For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown
together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large
table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs
...
For the last year he lived at the construction site, in a shanty hastily thrown
together on a bare hillside, a wooden enclosure with a bed, a stove and a large
table. His old draftsmen came to work for him again, some abandoning better jobs
in the city, to live in shacks and tents, to work in naked plank barracks that
served as architect’s office. There was so much to build that none of them
thought of wasting structural effort on their own shelters. They did not
realize, until much later, that they had lacked comforts; and then they did not
believe it--because the year at Monadnock Valley remained in their minds as the
strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months
of spring. They did not think of the snow, the frozen clots of earth, wind
whistling through the cracks of planking, thin blankets over army cots, stiff
fingers stretched over coal stoves in the morning, before a pencil could be held
steadily. They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring--one’s
answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first
blue of the sky--the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the
great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an
achievement that nothing will stop. Not from leaves and flowers, but from wooden
scaffoldings, from steam shovels, from blocks of stone and sheets of glass
rising out of the earth they received the sense of youth, motion, purpose,
fulfillment.
Read More
