A lot more of the same, it’s true: since I left Long Island in the 70′s, resolving henceforth to live somewhere more in the middle of things, more real, the suburbs have quietly and steadily expanded. And then the day came, a few years ago, when I read in the paper that for the first time in history a majority of Americans now lived in the suburbs. America had officially become “a suburban nation”—which sounded to me like one of those utterly weightless demographic truths, empirically verifiable, but without any real echo in experience. For wasn’t this really just a change in quantity, not kind? The relative size of middle and fringe may have shifted, but surely not their relative weight.

At least this is what I assumed. It’s only recently that I’ve felt any compulsion to go back to Woodbury to test my assumptions, and that was mostly because I needed a place to set this essay. What I found when I got there was a good bit more than that. What I found looks a lot like a whole new country—or at least a place for which “suburb” is no longer quite the right word.

From the time I was 5 until I got out of high school I lived in the Gates near the corner of Juneau and Fairbanks Boulevards. In all that time, I never really noticed just how goofily dissonant those names are, with their improbable conjunction of Yukon pluck and Old World prissiness. Yet these place names, and the conflicting dreams they embody, tell you just about all you need to know about the place and the time.

The development went in on the site of an old North Shore estate that had been subdivided into acre lots during the Suburban Revolution; the developer decided to preserve the wrought-iron entrance gates to give a bit of aristocratic tone to his shiny middle-class development. As for the whole Yukon theme, ground was broken in 1960, soon after Alaska had become a state, and the Gates fashioned itself a forward-looking, even pioneerish kind of place. At the time Woodbury was on the suburban frontier, still mostly farm fields and forest, and the Gates aimed to distinguish itself from the cookie-cutter subdivisions then spreading out across Long Island.

In the same way the suburbs began as a reaction against city life, each new incarnation of suburbia has defined itself in opposition to some earlier, superseded ideal: middle-class utopias keeping one step ahead of history. In the beginning the suburban frontier stood in places like Brooklyn Heights, first made accessible by steam ferry in 1814, but the city quickly followed, folding Brooklyn’s row houses into its expanding grid. To prevent that kind of thing from happening again, the next new place (epitomized by Llewellyn Park, built in New Jersey in 1853, and Riverside, built near Chicago in 1868) was carefully planned to keep the city permanently at bay. It would be an ungridded community of free-standing houses in a park, linked to the distant city by trolley or train. Then, beginning in the 1920′s, the 19th-century railroad suburb was superseded by more far-flung subdivisions organized around the automobile and, after the war, the mass-production house pioneered by the Levitts.

By 1960, when my parents went house hunting on Long Island, Levittown was passe, and the next new place—the un-Levittown—promised to be the Gates of Woodbury, where the lots were generally a sprawling acre. Instead of identical houses lined up like sparrows on a wire, the developer offered three up-to-date models (ranch, split-level, and colonial), laid out his roads in sweeping, pointless curves and sited the houses so far back on their wooded acres that each appeared lost in a reverie of being a mansion. (Sometimes I think this is what is really meant by a “dream house”: the recumbent ranches dreaming of California, the colonnaded white colonials dreaming of Tara.) But if the Alaska angle implied the pastless potential of the next great American place, what was with those prissy “boulevards” and “drives,” all those “ways” and “terraces” and, for the cul-de- sacs, “courts” Understand that in the suburbs a developer will go to heroic lengths not to call a street a street. Street says city, and city is precisely the last thing you want to say. Whereas boulevard said fancy, said sophisticated, and if this effeteness jangled alongside muscular Alaska, that evidently didn’t bother the developer or his buyers.

Finding your way back to your suburban childhood home is harder than you might think. I didn’t know anyone who still lived in the Gates—my folks moved out in 1972, and most of their neighbors had headed down to Florida the minute the kids left for college, there to recreate a grayer, warmer Gates in Boca Raton. (One thing the burbs have done to America is to recast its geography along purely demographic lines.) To find out who lived in my old house, I had to send it a letter, addressed to “current resident.” (In quotes, to make sure it didn’t get tossed.) “Current resident” turned out to be Stephen and Jena Hall, and they graciously invited me to visit. Since I didn’t know anybody to stay with, “going home” to Woodbury meant spending the night in a $79 room in the Executive Inn on Jericho Turnpike, the main commercial strip.

My first impression of Woodbury, after rolling off the expressway onto Jericho Turnpike, was disorientation. Every landmark on my mental map of the area had been stripped and replaced by a big-box retailer, such that it took me the better part of two days to locate my junior high school, its unmarked turn off Jericho having been swallowed up by superstores. I noticed that the brands were all high-end, the kind my mother had had to drive all the way to Manhattan for.

Actually the brands should have been my tip-off that this was not the same place I left, that it had a completely different relationship to Manhattan. But I didn’t put that together until I turned onto Woodbury Road, passed a bunch of newer developments (including the Woodbury Estates and the almost completely flat Rolling Hills) and made the left onto Froehlich Farm Boulevard. Whenever “farm” (or “forest,” or “fairground” or anything venerably rural) is honored in a suburban place name, you can bet the thing is history, and such was emphatically the case with the old Froehlich farm.

The pumpkin field to which Charlie DeSalvo and I used to drag our wagons each fall for the purpose of committing petty larceny had sprouted a half-dozen smoked-glass office buildings, blocky islands in a glittering sea of really nice cars. Gateways Executive Mall, the sign said (I half-expected to see “of Froehlich Farm”), and it listed a phalanx of law firms, insurance companies, medical practices, banks and high-tech firms. Each of those really nice cars represented at least one really good white-collar job, and there must have been a thousand of them right here, smack in the middle of the pumpkin field that backed up against Fairbanks Boulevard.

“The city”: we led centripetal lives in those days, our heads bent toward Manhattan as if it were the sun. Which in some sense it was, the city being the source not only of all money but also of entertainment and information and—what was especially important to us as teenagers—authenticity. The suburbs, we believed, were fake; after all, we had watched them rise like stage sets on the farm fields, seen the instantaneous lawns rolled out over the raw dirt like new linoleum. This creation of a new life ex nihilo was of course exactly what our parents liked about the place, but what was to them a blank canvas was to us an existential void. Nothing was original except, well, except us and these childhoods we were having—a thought disturbing enough to make us wonder if those were somehow fake, too, “sub” to something realer.

Like lots of other dads in the Gates, mine commuted to a job in the real world every day, leaving the house before I woke up and rarely getting home before the dinner dishes had been cleared. Only a few of the moms had jobs, but they’d dress up and drive in a couple of times a month, to shop, catch a matinee, meet the dads for a fancy dinner and a “first run” movie.

Even before kids were old enough to solo on the L.I.R.R., we looked to the city as the source of our styles and shows and news, an all-powerful broadcast antenna to whose frequency we always tried to stay tuned. Tuesday nights Cousin Brucie handed down the Top 40 from Midtown Manhattan, and by Wednesday morning the Sam Goody at the Walt Whitman Mall would have rearranged its shelves accordingly. Later on, the more time you spent in the city, the cooler you were, because you had personally bathed in coolness’s headwaters, at the Fillmore East, say, or the Thalia, or the Eighth Street Bookshop.

It doesn’t seem as though Long Island’s cultural and economic antennas point west in quite the same way anymore. Oh, sure, the Long Island Expressway still creeps every morning, but often now it’s creeping in both directions, and a lot of those cars are heading to places like the Gateways Executive Mall (Exit 45), rather than to Manhattan. The retail, which once helped light up the city in suburban eyes, is no longer any different: the Walt Whitman shopping area is now basically Lexington Avenue and 59th Street—Gap, Banana Republic, Nine West, Barnes & Noble, J. Crew and Tower Records, all anchored by a Bloomingdale’s. But whether this represents the colonization of the suburbs by the city or the opposite is a question.

Radio and network TV still originate in Manhattan, but the newer media have traded broadcasting’s radiating waves for centerless webs of wire. Who can say where in the world cable TV comes from? (A lot of it from Long Island, actually: Cablevision’s headquarters happen to be in Bethpage.) And the Internet? America Online, perhaps the first great suburban medium, originates somewhere in suburban Virginia, though like the rest of the Web it might as well be anywhere.

One way to tell the story of the American suburbs is as a story of new technologies recasting the relationship of city and countryside. Electric power, trains, automobiles and broadcast television propelled successive waves of decentralization, each along slightly different lines. Until now, however, the pattern those lines formed always resembled the spokes of a wheel, with the city firmly in the center. Radiating highways and radio waves used to reinforce the gravitational pull of cities. But cable and computer networks are forming different patterns now, ones that mirror and speed the emergence of the burbs as free-floating entities with their own overlapping gravitational fields.

Time has been kind to many of the suburbs, and Juneau Boulevard is much prettier than I remember it. The conehead evergreens and midget rhododendrons, the paper birches and forsythia—all that dinky nursery stock plunked into backfill by landscapers—have put down roots and grown up to reclaim half-forgotten woodland identities, picturesquely blurring the new developments’ blunter edges. By now many of the trees have grown tall enough to cast interesting shadows. The American suburb was conceived in the 19th century by visionary designers like Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and Andrew Jackson Downing to offer Americans a kind of democratically subdivided park, and the nicer ones are actually beginning to look that way.

Modest by comparison to what’s built today, the 60′s ranches and split-levels in the Gates have mellowed into period pieces: this is the architecture of postwar dreams that, at least from the vantage of a new century, no longer seem grasping or pretentious so much as sweet, even poignant. For this they probably have the newer houses to thank: the fat, bombastic three-story mini-mansions that now dot the Gates, many of them rising from the foundations of tear-downs.

Happily, the ranch on Juneau Boulevard hasn’t been a tear-down—though I was astonished to find at the far end of the driveway a hulking two-story post-modern building, a design studio perched atop a three-car garage. Jena Hall is a successful home-furnishings designer, and she has employed as many as eight people at a time here. On the exact spot where Binker, my problematic English bulldog, snored her days away in a chain-link dog run, people now come to work.

Jena Hall’s home business helped me see that the suburbs have proved to be rather more adaptable to changing lives and times than people once thought. The whole idea behind the suburbs was to draw bright lines and make separations: between city and country, obviously, but also between work and home, public and private. But it turns out we overestimated the power of architectural determinism. The suburbs have proved flexible enough to accommodate working mothers (though not without difficulty: Jena Hall’s studio was usually crawling with toddlers, hers and her employees’) as well as a great many different kinds of families and lifestyles. Since I left the Gates, its white nuclear families have been joined by singles and gays, Asians and African-Americans, people operating home businesses and empty-nesters. The houses themselves—light, wood-frame—turned out to be as easy to remodel as they had been to build. The world that built the postwar suburbs has passed away, and yet those suburbs still stand, remodeled by the press of history. What they haven’t been is reimagined or renamed, at least not yet.

