I'm a sucker for the romanticism of Winter.
It feels like low sun angles, frosty mornings, and trees heavy with last night's snowfall were purposefully designed to steal our hearts. Who doesn't love to watch the snow fall? (Who loves to shovel the snow that's fallen?) As Winter approaches, the days get shorter and the plants retreat below the soil, the season pulls at me to slow down and retreat.
Winter continually reminds me of Refuge and Outlook from Patterns of Home:
…sitting inside the house near the fire with the rain beating down on the roof and looking out the window to see the water coming down; hiding upstairs on the balcony, peering through the railing, and listening to the adults' party below; and relaxing on a covered front porch, watching life go by on the street below.
It always feels like Winter is a season to retreat back to the comfort of the office, dive into our notebooks, and look toward the possibility of Summer.
In other words: Winter is Planning Season in Kyle's world.
Naturally, one of the first places my planning mind drifts toward is Leaping Daisy. It's a place that inspires one to dream of what could be.
Lately I've been giving thought to something I'd call the story of the place. It's something inspired by the writings of Michael Pollan in Second Nature and A Place of My Own — two of my favorite books about... well, I'm not really sure what they're about. Culture? Building? Home? What I do know they both imbibe a strong feeling of place — the ideas and feelings you experience as you physically move through a physical space. Of his garden he says:
Along the way we’re told a story—for the garden path is like the thread of a plot, or an argument.
— Michael Pollan in Second Nature
He argues that gardens should be structured like books, telling a story as you move through it: the path as a plot, the plants as characters, the geography the setting — maybe even revealing a bit of the author all along the way. In A Place of My Own he tells a similar tale, but this time the place is a writing shack he built in his back yard. He again argues that good buildings tell stories — of course about how they were made — but also of how they should feel as you move through them. Each window should tell its own little story, every hallway a the plot line pulling you toward the main event.
I'll leave you to read the books yourself, but I can't imagine a better argument for the romanticism of buildings and gardens than these two books.
I don't know what the story of Leaping Daisy will be, but I'm starting to get an idea. Right now I feel like I have sketches of chapters, ideas for smaller pieces that will one day play into a larger whole: eating a sandwich in the picnic area by the swimming hole, enjoying a warm breakfast in the old cabin's breakfast nook, cruising the perimeter road in a UTV, a hot soak in the bath house on a snowy night, or enjoying the morning's coffee down by the garden pond during wildflower season.
For now, those sketches and the necessary work of infrastructure are enough to keep me busy for a while. There isn't a lot of romanticism to digging ditches, but sometimes you just gotta dig a ditch.
All of my plans for the ranch are well and fine, but we're also breaking ground on a new house in South Lake this year. So as much as I can dream of spending weeks milling up trees to make a new floor for the old cabin, I suspect I'll be spending most of my time watching other people build a 21st century house here in town.
We have a lot of restrictions building in South Lake (a good analogy is to imagine we are building in a National Park) and it puts all kinds of interesting constraints on building here. Most architects work with constraints like sun exposure, grade, building codes, and setbacks — and while we have those, we also have complicated rules around water percolation, footprint limitations, overhang shapes, and pitch-dependent height restrictions. All this adds up to a complicated calculus that puts you choosing between things like a third bedroom vs. a longer driveway, a 2:12 pitch roof vs. a second floor, or a large roof overhang vs. a built-in outdoor kitchen. It's a lot to take in, and it doesn't lend itself to foundational learning (the kind where you learn from fundamentals and build up).
So back in July of 2019 when we bought the land, I started learning SketchUp as a way to explore ideas about what the building might look like. At first, I wanted to understand what kind of shapes might work to maximize solar gain, solar energy production, and shed snow away from walkways & driveways.
Eventually, this lead me to explore how the interiors might be arranged and how each room might feel — especially it's size and sunlight exposure. As we worked with our designer to turn these ideas into an actual house, I could give better feedback since I had a good idea of how each of his ideas might feel. I could imagine how the sun moves across the sky, how that would affect garden space, and whether the roof would be practical for solar panels.
But all this exploration had me addicted. Sure, I had a good idea about how direct sunlight might cast into a room. But that's not really how sunlight works. It changes colors as it goes through objects, bounces off surfaces, and casts all kinds of indirect lighting. And what about after sunset? So recently I've been playing with rendering programs: software that takes your SketchUp models and renders them closer to the real world.
So here we are now, about a month away from breaking ground (crosses fingers), and I feel like I know this place that hasn't even started to be. I'm excited to see it become something we can touch, and even more curious to see how my expectations set in drawings and renders contrast to the shape of the thing in this physical world.
This whole process has reinforced why I love tools like SketchUp — they allow you to build up experience in a very cheap way. You can learn via iterations of guess and check in a virtual world rather than the slow, painful lessons the real life likes to offer.
This idea of building experience through cheap iterations is something that's stuck with me since college. For the vast majority of my schooling in Civil Engineering we learned things from fundamentals upwards. Learn the properties of materials, use those properties to calculate strength, calculate the loads for every structural member, design them to resist those loads, and so on. You then check each one of these calculations, and make sure each member is at least as strong as you need it to be. In this theoretical world, the structure never fails.
But one class we learned a different way. We modeled the structure in a computer program based on guessed materials, and added loads until it failed. Each time it failed below the expected loads, we'd beef up the structural member that failed. In this theoretical world, the structure failed over and over again — and we got to see where it failed. And it has significant advantages — when you get to the job site and it turns out they had to use a different bracket, you now have an intuition about whether that's important. Maybe it doesn't matter much and they can use the replacement bracket. But every once in a while, there's a bracket that absolutely has to be the one designed. Maybe that singular bracket is actually the weakest point of the building. Having that intuition helps you make that call quicker.
This is really the core of what we call experience. Someone who has done a similar thing many times and has built up an intuition about the meaningful decisions to be made. It's always been one of the most exciting elements of computers to me. Whether it's a spreadsheet of your monthly finances, seeing the sun angle throughout the year on your iPhone, or a VR walk through of house plans — we can iterate on possible futures in a way we've never been able to do before.
That's why I love planning season. It's full of possible futures unencumbered by the messy reality of doing.
There's an old saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy, which most people use as an argument to devalue planning. If all your plans fail at the first implementation, why even try? Let's just get started instead. But what most people don't realize is this quote's author intended the opposite:
The German field marshal, known as Moltke the Elder, believed in developing a series of options for battle instead of a single plan, saying “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Today, “no plan survives contact with the enemy” is the popular reconfiguration of this concept.
His argument was that you should have many plans. It's why I much prefer Churchill's version: Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.
So at least for me, I embrace my desire to plan during the Winter. But first I throw out last year's plans and start anew. Those old plans are of little importance. But making the new plans? That's essential.