principle of "inhabiting the site," as explained in the book Patterns of Home. Homes feel best to people when they fit into the surrounding natural features rather than starkly standing apart from them. In class I pointed out that our flat landscape may seem to be lacking in features to blend in with. We have no rock formations or forests or mountains or even slopes to let our houses grow among or out of. So what are we to do to make our homes "inhabit the site?"

I'm not sure if anyone has completely figured that out, but my mind has gone to some interesting places in puzzling over this.

I thought of the house on the banks of Plum Creek, a dugout home described in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book carrying that name. That home fit so thoroughly into the environment that a person could have walked over the top of it without knowing it was there. Building like that required a creek bank, however. We do have creeks nearby, but no spots that I know of that would be safe to build a dugout in. Other settlers in this area built sod houses. I can't imagine a more "inhabiting the site" thing to do than to build a house out of materials found on the site. That, of course, is also what people have done by building log cabins in forested areas and stone houses in rocky places.

I told my students that I thought in Kansas we should think of the sky scape--not only the landscape--when we explore the ideal siting of a house on a piece of land. It's one of the most notable features of the outdoor world because none of it is obscured by trees and hills or mountains. When do we especially wish to see the sky? Sunrise and sunset? If that's the case, we ought to make sure that the places in our homes that are occupied at those times have a good view to the east and west.

Another common feature of our place is wind. On featureless land, we don't have a lot of options for wind protection, but we can at least minimize the glass openings on the north sides of the house, where the coldest winds usually strike. If we decide to build along an east-west road, if we have a choice, a building site on the south side of the road would be preferred, to keep the road dust from billowing over the house when traffic passes while a south wind blows. This would especially be a benefit during a dry summer when the windows might be open to admit breezes--at a time when the prevailing winds are from the south.

Abundant sunshine nearly all year suggests that we cash in on its winter benefits, with wide windows on the south, and deep roof overhangs so that no scorching heat is admitted during the summer.

Visually, though, what kind of house design fits in best on a prairie landscape? A long, low structure. Like a ranch style house, which is just like that--a low-profile house, most at home on a wide, grassy ranch. Or perhaps a monolithic dome, like a bubble resting on the flat surface of the water in a dishpan.

Frank Lloyd Wright is famous for the Prairie Style of architecture. Low, flat roofs are part of this signature style. They echo the unwaveringly horizontal boundary of our landscape where it meets the sky in a circle all around us. True, the low flat roof line looks stunning in "Falling Water," one of Wright's most famous buildings, which isn't part of a prairie landscape at all. It's built in a bluff along a rocky creek. The building echoes its surroundings by being constructed partly of stone, and having a waterfall cascading off some of the roof edges. "Falling Water" steps up the slope by the creek in wide, flat steps, just as a prairie house could hunker down under a wide flat roof among the tall grasses that grow naturally here. The pronounced horizontal lines of Prairie Style architecture turn out to be very versatile architectural features.

Besides Kansas' pronounced horizon line, our natural landscape is loaded with texture--a fundamental element of design. Grasses lie on the earth in soft waves, the taller ones slipping away and rising again in response to the wind that lifts and lays them down. I'm not sure how to incorporate this feature into a home design, but I'd love to see someone try. Flapping shingles wouldn't cut it, I'm sure. Perhaps light and shadow playing across a sandy colored textured wall surface would be evocative of prairie vegetation showing its glistening blooms and duller stems by turns. Somewhere in the landscape, a native Cottonwood tree, rustling pleasantly, and showing its shiny top leaf surfaces and duller undersides would create its own light and shadow show, just as the grasses do.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder why people here so often copy home and landscape designs that could just as well be found in Ohio or Arkansas as Kansas. We could be so much more interesting if we dared to think and then live outside the "box" that is home for all the people who live in less interesting places than ours.

We'll never have enough money to build a sand colored monolithic dome with cottonwood trees growing nearby--but not directly to the east or west, so as to leave the sunrise and sunset visible. But I'm pretty sure if we did, living in it would feel just right. The winds would lift over the house without slamming into the exterior walls. We'd be as snug as the Ingalls family was in their dugout or the settlers were in their sod houses. Wes Jackson would say it would be a good way of "becoming native to this place." Traditional builders would shudder, but only until the first tornado came along and our house was the only one left standing. Then it would look like a sensible and abundant way of living in a place with nothing here.