When I was growing up in the Gates, suburban legend had it that one of the big white colonials on Bering Court had served as the model for Ward and June Cleaver’s house on TV. They showed the facade at the beginning of every episode, and it certainly looked right. Whether this was true or not (for all I know, every suburb in America nursed the same legend), we all wanted to believe it. Sometimes we regarded Hollywood’s notice as flattery, since being on TV made the Gates seem more real and substantial (fiction will do that); other times the fame seemed like the grimmest of jokes, weekly proof of the empty pretensions of the place.

Cleaverism—the sitcom image of suburbia—loomed large in our suburban lives, though its meanings were always complex and unstable. The Cleavers, Ozzie and Harriet, Donna Reed and all the rest proposed a ideal of suburban life that everyone knew was unrealistic and silly; and yet even as we made fun of it, we allowed the stereotype to exert a kind of normative hold on us. Your own family might be hopelessly dysfunctional, but maybe the Grables next door were getting it right. TV was happy to promote the Cleaver ideal because TV (alone among the arts) loved the burbs, and was eager to flatter what was, naturally, its ideal audience. Here were people marooned at home for much of the day, affluent and consumerist by inclination (having already purchased a new lifestyle), and at least at the start, insecure enough about the conduct of their new lifestyles to welcome the guidance of advertisers.

But what’s remarkable is how Cleaverism continues to organize so much of our thinking about suburbia. Now, though, it’s the lie of Cleaverism—call it Cheeverism—that dominates the popular image, offering writers and moviemakers a cheap way to construct a gothic version of suburbia, to throw its dark side into sharp relief. Now behind every smiling lawn is a dysfunctional family: Donna Reed’s sleeping with the woman next door and Eddie Haskell’s got a gun.

Yet the facade remains the organizing principle; in defiance of everything we know, we can’t seem to see the suburbs without it. Without the ghosts of the Cleavers hovering over them, the families in “American Beauty,” say, or of any number of recent suburban-gothic productions, just don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Before I left the Gates I drove into Bering Court to see if I could find the Beav’s old place. If I had the right one, the house has had a complete face lift since the 60′s. The stately white faux-colonial now has diagonal siding painted an unfortunate shade of puce, lots of opaque glass bricks and, out front, a berm thickly planted with shrubs to hide the facade. Very 80′s, it seemed, but for the life of me I could not name the dream behind this house.

It’s hard to spend time driving around Long Island today without a gathering sense of cognitive dissonance. So many of our generalizations about the burbs no longer stick, which almost seems a shame, since generalization was one of the things that we liked best about them. Is it even right to call a place like Woodbury—no longer “sub” to any “urb”—a “suburb” any more? “Urban sprawl” might be a better term. Certainly “sprawl” hints at the centerlessness of it, “urban” at the fact there’s nothing in the city you can’t find here. And maybe, as some have suggested, that is what I’m looking at but can’t quite yet see: a new kind of city, one we still don’t have the words or name for. “Edge City” is one proposal, though that still implies a center. “Technoburb,” another, hints at the role technology has played in freeing these place from their urban orbits, but it’s awfully cold. How about something more floppy-effervescent, like “burbopolis”

Whatever it ultimately gets called, the horizontal city that is now Nassau County, Long Island, is fast acquiring a city’s jangly diversity, though, being horizontal, it takes a car to really see it. Freeport has its African-American neighborhoods and Great Neck a community of Persians, and even in my very white elementary school you see Indian and Asian faces now. Street culture, of all things, has come to certain suburban lanes: in Glen Cove, Central American immigrants collect on corners and in front yards, talking and playing music as if they were still in Guatemala City. (The village issued a flier gently instructing them in suburban custom.) The new city has city problems too: housing shortages, crime waves, pollution; dilapidated “first ring” suburbs are said to be in the throes of a full-fledged “urban crisis.”

Though even here the generalizations don’t hold. Before I left Long Island I took a long walk through Levittown, where the suburban history of Long Island got its start half a century ago. A first-ring suburb built fast and on the cheap, Levittown by all rights should be crumbling by now. Yet the place I visited appeared to be doing just fine, in defiance of every stereotype that has been thrown at it. Held up as an example of conformity and monotony, Levittown’s 17,000 identical capes have mutated into an exuberant architectural Babel: the sparrows on a wire have each grown their own distinctive plumage.

Yet this free-for-all of Home Depot fantasy is held together nicely by the steady setback line of the houses and the mature shade trees marching down the gridded streets. Even more surprising, though, was the sidewalk scene, which even in late winter was about as lively as a New Urbanist could wish for, the young mothers out with their strollers, the kids biking home from school, the gray-haired joggers doing the loop in slo-mo. By the time I got back in my car, I felt completely confused about where, exactly, it was I’d been.

The monolith that was supposed to be suburban America—middle class, homogenous, white—has become just one of a great many neighborhoods in a larger and more complicated mosaic. So why is this new suburbia so hard to see plain, without the filter of suburban cliche? Maybe it’s because we’ve lost our old vantage point.

When my parents moved to the Gates in 1960, one-third of America was suburb, one-third city, one-third rural. Even those of us who lived in the first third tended to look at it from the perspective of the second. The city still held what amounted to a monopoly on descriptions and, for obvious reasons, the city didn’t much like what it saw rising up around it.

Forty years later, the suburbs—or whatever they are—have grown up and taken over: more people now live in suburban American than rural and urban America combined. Suburbia is America, and not just demographically. Today our politics are ruled by the suburbs; suburbia’s agenda—that is, issues bearing on the well-being of families with children, around which the suburbs still revolve—is now America’s. (Even the erstwhile party of the city has moved to the burbs, with Bill Clinton doing the driving.) Suburbia’s cultural power is harder to see, but that may be because it’s everywhere, indistinguishable from the air we breathe.

On the drive back to the country, where I live now, or where at least I think I live, I thought about the various ways suburban qualities have seeped beyond the burbs themselves. I thought about the suburbanization of the city, manifest in freshly themed neighborhoods and malled retailing, and I thought about Silicon Valley, which in some ways represents the apotheosis of suburbia: the first time in history an important economic, technological and cultural revolution has its roots in a suburb.

I also thought about manners. Ever since Levittown was built America has become a progressively more informal place, one where social distinctions get played down, where even the rich and famous feel compelled at least to act like normal suburbanites, and where hierarchical distinctions like high and low-brow—which are fundamentally urban distinctions—come to seem quaint. Suburbia’s too horizontal a place for all that.

I thought about clothes too. I usually wear a tie and sport jacket when I’m reporting, but not on this trip. Suburbanites dress up only to go to the city, a place where the presentation of self is far more serious business. That’s probably because all you really have to present in the city is yourself in public, dressed this way or that. In the burbs you’ve got the house and the car and the lawn all working overtime to tell the world who you are, and this leaves you free to dress down. Nowadays everybody dresses down; on Fridays, even the starchiest urban offices go suburban.

I wondered too if what we used to think of as the fakeness of the suburbs hasn’t also left its mark on the broader culture. To grow up on a “boulevard” conjured in a field is to be at home with the facade and the themed environment, with the quick-change and the quotation marks, not to mention the willing suspension of disbelief. It may be that ironic detachment is a mental habit we children of the burbs have come by naturally.

Anyway, these were my desultory highway thoughts, entertained on the long drive home from suburbia. The funny thing is, the closer to home I got, the more omnipresent the place I’d been began to feel. Suburbia, I realized, is no longer somewhere you go, or leave. Wherever we live now, it’s where we live.

I quite like living in the exurbs, and while I hope this fine form of civilization—this late-20th-century cross of countryside and latte—will last indefinitely, I’ve always assumed that it won’t, that my town will eventually succumb to the ineluctable, almost geologic forces of sprawl. There didn’t seem much anyone could do about it, at least nothing that didn’t feel selfish or elitist or hypocritical, not to mention perfectly futile. But that was before the Clinton Administration made “quality of life” a fit subject for national politics, and Vice President Gore kicked off his campaign talking, of all things, about sprawl.

The sprawl threatening the quality of this particular life is massed somewhere to the south of where I live, and I recently took a drive down Route 7 in search of its current frontier. I had only driven 15 miles, through the cornfields and pastures strung along the Housatonic River, before encountering a new townhouse development just north of New Milford. I recognized it as sprawl because it has one of those sad picturesque names (“Twin Oaks”) that memorialize whatever feature of the local landscape has just been obliterated.

As I continued south, the big maples gave way to even bigger signs, the traffic thickened and the franchises began reiterating themselves every five miles or so, the only indication that I’d left one town and entered another. I tried to decide what it meant—was it ridiculous or significant?—for a Presidential candidate to declare that the sorry state of this landscape (even this traffic!) was the nation’s business. “In too many places across America,” Vice President Gore had said in a January speech laying out his Livability Agenda, “the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development.” The agenda itself was so Clintonian in its modesty (a thimble of money for buying open land, a minor rejiggering of Federal highway spending, some funds to encourage “smart growth”) that I initially dismissed it as the urban-planning equivalent of school uniforms.

But the response to Gore’s initiative has been so vociferous as to make me think again. The free-market think tanks spewed forth studies arguing that sprawl doesn’t really exist or that, if it does, it’s exactly what Americans want. George Will detected in the antisprawl movement an echo of 60′s disdain for middle-class consumer culture. A high-ranking official of the National Association of Homebuilders issued a threat to any politician who dared get in the industry’s way.

As I thought more about it, I realized that George Will may actually be on to something. For by elevating “livability” to a national issue, the Vice President has put a new spin on two legacies of the 60′s that the right thought had been safely disposed of a long time ago. One of these is the conviction that “the personal is political.” The other is the habit of questioning the wisdom and sovereignty of the free market. Rub these two supposedly discredited ideas together, and you can generate some surprising political heat.

This Administration’s quality-of-life issues—a rubric that embraces everything from family leave and the V-chip to traffic congestion, movie violence and smoking—are often derided in the media as examples of small-bore, middle-class, “feminized” politics. Yet the very act of injecting such personal matters into national political discourse draws the middle class, unawares, into a conversation about capitalism that is anything but trivial. For implicit in that conversation is the notion that the free market need not have the last word on the state of the American landscape or public health or even popular culture. In a remarkable feat of political jujitsu, Clinton and Gore have taken the right’s own emphasis on “values” and turned it into a middle-class critique of consumer capitalism.

Conservatives like to argue that, with sprawl, the free market has given Americans exactly what their spending decisions say they want. And yet many of us—or maybe I should say some part of most of us—are dismayed by the landscape and traffic that our own dollars and desires have wrought. That’s why it is possible both to deplore the arrival of a new Home Depot in my area and also to shop there.

The right would have you believe that the real me, the only one that finally matters, is the shopping me—the consumer; the deploring me should be dismissed as a sentimentalist or elitist or hypocrite. Until now, that’s been the general view on sprawl, one I’ve bought into myself. But it overlooks a complicated truth about modern life that conservatives would have us forget. It is that although we are consumers, we are not only consumers, but parents and neighbors and citizens too. The sort of world we bring into being with our dollars does not necessarily match the world we would vote for with our hearts, and one of the things politics is good for is to help us bring those worlds into a more pleasing alignment. What a radical idea.

In my family’s case, the dream of a more perfect order was supplied by a man named William Machado, the interior decorator my mother chose from the pages of a home-design magazine to redo the dated and gloomy Manhattan co-op my family had moved into the year before, making the big step up from our ranch house on Long Island. In memory, Machado looks exactly like Jerome Robbins, with the same scrupulously clipped salt-and-pepper beard, the erect dancer’s bearing and an austere, somewhat formal manner not at all in keeping with the times. It was always an occasion when he came by to present his color schemes and fabric swatches, my mother according him the deference due a maestro, while my father grumpily eyed his watch and mentally patted his wallet.

The summer of the renovation, my parents removed the whole family to the beach for the duration, and it was there that one of the unsolved mysteries of my childhood unfolded—one that, in retrospect, should have served as fair warning to us all that living under (or up to) Machado’s design was not going to be easy. It concerned Binker, our English bulldog. Bought on sale from a pet store by my father, Binker was in every respect a horrible creature. She attacked children without provocation. With a snorty flick of her great, bejowled head, Binker could fling a ropy lariat of drool 20 feet, and if that didn’t empty the room, her staggering smell would finish the job. We surmised that Binker’s digestive and respiratory tracts had somehow been crossed, for her breath seemed to come from someplace other than a lung. Binker also suffered from eczema and incontinence, though the latter condition may have represented nothing more than an extreme manifestation of her laziness. Either way, Binker’s existence, which might be said to represent the antithesis of good design, posed a mortal challenge to Machado’s work in progress, and as the renovation progressed, my parents could often be heard fretting about the dog’s future in the new apartment.

Then the mysterious thing happened. One morning a few days before we were due to move back into the finished apartment, Binker quietly and conveniently expired in her sleep. It would never have occurred to me to suspect foul play—Binker was getting on in years—except that my father made such a big show of taking her to the animal hospital for an autopsy. He returned brandishing an official-looking document declaring that Binker had died, and I quote, of “natural causes.”

When I saw the new apartment, I knew right away that Binker was better off having departed this world for what could only be a more imperfect one. All our old stuff was gone, and the living room had been transformed into a meticulously composed tableau, a spacious, tranquil room, done in shades of wheat and sand and clay, that occupied an existential plane somewhere between high-tech and Zen. I remember thinking that it looked just like a magazine, and wondered if the new living room was going to get the sort of velvet-rope treatment I’d run into at some kids’ houses. There was one friend’s place I must have been over a thousand times before even setting (unshod) foot in the living room, a plushly carpeted Danish Moderne space as blue and airless as the sea.

A few days after we moved in, Machado himself showed up to put the finishing touches on his masterwork. He spent an entire day arranging the wall of books in the living room, until he had satisfied himself that he had achieved the ideal composition of upright Modern Library volumes alternating with great slabs of art books stacked on their sides, and here and there the occasional jaunty leaner canted at a precise 60 degrees off plumb. Books whose spine color or typography he judged unesthetic were exiled to the bedrooms, along with all our paperbacks. To give the whole wall the proper amount of compositional air, he left spaces between the book clusters for a collection of considered objects—a pair of kachina dolls, a carved Inuit stone and various pre-Columbian tchotchkes. Some of this stuff I recognized as my mother’s, but a lot of it I’d never seen before.

I had to admit that the bookshelves were beautiful, as much a work of art as half the volumes perched on them, yet they soon became a symbol of the vague oppression Machado’s design had visited on our daily lives. Though to their credit (and peril), my parents never ruled the new living room off-limits to minors, Machado’s bookshelves quickly emerged as a source of family tension. My mother informed us that each time we removed a book from the Wall, we were to leave a little slip of paper in its place so the book could be returned to its designated spot. As you might expect, this regime didn’t survive very long, and in short order several of the Modern Librarys were found lying down, and a few of the leaners began looking less casual than sloshed.

The creep of entropy took its psychological toll on my mother, but her fidelity to Machado’s art never quite exceeded her devotion to her children (a proposition we sought daily to test), because she continued to let us take out books. What we didn’t know then was that she had made a graph-paper sketch of Machado’s tableau, recording each book’s precise address and the cosine of every leaner, and after we went to bed she would set to work putting the Wall right again, holding the picture perfect for one more day.

I realize now that my mother’s sketch of Machado’s bookshelf arrangement was her way of defending his design against the inevitable frictions of time and habitation—arguably the Achilles’ heel of 20th-century design. Ever since the modernists, whose rise happened to coincide with the advent of architectural photography, much of the energy of interior design has been directed toward that single pristine moment my mother was struggling to preserve: the day the finished but not yet inhabited house gets its picture taken, freezing it in time. This is the moment memorialized in the magazine layout, the still point on which designers’ careers turn. After that, it’s downhill. “Very few of the houses,” Frank Lloyd Wright once complained, were “anything but painful to me after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along after them.”

A designer’s “horrors” are nothing other than the client’s favorite stuff—the furniture, pictures, curios, books, mementos and keepsakes accumulated over a life. We prize these things not necessarily for their beauty, and certainly not for the harmonious way they fit together, but because they tell a story about us, individuals with a particular history that, over time, gets written on the walls of our homes. The problem is, that story is not necessarily the same one a designer wants to tell. He doesn’t want his work of art haunted by our past or, for that matter, left open to the imprint of our futures.

All art aspires to the condition of timelessness, but what, in a house, is time? It is simply us, going about our lives, taking books off the shelf and putting them back wrong, adding a souvenir from a vacation to the mantle, taping a report card to the fridge, leaving crescent moons of coffee on the new butcher block. (Did I mention the new kitchen counters? For years my mother would apply a nightly poultice of Bon Ami to the butcher block, hoping to bleach out the traces of the day.) As inevitably as weathering, the process of inhabiting a space leaves the marks of time all over it, and so constitutes a declension from the designer’s ideal.

It was the modernists who first came up with a solution to this design problem, a way to keep our stuff and all the other traces of habitation out of the picture. They would insist on designing their interiors down to the very last detail, not only the bookshelves and cabinets (“Farewell the chests of yesteryear,” Le Corbusier had declared) but also the furniture (built in wherever possible) and window treatments, and even in some cases the light fixtures and teapots and ashtrays. This way they could control everything in the picture. And some didn’t stop there: Wright went so far as to design new clothes for one client, the better to insure that her presence in his rooms wouldn’t spoil their color schemes. The wonder is that there are clients who actually like the idea of having their lives professionally designed. Architects get asked to arrange not only their clients’ books but also the toothbrushes in their bathrooms and even the groceries in their pantry. I’ve seen blueprints prepared for the express purpose of showing a client where to put her olive oil.

Not many of us would ever think to have a designer pre-position our salad oils, and yet we’re avid to look at the homes of the kind of people who do—that is, the scrupulously styled rooms splashed across the spreads of shelter books like House & Garden and Metropolitan Home. At least, I know I am, even after having spent part of my childhood trying to live within the confines of such a magazine spread. We look, even though we understand no one really lives like that, even when we know a not-very-bookish stylist has handpicked the bedside reading, that the ottoman was brought in to bestow a credit on an advertiser and that the Phalaenopsis has already gone back to the orchid-rental guy.

Yet there’s a powerful fantasy on offer here, and it’s not just a fantasy of wealth, though surely that comes into it. For me, at least, it’s a daydream of a more ordered and coherent existence (not to mention a really good housekeeper). In this other life, the wave of clutter and information threatening to break over us has somehow been tamed. Notice how rarely a TV or computer or even a magazine disturbs the peace of these rooms; indeed, the images themselves implicitly deny the existence—the pressures—of the very world that produced them. Also, the harmonious tableaux bespeak an equally harmonious marriage, a meeting of the minds on how two people, or a family, can live happily together. (Never mind that few interludes can ruin a marriage quicker than the building of one of these places.) So, yes, these rooms ask us to suspend our disbelief, and we do, accepting these frozen signs of habitation for the flowing, tangled thing itself.

The picture in the magazine also gratifies our voyeurism, for how often do we get to peer into the kitchens or bedrooms of perfect strangers? Yet we seldom get to see how other people inhabit their houses, which is to say, live their private, at-home lives. Shelter magazines offer only the thinnest sampling of the myriad forms domestic life can take. Even today, when “good design” is no harder to find than the nearest Crate & Barrel, most of us continue to make our places according to our own idiosyncratic lights. We’ll buy one of those from there, borrow this idea or that from Martha Stewart or the people next door, but mostly we’re happy to let life’s accidents and passing fancies shape and reshape our interiors. We might start out with a picture, but we usually end up with a story.

I’m thinking of a couple of rooms I’ve been in recently, rooms in which the crosscurrents of personal history have exerted a stronger pressure than design or even good taste. The first is a woodsy New England home decorated in what might best be called Amateur Natural Historian. Wasps’ nests balloon from tree branches crisscrossing the ceiling; a snake’s skeleton stretches out along the mantle; cactuses thick as phone poles tower in the kitchen; a stuffed barn owl supervises the dinner table. Then, in central Florida, a soaring white church of a living room presided over by a floor-to-ceiling hutch displaying, exclusively, a collection of hand-painted Walt Disney plates, each of them tenderly held in a circle of halogen. One more: the handmade house of a friend who died recently, where, on the mantle, his daughters have composed a modest shrine consisting of his first novel, his pocketknife, a family portrait from a sunny time, a guitar pick and a shell from his hunting rifle. The real world of interiors is a far stranger and more wonderful place than any designer or magazine editor can conceive.

The pages that follow—documenting the insides of homes from Cleveland to Taipei, Brooklyn to Bangkok—offer abundant, even extravagant proof of this proposition. Taken together, they tell a story of how we go about inhabiting the places we live in, how we make them our own. And though this process is inevitably inflected by the particularities of culture and class, certain elements of the story seem the same just about everywhere.

One is the importance of our stuff—Wright’s “horrors”—in making, and marking, our places. A novelist could tease entire lives from the contents of a bachelorette’s bathroom, or from the boxed dowry items carefully set aside in an Indian farmer’s living room, or even from the ghostly marks of furniture pressed into the carpet of an unoccupied house foreclosed on by the bank. Indeed, the emptiest rooms make the point most eloquently—that, far from being inanimate or mute, our things breathe life into a room. Matter matters.

Particular as we like to think our places are, they seem to pass through predictable phases, not unlike our bodies, and on the walls of our rooms you can read the ages of man. Singles have a specific way of organizing the traffic jam of an apartment share, and the newlywed couple’s tentative stabs at interior decoration will tend toward the generic, taking care not to insist on anything too distinctive just yet—except, of course, images of the newlyweds themselves. Later on our places grow emphatic: think of the richly inhabited, overripe rooms of people who have lived in the same place for 50 years, or the brutally edited last quarters of elderly people who have had to decamp to nursing homes. To peer into such rooms is to realize that what we call “a sense of place” has very little to do with design or space, but is really a function of time.

It was House & Garden that eventually came to photograph our apartment, though in the end my mother wouldn’t let them run the pictures. The magazine’s stylist had insisted on hanging paintings on the walls and plopping a rented ficus tree on the coffee table in the living room. Machado himself was willing, but my mother refused to go along; if she wasn’t going to let her children alter the room’s composition, then she certainly wasn’t about to let a magazine.

But over time, the press of life got the better of the design. After my grandfather died, my grandmother—in her 90′s and not well—came to live with us. Machado’s living room, where she spent her last afternoons, was gradually transformed by her nurse into a kind of hospital day room, with lots of mismatched chairs for her visitors and a big rented TV on casters. The summer of my freshman year in college, I lived in the apartment with a friend, and we put burns in the butcher block no amount of Bon Ami could erase, though I scoured them till my wrists ached. Books began to migrate more freely in and out of the living room, and new objects gradually infiltrated the Wall, until the whole thing had pretty much relaxed into an unphotogenic normalcy. By then my mother had relaxed, too, and now she’ll smile when reminded of her graph-paper sketch.

But the final insult to the design was inflicted by my father, who one dad got the bright idea of bringing home another pet store special—this time a Maltese, a breed he reasoned would be better suited to life in a Manhattan co-op than a bulldog. But though Chauncey may have looked the part, he proved only slightly less awful than his predecessor. He was a macho little mop of a dog who left a white wake of fur and insisted daily on marking every right angle in the apartment, and it wasn’t long before it became the sort of place where old Bink might have felt at home.

Looking at the apartment today, a quarter-century after the renovation, it doesn’t feel very much like Machado’s creation anymore. No, now it seems very much my family’s creation, if that’s the right word for something shaped by so little intention. The perfect picture has faded almost past recognition, but in its place there’s this story—of one marriage, four childhoods, now a bunch of grandchildren. The last time I was over I noticed that one of my sister’s horse-show trophies had found its way onto the Wall, next to my ratty high-school copy of “The Catcher in the Rye.” And though the apartment these days can sometimes feel like a museum of my teen years, with my father’s original cast album of “The Me Nobody Knows” still on the turntable, one of my wife’s paintings recently won a spot on the mantle in the living room, so it’s not as though time has stopped here. Le Corbusier, whose own design strove so heroically to escape the press of time, nevertheless knew how it had to end. “Life,” he said, “always has the last word.

That’s right, there are no private lawns in Seaside. The town’s strict design guidelines prohibit them. So the set designers for “The Truman Show” had to rip out the garden of native plants surrounding Truman Burbank’s perfect little house on Natchez Street in order to roll out the carpet of Kentucky bluegrass his cliched existence demanded. For how was this perfectly ordinary American going to spend his Saturday mornings if he had no lawn to mow?

In the last few years a million or so words have been written pointing up the environmental and philosophical folly of the Great American lawn. Lawns consume unconscionable amounts of energy and chemicals, while producing little more than landscape conformity and social anxiety. People complain—but people continue to mow, as if it were their solemn civic duty.

Except, that is, in Seaside.

By permitting only native species in front yards, and by outlawing sod, Seaside has seceded from the great green river of lawn that joins Americans, yard by unfenced yard, from Maine to California. In March, I spent a couple of days at Seaside, and though it would be foolish to proclaim I’ve seen the future, I had a vision of what post-lawn America might look like.

Much about Seaside was revolutionary when it was founded 17 years ago, but perhaps nothing about it remains as radical as its landscape: the exuberant thickets of native plants (live oak, Southern magnolia, beach rosemary and a host of others) that threaten to burst their tidy picket enclosures. By now the town’s neotraditional houses look downright familiar, for the simple reason that Seaside helped bring back such traditional elements as the front porch.

At the same time the town-planning concepts that Robert Davis, Seaside’s developer, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, its designers, pioneered here—houses on tiny lots pulled up close to walkable streets leading to public spaces—have gone on to inspire a national movement.

But if the reach of Seaside’s influence has blunted the novelty of its architecture and layout, the town’s gardens—just now coming into their own—have lost none of their power to astonish. Seaside’s landscaping may well be the most revolutionary thing about the place. It’s one thing to challenge the architecture and planning of the American subdivision, but it’s quite another to abolish something as fundamental as the American front lawn.

When I asked Mr. Davis why a real estate developer hoping to sell houses to Americans would challenge their inalienable right to mow, he smiled. “I suppose I didn’t know enough to know how crazy it was,” he said.

Besides being a developer, Mr. Davis was a child of the 60′s, an ardent environmentalist who happened to inherit 80 acres of scrubby Gulf Coast beachfront and decided to experiment with them. When Douglas Duany, Seaside’s landscape architect (and Andres Duany’s younger brother), first met with Mr. Davis to discuss the town’s landscape style, Mr. Davis simply pointed out the window at the low, windswept scrub clinging to the sugary white sand and said, “I sort of like what’s out there now.”

This was 1982, years before nurseries in the area began carrying the sand live oak, woody goldenrod and wild lupins that make up the local scrub forest. Yet, growing turf on a barrier island would have been, in Mr. Davis’s words, “dumber than dirt.” For one thing, there was no dirt, only sand.

So Douglas Duany drew up a list of the plants Seaside would allow, and turf grass was not among them. To preserve as much of the existing vegetation as possible, builders were told they could disturb no more than a four-foot zone surrounding the house. “One contractor almost took my head off when I told him he couldn’t simply scrape the lot with a bulldozer and fix it later with grass and shrubs,” Mr. Duany told me.

Initially, Seaside’s sales force encountered some resistance, too, though they soon learned the “grass question” was a good way to identify serious buyers. “Prospects who gagged on the ‘no lawn’ rule usually had trouble with the rest of the concept, too,” one broker explained. Which makes sense: Seaside posed a challenge to the whole suburban regime of private castles surrounded by vast moats of lawn; those home buyers who welcomed the idea of shrinking their private realms were the ones least wedded to their Toros.

The fact that only a tenth of Seaside’s 300-plus families live here year round also helped, since the landscape rules promised homeowners almost complete freedom from yard chores.

AT first, I didn’t get it when Mr. Davis described Seaside’s garden style as “Gertrude Jekyll gone native.” Walking down one of Seaside’s older streets for the first time, I wasn’t sure these yards even qualified as gardens—many of them looked untended and disorganized, as if the “gardener” had merely thrown a fence around a patch of the scrub forest to keep it from escaping. Yet, the more I walked, the more these yards came into focus as exquisitely subtle gardens.

Actually, it wasn’t until I went for a jog through the scrub forest just beyond Seaside’s town line that I understood the Seaside yard wasn’t simply a restoration of the native plant community but a carefully edited representation of it. It was, like all gardens, a metaphor of nature.

Where the real scrub formed a low, impenetrable thicket, Seaside’s trees, protected from the salt spray by the architecture, have by now risen well above head height, creating an agreeably shady canopy that shelters walkers. The contorted branches of the live oaks throw webs of spooky shadows against the freshly painted houses. Since much of Seaside’s architecture tends to err on the side of sweetness and light, this unexpectedly Gothic inflection renders the houses more interesting, less wholesome.

The typical Seaside garden is layered vertically. Beneath the canopy of oak and magnolia leaves is a relatively open space at eye level that affords a welcome sense of prospect; then, around waist level, the density resumes, with informal plantings of beach rosemary, woody goldenrod, lupins, gopher apple and bluestem grass. A few small areas have been carved out for barbecues, benches or paths, but for the most part, human life is meant to take place on porches and decks—realms of Culture set within patches of seemingly unreconstructed Nature.

“Gardening by subtraction” is how Randy Harelson explained the method. A garden designer by training, Mr. Harelson moved from New England to Seaside six years ago. Nowadays he consults with the Town Council on horticultural issues, designs private gardens for homeowners and runs the Gourd Garden, a native-plant nursery two miles east of Seaside.

“The landscape here gets very little credit for putting Seaside on the map,” he told me. “But if you try looking at the architecture by itself, mentally removing the scrub and replacing it with lawn and foundation plantings, it gets boring very quickly.”

The point is proven by Truman Burbank’s intentionally trite yard, as well as by most of the new houses rising on the west side, where trees have yet to subdue the noisy parliament of Architectural Expression.

It’s the rub between the neat white picket fences and the luxuriant, heedless plantings that gives Seaside’s best gardens their power. Remove the tidy enclosures and the plantings would immediately look slovenly or go slack—the fate of all too many wild or native gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll understood it wasn’t enough to bring England’s native plants into the garden; they needed the frame of architecture if they hoped to make the leap from meadow to garden. The tight, controlling picket fences set off Seaside’s raucous planting much the same way that Sir Edwin Lutyens’s formal walls and paths set off Gertrude Jekyll’s relaxed perennial borders. At Seaside the juxtapositions reach an almost violent pitch that I suspect would have popped Miss Jekyll’s spectacles. But the underlying principle is the same.

MR. HARELSON says Seaside residents have taken the town’s landscape to heart, especially now that the tree canopy has matured. “The challenge was getting people to prune from below to create an understory, rather than from above, which is what most of us are accustomed to,” he said.

Definitive proof that Seaside’s landscape has set deep roots in the community came a few years back when the town planners decided that the scrub crowding the median strip of Seaside Avenue, a main axis, should be replaced with grass. Residents on the avenue rebelled, defending their corridor of wilderness in a battle that some say marked the moment when Seaside—residents and plants alike—slipped from the control of developers and designers.

Mr. Davis, for one, regards this as healthy, part of the town’s inevitable passing from idea into history. He described a recent conference at which a visiting English architect criticized Seaside’s landscaping. “He told us it was time to cut everything back—hard—since the foliage was now obscuring the architecture,” Mr. Davis said. “We had to explain that that’s exactly what people like about it. There are so many tourists passing by that our porches would be fishbowls if not for the trees.”

Thanks to the town’s celebrity, sure to increase with the release of “The Truman Show,” a porch wreathed in a tangle of oak and magnolia is a blessing. The sheer wildness of Seaside’s gardens is thus an inadvertent byproduct of the town’s success.

As I walked Seaside’s streets, I wondered why Seaside’s many imitators have so far failed to imitate it. Other New Urbanist communities have managed to shrink the front lawn and fence it in, but I don’t know of another town in America that has dared to do away with it entirely. In fact, at Disney’s town of Celebration—where Truman Burbank would have fit in without changing a thing—the rules actually require homeowners to maintain a minimum amount of lawn.

Seaside’s landscape is a special case, one that may not lend itself to imitation. It has taken everything from the abundance of gawkers to the paucity of humus to the conviction of its slightly naive developer to make lawns untenable here. It is also true that landscape styles, rooted as they are in the particularities of place, never traveled as easily as architectural styles. Even so, Seaside points a way, one way, and if we Americans ever do declare our independence from the tyranny of lawns, we will look back at Seaside as our exuberantly overgrown…

Only two years ago, the spot on which we were getting acquainted, these implausible Rotarians and I, was an impenetrable cypress swamp on the farthest edge of Walt Disney World. Now there is a handsome and lively town (population 1,500, eventually to reach 20,000) built by Disney, which has deployed its considerable capital and place-making skills to create, in the choral refrain of just about every company executive I met, “not just a housing development but a community.” Viewed from that perspective, Celebration is nothing more than an elaborate contraption for the production of Rotarians—for transforming isolated and disaffected American suburbanites (not unlike myself) into civic-minded members of a community. By one measure the contraption seemed to be working: scarcely 18 months after the first family moved in, Celebration has become ground for a luxuriant growth of scout troops, religious groups and hobbyist clubs of every conceivable stripe. No doubt any housing development that markets itself as an old-fashioned town would tend to attract more than its share of joiners. There is, too, the fact that Disney has been quietly working behind the scenes (for there is always a “backstage” at Disney) to seed and nourish all these groups.

But none of this explained the presence, across from me at breakfast, of someone like Todd Hill—an urbane landscape architect from Atlanta who doesn’t fit anyone’s stereotype of a Rotary member. Hill is, by his own lights, living proof that the “neotraditional” design of a subdivision can transform a young urban professional into what can best be described as a neo-Rotarian.

“Before I moved here I was not a big volunteer type,” he told me over microbrewed beers on his porch one evening. “I worked all the time.” Hill, who is 37, and his wife, Lisa, live on Mulberry Street in a Charleston side row, one of the six historical-house styles permitted in Celebration. They moved here from a condo in Atlanta, and their home has a two-career, no-kids spareness about it—lightly inhabited, with somewhat less in the way of furniture than high-end home audio and video equipment.

As a design professional, Hill had long been familiar with the ideas of neotraditionalism, the planning movement, also known as the New Urbanism, whose principles Disney has drawn upon in building Celebration; his experience living here has already convinced him that “it works”—that walkable streets, attractive public spaces and a close-by downtown can profoundly affect peoples’ daily lives.

“It’s a physical thing that becomes a spiritual thing,” Hill said, by way of explaining his belated discovery of his Rotarian self. “About two months after we moved to Celebration, I was back in Atlanta on a job, and it hit me: for the first time in my life, I felt as though I was part of a community. That’s when I decided I should join something. Me! When I first went to Rotary, I thought it was going to be, you know, Fred Flintstone in the bullhorn hat. I mean, what was all this ‘fellowship’ stuff? It’s kind of hokey, and I’m not ordinarily that kind of person, but I see it as a community thing.”

“Community” is a word we hear a lot these days, not only in the speeches of the President and in books by self-described “communitarian” thinkers in several different fields, but also in the focus groups and brochures of real-estate developers. (Community has emerged as one of the “features” most prized by new home buyers, according to the trade journal Builder.) Americans seem to sense, and regret, the fraying of our “civil society”—the informal network of clubs, volunteer groups and civic and religious organizations that traditionally knit a community together.

The town of Celebration represents the Disney Company’s ambitious answer to the perceived lack of community in American life, but it is an answer that raises a couple of difficult questions. To what extent can redesigning the physical world we inhabit—the streets, public spaces and buildings—foster a greater sense of community? And what exactly does “a sense of” mean here?—for the word community hardly ever goes abroad in Celebration without that dubious prefix.

Disney occupies a special place in the American landscape and culture. Few companies are as skillful at making places, at shaping the physical environment to affect our behavior. Disney’s theme parks deserve credit for helping to keep alive not only a large part of America’s vernacular architecture but, on Main Street, the very experience of walkable streets and pleasing public spaces—this at precisely the time when Americans were abandoning real Main Streets for their cars and suburban cul-de-sacs.

But Disney’s expertise is in building theme parks for paying guests, not towns for citizens. A real community is messy, ever changing and inevitably political—three adjectives that pretty much sum up everything the culture of Disney cannot abide. Very soon after the first homeowners moved into Celebration, Disney got its first taste of the unpredictability of community life, and of the difference between consumers and citizens. A bruising controversy erupted over the curriculum at the Celebration public school, and Disney suddenly found itself in a most unfamiliar environment, one that has tested the company’s vaunted skills at managing reality.

Disney’s expertise at making places and synthesizing urban experience cannot be separated from its legendary obsession with control; it is, even more than most, a corporation that lives by scripts of its own scrupulous devising. At Celebration, however, Disney has set in motion a story whose script it can only partly control. It is this experiment that I recently traveled to Celebration to observe: just how does a corporation go about manufacturing a community? And what happens when it actually succeeds, and that community starts to act like one?

The Street

One Sunday afternoon, I took a long walk through the streets of Celebration, hoping to understand just what Robert A.M. Stern meant when he told me that “the street is the key to everything else we’re trying to accomplish here.” Stern is, along with Jaquelin Robertson, a fellow New York architect, Celebration’s master planner; the two laid out the town’s network of streets, its downtown commercial district, its parks and school and “wellness center.” If a neotraditional town like Celebration represents a technology for the creation of community, the street, Stern was suggesting, is its most crucial component—its flywheel or microprocessor.

The streets of Celebration are loosely gridded, which means lots of stop signs, and narrow enough to force cars to crawl, so a pedestrian senses at once that he belongs here. The first thing I noticed as I headed up Longmeadow toward Hippodrome Park was just how much there is to look at. The houses are close enough to one another, and sufficiently varied in style, to unfold before the pedestrian in a pleasing rhythm. Even the grandest houses—and Longmeadow is a street of “Estate Homes”—are on tiny lots pulled up to the curb, and their faces engage the passerby with ceremonial front doors, nicely detailed windows and columns and sociable front porches.

Though I spotted no porch sitters on my walk, I spoke to several residents who swear by their porches, especially in the winter, when Orlando’s temperatures and mosquitoes let up. Lise Juneman, a young mother of two, said her family “spends every Saturday morning out on the porch, having coffee, playing Barbies with the girls, catching up with the neighbors strolling by.” A cliche, perhaps, but not an unappealing one.

Stern had spoken of the importance of making the street into an outdoor room—a public space in its own right, not just a connector—and the best of Celebration’s streets have already achieved this quality. The orderly ranks of trees (Disney has planted thousands of handsome, mature specimens) present a unifying street wall, the dead faces of garages have been banished to backyards (where they are accessible by service alleys) and the house fronts have been carefully scaled so as not to overwhelm the space. I found it easy to strike up conversations on the street, and my notebook quickly filled with slightly astonished testimonials to the forgotten pleasures of small-town life: “I used to just wave at my neighbors from the car. Now we stop and gossip on the corner.” “Everyone’s so friendly here, it’s like the first week of college.”

If the typical suburb represents a kind of monoculture, street after street of architecturally and socioeconomically identical houses, Celebration has already achieved a striking degree of diversity. During my walk, I strolled down a street of million-dollar homes facing the golf course, and then turned to find a lane of modest cottages that sell for a fifth as much; walking another block or two, I came to a broad crescent of town-house apartments that rent for as little as $600 a month. This sort of diversity, while limited—there are no poor in Celebration, and the town is extremely white—is nevertheless rare today in the suburbs, where it is an article of the real-estate faith that people will live next door only to neighbors of the same class. In Celebration, houses of roughly the same price do face each other across a street, but the service alleys behind those houses deliberately mix high and low, forcing the surgeon and the firefighter to mingle while taking out the trash or getting into their cars. Stern spoke of deliberately setting up such encounters as one of the many ways that “design can help to orchestrate community.”

This is, of course, a very old utopian idea, with deep roots in the American landscape: that the proper arrangement of streets and houses can help usher in a specific sort of community. When, in the 1630′s, the Puritans established a town on Massachusetts Bay, they specified exactly how far from the meeting house anyone could build—no more than a mile and a half—and laid out their village in concentric circles to enforce the social compact. In our own century, a long succession of middle-class utopias—Radburn, N.J.; Reston, Va.; Columbia, Md.; Levittown, N.Y., and countless unheralded others—have been staked out, platted and built on blank stretches of land in the conviction that a considered arrangement of streets, houses, public spaces and, increasingly these days, walls and gates will help to realize a specific vision of the good society.

In the mid-60′s, Walt Disney decided he had something to add to this tradition. He originally conceived Epcot (an acronym for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) not as a theme park but as a high-tech model city of 20,000 residents. But it was not to be: shortly after his death in 1966, company executives, no doubt worried about profit margins and the likelihood that a city populated by real people might prove more difficult to manage than a theme park, decided to shelve Walt’s utopia.

Today, Disney executives from Michael Eisner, the company’s chairman, on down speak of Celebration as the fulfillment of Walt Disney’s old dream to build a City on a Hill—a model held up to the world.

“Eisner was very clear from the beginning that he didn’t want to do just another residential community,” Bob Shinn said over dinner downtown at Max’s Cafe. Shinn is senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering, giving him responsibility for the company’s operations in Florida. “With Celebration, we’re giving something back, trying to blaze a trail to improve American family life, education and health. This project allows us to fulfill Walt’s idea for a town of tomorrow.”

Of course, fulfilling the founder’s vision was not the only motivation for building Celebration: if it is a City on a Hill, it is at the same time an element in a larger corporate strategy and, very simply, a $2.5 billion real-estate deal, a creative way of packaging and selling Florida swampland. (Disney paid approximately $200 an acre for this land in the 60′s; it is selling quarter-acre lots at Celebration for upward of $80,000.)

According to Tom Lewis, perhaps the Disney executive most closely involved with Celebration’s early planning, the town had its more earthly origins on Wall Street, in the bloody battle for control of Disney in the early 80′s. Part of what made the corporation such an attractive takeover target was the vast acreage of undeveloped real estate it owned in Orlando—the theme parks and hotels occupied only a small fraction of the company’s 27,000-acre holdings. After Michael Eisner took over the company in 1984, he ordered a study of the real estate that determined that some 10,000 acres of it, lying on the south side of Route 192, would never be needed by Walt Disney World. Developing that land in some way would render Disney that much less attractive to a raider.

Another consideration was the fact that Disney’s relations with local governments in central Florida had grown somewhat strained. Walt Disney World occupies a state-chartered and virtually sovereign municipality called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which contributes relatively little in the way of taxes to Osceola County, one of the two counties it straddles. By “de-annexing” the 10,000 acres and populating them with taxpayers, Disney could please local governments and smooth the approval process for future theme-park projects, like its new Animal Kingdom. (Had Celebration remained within Reedy Creek, it would also have given Disney’s private municipality something it can’t afford to have: independent voters.)

Of course, Disney could have accomplished these goals far more cheaply and easily by building a conventional housing development or resort community—and this is where the company’s old utopian streak probably came into play. In a bit of local lore cherished by Celebration residents and executives alike, Eisner is said to have instructed his real-estate-development team that Celebration—the town’s name was chosen from a focus-grouped list by Eisner and his wife—needs to make money for stockholders, but if it’s not going to be state of the art, Disney shouldn’t bother.

The state of the art has changed considerably since Walt Disney’s time. Disney’s corporate vision of the future has undergone a revolution since 1966, from Epcot’s sleek technological sublime (the city of tomorrow was to have people movers and a vast dome overhead) to neotraditionalism. Perhaps most closely identified with Seaside, the Florida resort community designed in the 80′s by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, neotraditional town planning has until now enjoyed rather more success nationally with the media than the marketplace. Many New Urbanists are counting on Disney’s success at Celebration to sell developers and home buyers on the idea that the next American utopia should look like a neotraditional town.

They could be right. Some 5,000 home buyers entered a lottery for the privilege of purchasing the first 350 homes at Celebration, and sales since then have been brisk enough (Celebration is currently the fastest-selling development in its price range in the Orlando area) to catch the attention of developers and planning officials from across the nation. Indeed, walking the streets of Celebration, bumping into visitors from all over the world doing much the same thing I was, I realized that Disney’s town has already become what Disney’s founder intended—a stop on the architectural tour of the American future.

It was hard not to come away from that tour impressed by the extraordinary care Disney has taken in every aspect of the town’s physical design. And yet by the end of my walk the very designed-ness of Celebration had started to weigh on me. Eventually the streetscape began to feel a little too perfect, a little too considered. After a while my eye longed for something not quite so orchestrated.

From my research I knew that every last visual detail my eyes had taken in during my two-hour walk, from the precise ratio of lawn to perennials in the front yards to the scrollwork on the Victorian porches to the exact relationship of column, capital and entablature on the facades of every Colonial Revival, had been stipulated—had in fact been spelled out in the gorgeous and obsessively detailed “Pattern Book” that governs every facet of architectural and even horticultural life at Celebration. I knew all that, yet now I felt it, too, and how it felt was packaged, less than real, somewhat more like a theme park than a town.

When I offered these impressions to Robert Stern, he said, wait for “the buildings to take on the patina of age, the landscaping to get luxurious” and for time to put its mark on a place that is still very, very new. I noticed that he spoke of time leaving its mark, not people. In fact, no one can make the slightest change to his house’s exterior without first obtaining written permission from the company; even the choice of trees and shrubs is subject to approval, and will remain so indefinitely. That doesn’t leave much room for history.

“Will Celebration always look so newly minted? That’s a real question,” Stern acknowledged. “They do have people power-washing the streets at night”—which is exactly what they do in the theme parks. But then the architect, who also happens to sit on Disney’s board, remembered himself. “You know it’s a really sad commentary,” he said, “that for something to look ‘real,’ it has to be run-down.” That is one sort of history, certainly, though not the one I had in mind.

Downtown

From the air, Celebration vaguely resembles a river delta, with the residential lanes flowing south and collecting at the head of Market Street, a commercial thoroughfare lined with stately palms that carry down to a pretty man-made lake. The whole neotraditional town idea is predicated on providing residents with a vibrant downtown area, a center of social gravity. Downtown Celebration is a sleepy little grid of streets lined with upscale shops and restaurants, a two-screen movie theater (designed by Cesar Pelli), a bank (by Robert Venturi), a neat toy of a post office (Michael Graves) and a visitors’ center (really a sales office, designed by the late Charles Moore). Leaving aside these generally whimsical “signature” buildings, downtown resembles a miniature Santa Barbara—vaguely historical, lots of pastel stucco (actually a synthetic material called Dryvit), with most of the parking deftly hidden behind Main Street.

It is tempting to dismiss Celebration’s downtown as a shopping mall without a roof, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate: for one thing, there are no big national chains (most of the shops are appealing mom and pop operations); for another, there are rental apartments and a handful of offices above the shops. Andres Duany judges it “a spectacular achievement.”

Many residents regard living within a five-minute walk of downtown as one of the best things about life at Celebration. “I am much less dependent on my car,” Lise Juneman said; some, like Ramond Chiaramonte, have actually scaled back their fleets. Kids in particular enjoy a freedom in Celebration that is almost inconceivable today anywhere else. By the time children have reached the age of 10 or so, most parents are willing to let them wander freely, and after-school hours once filled with television are now taken up with Rollerblading to the parks and pool or expeditions downtown, where preteens go to check out the clothes at Village Mercantile or cadge samples of the coffee coolers at Barnie’s.

For grown-ups, downtown offers a quasi-urban experience that can’t be had elsewhere in the suburbs. Brian Haas and his wife, Dianne, are doctors who met while in medical school in Manhattan in the 80′s. Career took the Haases to the Orlando area, but both miss the experience of walking to bars and jazz clubs in New York. They can get some of that here, Brian said.

“We’re a high-powered New York-Washington couple,” he explained, as I joined him early one morning for breakfast before he walked his children, Julian and Zachary, to school. “Morning Edition” was on the radio, that week’s New Yorker on the kitchen counter. Except for the cavernous space, the Haas home could easily pass for the apartment of an overscheduled two-income Manhattan family.

“I’m an inveterate New Yorker,” Brian said. “I could not at first imagine ever living in a Disney town—too Mickey Mouse, to use a cynical New Yorker’s expression. But cynicism is often a mask for frustrated idealism. After visiting Celebration, I realized there were virtues to Disney’s involvement. With all the publicity”—and here he gestured in my direction—”they can’t afford to let Celebration fail.”

After a while I began to see how someone as “high powered” as Brian Haas, a busy surgeon who probably devotes very little time in a day to doubt, might learn to suspend disbelief about something like the urbanity of his adopted hometown. “It’s the best of New York,” Brian declared. And then, a moment later, “I love it because of the kids.” Which is, of course, the classic pre-neotraditional rationale for moving to the suburbs.

So what is Celebration? A town or a suburb? A subdivision with a few streets of restaurants and shops, or a plausible alternative to the general sprawl of suburban cul-de-sacs spilling their cars onto commercial strips? From one perspective, Celebration allows people like Brian Haas, Todd Hill, Lise Juneman and their children to have a different life style than they would in a subdivision without a town center. Yet one has only to climb the tower at the visitors’ center to see that the new town is really just one more in a series of residential pods hanging off the classic suburban strip—in this case, Route 192—by a single asphalt thread. Like all but a very few New Urbanist projects, Disney’s town offers few real places to shop—there’s no hardware store or pharmacy—and few serious employment opportunities; it also leaves the larger patterns of transportation undisturbed. Celebration might look like a railroad suburb, and its residents may walk downtown on the weekends, but on Monday morning most of them will have no choice but to climb back into their cars for the half-hour commute to Orlando.

Rosemary Cordingley laughed when I asked her whether she felt as though she lived in a town: “Oh, yes, a new town! We’re pioneers! Please. I can’t even get my hair cut downtown. Oh, it’s very nice, you can walk to the movies with your friends—that part is great. But a town? It’s not even close.”

The School

Celebration School, a dignified campus of classrooms linked by covered walkways, is right in the middle of town. In brochures for Celebration, Disney resurrects Walt Disney’s dream of “a school of tomorrow” and depicts its K-12 public school “as a model for education into the next century.” Florida schools are notoriously poor, and the promise of a “state-of-the- art school” in central Florida has proven to be the town’s strongest selling point—the main reason home buyers are prepared to pay a 25 percent to 40 percent premium over comparable real estate to live in Celebration.

Given the expectations, it isn’t surprising that the school should have emerged as the first real test of Disney’s management and Celebration’s community. Very soon after school opened in fall ’96, a couple dozen parents began expressing dissatisfaction about the quality of the education their children were receiving. Many objected to the school’s notably progressive curriculum: there are multi-age classrooms; reading is taught using the “whole language” method; tests are few, and there are “narrative assessments” instead of grades. (“This is a place,” the principal said, “where nobody fails.”)

Some of these approaches are quite controversial—the state of California, for example, is currently abandoning whole language in the face of plummeting reading scores, and while multi-age classrooms are catching on in places, combining six grades in one space is virtually unheard of. So why would Disney have opted for such a radical school, particularly in a neotraditional town? Possibly because a more conventional school would have been hard to distinguish from any other Osceola County public school.

At any rate, problems—or, as the company prefers to call them, “growing pains”—emerged right away. A group of some 30 parents began meeting to discuss their concerns and push for changes—hardly an unusual occurrence, but Celebration is an unusual place, and it all but suffered a nervous breakdown. Here was a faction of its young community flexing its muscles for the first time, and it gave everyone a chance to see how Disney would react. As parents trooped in to complain, executives listened patiently, even sympathetically, but finally disclaimed responsibility—this was, after all, a public school, and the company had its hands tied. All of which was true, but did little to assuage the anger of parents who had put so much faith in Disney.

For Roger Burton, a successful small-business owner who had moved his family to Celebration from Chicago largely because of the school, the episode was disillusioning. “Sure it was a public school, but we figured if Disney was behind it, it would be as fabulous as everything else they do,” he said. “I knew Celebration was going to be a very controlled situation, but controlled in a good way. But as soon as you run into a problem, you find there is no mechanism to change things. The only person you can call is a corporate vice president, but he’s not interested in the school, not really. He’s interested in selling real estate.”

Frustrated at the lack of response, Burton and a group of his neighbors began speaking out in the press. Celebration residents have discovered that they possess a powerful political tool few of the rest of us can lay claim to: merely by picking up the phone, they can put a local school squabble on the front page and the evening news. The press descended on the Celebration School story, and Disney realized it had a problem.

Soon after the first negative articles appeared, the great majority of Celebration residents suddenly rose up in full-throated support of the school, though just how spontaneously is open to question. One Disney executive told me that “the negative publicity galvanized the whole community in support of the school,” but several residents see Disney’s hand behind a lot of the galvanizing. Jackson Mumey, one of the parents most articulate in support of the school, was put on the Disney payroll as an “educational consultant”; he gave interviews to the press, educated benighted parents about the curriculum and helped organize something called the Dream Team—a parents organization that lent moral support to the teachers, who were thought to be demoralized by the controversy. A plane was hired to fly a “Great Job Bobbi” banner above downtown Celebration on Teacher Appreciation Day. (Bobbi Vogel, the principal, quit not long after, as did 6 of the 19 teachers.)

Brent Herrington, Celebration’s “community services manager,” emerged as one of the school’s biggest cheerleaders. Herrington is paid by Disney to manage town affairs, but professes to represent “all the stakeholders.” From his office in town hall, Herrington helped to organize a series of “pep rallies” and picnics for the teachers and helped raise funds to buy them small gifts—things like Celebration School jerseys.

All of this might seem harmless enough, yet there was a dark side to the frenzied show of support. At one point early in the controversy, Herrington used his monthly newsletter to solicit contributions for a “positive parents” fund, and school boosters soon took to calling themselves “the positive parents.” Surely this was an insidious choice of words, for it immediately cast critics of the school as “negative parents.” Dissent had been framed as destructive. The critics took to calling themselves “refuseniks.”

Tensions quickly mounted, to the point where “the Hatfields and McCoys”—as Brian Haas described the warring factions—virtually stopped speaking to one another. “As soon as you say anything,” Burton told me, “you become an outcast. If you don’t like Celebration, you should leave, people would say. Keep quiet or get out.” Rosemary Cordingley, another school critic, told of being harangued on the street by Margo Schwartz, a single mother in her 40′s who emerged as one of the most vociferous “positives.” I can imagine it, for when Schwartz spotted me on Water Street interviewing a refusenik, she strode up to us and, jabbing her index finger at my notebook, informed me that “Beulah here was one of the negative ones who only wants to bash this place.” (Schwartz and I had never met before.)

Cordingley refers to the positive parents as the “pixie-dust” brigade.

“Those of us who weren’t quite so sprinkled with pixie dust were ostracized,” Cordingley said. “And it was orchestrated by Disney. We were treated in a very ugly manner. There was a lot of talk about property values. Instead of facing up to the problems—and believe me, the majority agrees there are problems—they hold pep rallies! Disneymania is fine at the park, but not in a school.” Cordingley pulled her children out of school, and now drives them 25 miles to a parochial school. All told, some 30 children—16 percent of the total—withdrew from Celebration School last year, and the defections have continued.

Joseph Palacios, who has been active in efforts to reform the school, lays much of the blame for the polarization of the community at the steps of town hall: “A real town manager isn’t going to try to create division in his community, but Brent Herrington did exactly that. Brent treated everyone as either positive or negative, and if you were negative, he would literally turn his back on you on the street. Your phone calls to town hall wouldn’t get returned.” Palacios, the father of a second grader, was one of the few residents willing to criticize Herrington on the record, but three others reported similar treatment.

“Brent is supposed to represent all of us,” Palacios said, “but it became clear during the school fight that he’s representing Disney.” Asked about this, Harrington told me, “This perception is mistaken.” It would appear, however, that “community building” has been less of a priority than damage control. Large unscripted public meetings where residents might speak freely have been scrupulously avoided; in their place, Disney has held “focus groups” about the school.

Perhaps the most telling episode in the whole school drama came a year ago when a handful of families—including Roger Burton’s—decided to pack up and leave Celebration. According to the contract that buyers sign, a homeowner may not profit from the sale of a house held less than one year unless he can prove hardship. Disney offered to exempt the disgruntled families from the rule but only on condition of signing an agreement promising never to reveal their reasons for leaving Celebration. “They were treating me like a Russian dissident,” Rich Adams said. “You know, ‘Sign here and you can go.”‘ Adams, who was one of the first to move to Celebration, became the first to move out. In the end, he signed nothing and Disney did nothing to stop him or the others. Herrington said that in retrospect the confidentiality agreement “probably wasn’t the best choice.”

Town Hall

Celebration’s town hall is prominently situated at the head of Market Street, and to see it for the first time is to wonder if its architecture doesn’t represent one of wily old Philip Johnson’s more clever inside jokes. Johnson’s design begins with the obligatory white columns, the same ones that have symbolized democratic values in American civic architecture since the time of Thomas Jefferson. Yet Johnson has taken this venerable convention and multiplied it ad absurdum, until the entrance to Celebration’s town hall is all but lost in a shadowy forest of columns—52 of them in all. A straightforward symbol of republican self-government is thus transformed into a disconcerting image of obscurity. It couldn’t be more fitting, for Celebration’s town hall is privately owned—by Disney.

“Town hall offers residents one-stop shopping for services” is how Tom Lewis, the Disney executive, characterizes what happens in the building; “shopping” is not a bad metaphor either, because the whole panoply of municipal services—everything from garbage pickup to street lighting, from the provision of recreational facilities and (a portion of) public safety to the enforcement of town rules—has been privatized at Celebration, as indeed they have been at hundreds of thousands of other master-planned communities across America.

The responsibility for managing these private governments—for that is what they are—generally falls to a homeowners’ association whose board is elected by the residents. Homeowners’ associations are now the fastest-growing form of political organization in the country, forming a kind of alternative political universe in which one of every eight Americans now resides.

The Celebration homeowners’ association has its offices in the town hall, and that is where I met the town manager, Brent Herrington, the man Tom Lewis had called “sort of the Mayor of Celebration.” Herrington is a big, bluff 37-year-old Texan whose friendly demeanor was hard to reconcile with the image of Disney enforcer that several residents had painted. He is a product of the master-planned world: he grew up in Kingwood, a “highly amenitized” community in Houston, and has spent most of his working life as a professional manager of various master-planned developments.

When I mentioned to Herrington that I’d heard him described as Celebration’s Mayor, he smiled and demurred. “I’m more like a small-town manager—I’m the go-to guy, but I don’t see myself as a politician.” Indeed, Herrington sees running a town like Celebration not as a matter of politics at all, but of “good communication and consensus building.”

In Herrington’s view, his actions during the school crisis fall squarely under that heading. When I suggested that some residents felt he had taken sides, and that the rhetoric of “positive parents” is perhaps not as post-political as it sounds, Herrington said, “There was no perception on my part or the developer’s part that we were pursuing a controversial path or taking sides.”

Surely the most ticklish part of Herrington’s job is enforcing the myriad rules that typically govern life in a master-planned community. To anyone living outside the walls of such a community, these rules can sound outrageous, but inside residents generally view them favorably, as a way to keep property values high at a time when many suburbs have entered a period of decline. As one Celebration resident explained it, “The rules are there to make sure your neighbor’s front yard doesn’t turn into ‘Sanford and Son.”‘ It should be said that this was the only racist remark I heard at Celebration.

All the rules governing life at Celebration would (in fact do) fill a book, but here are some of the more striking: All visible window coverings must be either white or off-white. A resident may hold only one garage sale in any 12-month period. A single political sign (measuring 18 by 24 inches) may be posted for 45 days prior to an election. Any activity that “detracts from the overall appearance of the properties” is prohibited—including the parking of residents’ pickup trucks on the street.

“A violation is usually just an oversight,” Herrington explained. “We try to solve problems as neighbors.”

While I was walking around Celebration, I noticed some bright red curtains in the windows of a new Victorian on Longmeadow. Only then did I fully grasp the import of a cryptic little item I’d spotted in Herrington’s monthly newsletter: “Please refrain from using colored or patterned material in the windows. This can look pretty ‘icky’ from the street!”

Icky?! So this is the voice of private government in the 90′s? It all struck me as fairly creepy, Big Brother with a smiley face, but then I am probably not temperamentally suited to life in Celebration. As Kenneth Wong, president of Walt Disney Imagineering, pointedly reminded me, “Everyone is here on a voluntary basis.”

Master Planner Stern is vigorous in his defense of Celebration’s rules: “In a freewheeling capitalist society, you need controls—you can’t have community without them. It’s right there in Tocqueville: in the absence of an aristocratic hierarchy, you need firm rules to maintain decorum. I’m convinced these controls are actually liberating to people. It makes them feel their investment is safe. Regimentation can release you.”

The best defense of the regulatory regime at Celebration is that the people here have chosen to live under it and, if not now then eventually, those people can vote to change it. At least that’s what I kept hearing from both the past and current “mayors” of Celebration. “In 8 or 10 years,” Herrington assured me, “all power will revert to the homeowners.” Lewis said the same thing.

But it turns out that matters are not quite that simple. Buried in the legal hickets of Celebration’s “Covenants, Codes and Restrictions,” the quasi-constitution that all home buyers are required to sign, can be found the underlying political script Disney wrote for the future of its town, and it reads very differently from the public script about community building and participation that company executives lay out for residents and reporters.

For while it is true that Celebration residents will eventually elect the directors of the homeowners’ association, the covenants guarantee that that body will remain a creature of Disney’s for as long as the company wishes—specifically, for as long as it owns a single acre of land within, or adjacent to, Celebration. The homeowners’ association cannot change any rule or restriction in Celebration “without prior notice to and the written approval of the Celebration Company,” according to the covenants. Disney further retains the right to control every aspect of the physical character of Celebration as long as it wishes to. Thus, however vital the community that evolves in Celebration turns out to be, ultimate power over its affairs will remain backstage, with Disney.

“It is absolute top-down control,” said Evan McKenzie, a lawyer and expert on homeowners’ associations, when I showed him the copy of the covenants I had obtained from a sales agent. “The homeowners are powerless against the association and the association is powerless against Disney. I can’t imagine anything more undemocratic.”

When I went back to Tom Lewis for clarification, he said that, as far as he understood, Celebration’s covenants were “standard master-planned community boilerplate” and referred me to Wayne S. Hyatt, the Atlanta lawyer who was the principal author of them. Hyatt specializes in master-planned governments; he is, in effect, the “framer” of Celebration’s constitution, which he has described in speeches to professional groups as “progressive,” part of a “shift from people and property management to building community.”

Only after I cited specific articles of the covenants did Hyatt acknowledge that Disney would indeed retain a veto over the homeowners’ association indefinitely and that this was unusual. “The residents can still make decisions, but the veto stays with the developer,” he said. I asked him if he saw any contradiction between the goal of building community and the fact that Disney planned to keep that community’s representative body on a short and permanent leash.

“Not at all,” he replied. “This will result in more progressive governance: you can’t change things arbitrarily to my detriment, and I can’t change things arbitrarily to your detriment. It’s a system of checks and balances. This is not a dictatorial Disney. This is a participatory Disney.”

For many residents, it is precisely Disney’s participation that attracted them to Celebration in the first place. Most people I met expressed complete confidence in Disney’s ability to run the town just as well as it runs its other enterprises. “Who’s going to do a better job of it?” a prospective homeowner I met at the visitors’ center asked me. “The homeowners? Come on!” Lise Juneman said: “Disney gives me a sense of security. They will insure a quality product, and keep property values up.”

Somewhat sheepishly, I started asking everyone I met if they felt they were living in a democracy. To a great extent, the answers I got depended on where a resident stood on the school issue. Predictably, school critics did not feel they were living in a democracy; the far more numerous “positive parents” did. But what was striking was that the two groups held entirely different conceptions of what a democracy is. Critics like Rosemary Cordingley and Joseph Palacios described democracy in terms of power and voting, rights and self-rule, the traditional copybook maxims learned in elementary school.

The “positives” spoke with equal fervor of something more … well, neo. “It is definitely a democracy,” Margo Schwartz said, “because we can go to town hall and express our feelings. It’s a very responsive government.”

Tom Lewis said, “Democracy is being listened to, so I’d say it’s clearly a democracy.” Charlie Rogers, a Rotarian who heads up the Sun Trust Bank branch in town, told me: “Everyone’s input is welcome. Disney’s doing an excellent job of staying in the background. Behind the scenes they’re doing a lot, and while they have to control things, I think they really want to step back.”

It may be Disney’s boldest innovation at Celebration to have established a rather novel form of democracy, one that is based on consumerist, rather than republican, principles. For many of the people I met at Celebration, the measure of democracy is not self-rule but responsiveness—they’re prepared to surrender power over their lives to a corporation as long as that corporation remains sensitive to their needs. This is the streamlined, focus-grouped responsiveness of the marketplace, rather than the much rougher responsiveness of elected government—which for many Americans was discredited a long time ago. Of course, the consumerist democracy holds only as long as the interests of the corporation and the consumer are one. So far, this has largely been the case, if only because all the community’s “stakeholders” have dedicated themselves to the proposition of maintaining high property values—which is one way, I suppose, to define the public interest.

Todd Hill’s answer to my question about democracy was slightly different than his neighbors’ and, befitting his general post-modern slant on life, completely without illusion and undefensive. “This is no democracy, I know that. But, hey,” he shrugged, “it’s the 90′s.” Hill sees no necessary connection between community, which he cherishes, and self-rule, which is … old.

Maybe Hill is right. Maybe Disney has developed a new kind of community for the 90′s, one that has been shorn of politics and transformed into a commodity—something people buy and consume rather than produce, an amenity rather than an achievement. Certainly Celebration is, as many residents noted, an “apolitical” place. Mention the word “politics” to people here, and they will talk about “divisiveness”; for in this view, politics is the enemy of community, rather than its natural expression.

I put this idea to Daniel Kemmis, who served until recently as the Mayor of Missoula, Mont. (population 88,520), and is the author of two books about community and place. “I don’t believe you can create genuine community in the absence of self-government,” he said. “Community finally depends on people taking responsibility for their own lives and the place where they live. That’s a messy, troublesome—and also deeply satisfying—process.

“The interesting question here is, What will people do with the civic skills they’re apt to acquire in this community? My guess is they will put them to political use—that there will be building pressure for the people to have more of a say.”

Kemmis hasn’t been to Celebration, but he may be onto something. For Disney seems to have set in motion two powerful forces that are bound sooner or later to collide. They have built a most impressive landscape of community—a place expressly designed to encourage neighbors to engage one another, to form associations and acquire the “civic virtues”—yet they have built it atop a subsoil of authoritarianism, which limits participation to only the most trivial matters of that community’s business.

Why would Disney do two such contradictory things—undercut the very community it has worked so hard to create? Tocqueville suggested an answer 150 years ago when he pointed out that “civil associations … facilitate political association” by teaching people the “strength that they may acquire by uniting together.”

It may be that the very same contraption that produces neo-Rotarians like Todd Hill will eventually produce political activists, too.

If Disney truly believed in its benign, post-political vision of community—as an end in itself, as something that confines its energies to block parties and rotary meetings—it would never have bothered to make everyone in it sign such an onerous constitution. But Disney, who is nothing if not an astute observer of the American character, understands that sooner or later the people of Celebration will find their political voice, and when they do they’re likely to make a mess of the company’s carefully crafted script.

In a future history of the town of Celebration, the skirmish over the schools may well mark the beginning of that process. Certainly the episode has been a political education. “A real town has a voting process,” Rosemary Cordingley said, “but this place is run by Disney. Could it ever change? There might have to be an uprising first.” For now, people like Cordingley are keeping their heads down. “Last year was traumatic,” she explained. There’s talk among residents of an informal “moratorium on bad press.” But politics could rear its head again at any time.

No doubt the school crisis has been an education for Disney, too. Brian Haas, who is generally supportive of the company, believes that “Disney has learned a lesson—that this isn’t just selling someone on a theme park. You’re playing with people’s lives.” That’s one lesson. Another is that a community of citizens is a lot more difficult to control than a community of employees or tourists, especially when those citizens have access to the microphones of national publicity. Robert Stern mentioned that the company has been “amazed” by the amount of attention, good and bad, its City on a Hill has received, and is now “mindful of the fact its name will forever be linked with Celebration.” To a degree Disney couldn’t have foreseen, it has tied its good corporate name to the destiny of this town—and therefore to the deeds and words of people like Roger Burton, Rosemary Cordingley and Joseph Palacios. For a company like Disney to suddenly find itself in such an environment—volatile and, despite heroic efforts, ultimately unscriptable—must be disconcerting, to say the very least.

When I first visited Celebration early in 1996, before any people had moved in, there was enthusiastic off-the-record talk among executives of rolling Disney towns out nationally. Not anymore: Celebration is an experiment the company has decided it won’t repeat.

Indeed, there are signs, subtle but unmistakable, that the company would like nothing better than to put a little distance between itself and its unruly new community. Early in the fall, a crew of workers climbed the fake water tower at the entrance to Celebration and took down a banner proclaiming “Disney’s Town of Celebration.” Now there are just the words “Town of Celebration.” It got people talking, so in last month’s newsletter, Brent Herrington wrote an item aimed at dispelling the rumor “that Disney may be ‘pulling out of Celebration.”‘ There’s nothing to it, Disney’s sort-of Mayor wrote; the company has merely been “eager for the public to begin recognizing Celebration as a real, thriving community with its own unique identity.”

This in itself didn’t surprise me particularly. I was in the process of pulling my life up by the roots, all at once becoming a father, leaving the city where I’d lived since college, and setting out on an uncertain new career. Indeed, it would have been strange if I hadn’t entertained fantasies of escape—of reducing so many daunting new complexities to something as stripped-down and uncomplicated as a hut in the woods.

What was surprising, though, and what had no obvious cause or explanation in my life as it had been lived up to then, was a corollary to the dream: I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making.

I wanted to build this place myself.

It was right around this time that I stumbled upon a French writer named Gaston Bachelard. ‘If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house,’ Bachelard wrote in The Poetics Of Space, ‘I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ An obvious idea, perhaps, but in it I recognised at once what it was I’d lost and dreamed of recovering.

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. Daydreaming is pleasurable. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn’t it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people. Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink to the size and shape of the estimation of others.

To daydream the notion of a room of one’s own—a place of solitude for the individual—is, historically speaking, a fairly recent invention. But then again, so is the self, or at least the self as we’ve come to think of it, an individual with a rich interior life. Dipping recently into a multi-volume history of private life edited by Philippe Aries, I was fascinated to learn how the room of one’s own (specifically, the private study located off the master bedroom) and the modern sense of the individual emerged at more or less the same moment during the Renaissance. Apparently, this is no accident: the new space and the new self actually helped give shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interiors and interiority.

The room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf and Bachelard and the French historians all talked about as necessary to the interior life was located firmly within the confines of a larger house. But it was a building of my own I wanted, an outpost of solitude pitched somewhere in the landscape rather than in the house. And so I began to wonder where in the world could that part of the dream have come from? The deepest roots of such a dream are invariably obscure, a tangle of memories and circumstances, things read in books and pictures glimpsed in magazines. But the proximate answer is an architect by the name of Charles R Myer.

It was Charlie Myer who’d helped us renovate our tiny bungalow in the north-west corner of Connecticut, where most of this story takes place. On good days that year, my wife Judith and I regarded Charlie with gratitude and even a measure of awe: it was already evident he had succeeded in transforming our humdrum little bungalow into a house of real character and, for us then, what seemed a perfect fit.

One of the aims of Charlie’s design had been to redirect the house’s gaze away from the road in front and back towards the hillside and our gardens.

Charlie seemed pleased with the bedroom that was now taking shape, and the view from its window, but I could tell that something was bugging him. What the garden’s axis needed now, the architect had concluded, was a destination—some sort of distinct object in the distance that would draw your eye out into the land and up the hill, that would somehow tie the cultivated foreground into the larger landscape above.

I could sort of see his point, but it seemed to me that this particular problem belonged down near the very bottom of a to-do list that had grown dauntingly tall. Judith and I were still camped out at my parents’.

‘So, you mean, like a bench or something?’ ‘What I think we need to do is build something out there,’ he began.

Compared with the Ayn Rand stereotype of the architect as a power-mad empire builder, a chilly figure only at home in the realm of his own ideal forms, Charlie has always seemed to me a fairly contented citizen of the real world, somebody with a deep appreciation of life as it is really lived, in all its unplatonic messiness. Yet here he was, actually suggesting that what the view from the window of his new building needed most of all was another Charlie Myer building.

I thanked him for the generous offer and promptly changed the subject to something compelling, like plumbing fixtures.

But I guess the notion had been planted. Rehearsing this scenario in bed late one night, during one of the frequent bouts of sleeplessness I credited to incipient fatherhood, it occurred to me that my image of the building was based, at least partly, on a tree-house I’d had as a child on Long Island—the last time I’d had a room of my own off in the woods.

Even more than adults do, children seem instinctively to grasp the deepest meanings of houseness—the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs.

Bachelard’s The Poetics Of Space is the only book I’ve ever read that takes these sorts of places seriously, analysing them—or at least our memories and dreams of them—as a way to understand our deepest, most subjective experience of place. He suggests that our sense of space is organised around two distinct poles, or tropisms: one attracting us to the vertical (compelling us to seek the power and rationality of the tower view) and the other to the enclosed centre, what he sometimes calls the ‘hut dream’. It is this second, centripetal attractor that inspires the child to build imaginary huts under tabletops and deep inside coat closets, and draws the adult toward the hearth or the kitchen table—places of maximum refuge that hold us in a small, concentrated circle of warmth. These, in Bachelard’s terms, are huts too.

But in addition to the centripetal impulse that Bachelard so tenderly describes—our wish to be ‘enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house’—isn’t there also a centrifugal impulse at work in our dream of houses, one that is always pushing us outward, flinging open windows and reaching out into the surrounding landscape? It must have been some such sense of space that compelled me to situate my dream of a hut out in the woods, first as a child and then, some 30 years on, as a parent-to-be.

This doesn’t, however, quite explain how my own grown-up dream of a hut expanded to include the improbable idea of building it with my own hands.

A house in the first person did not seem like something a third party could build. I began to see how there might be a connection between the kind of mental life I hoped such a place might house and the kind of work I’d have to learn in order to build it, a connection hinted at in words such as independence, individual, pragmatic, self-made. The meaning of such a place was in its making.

A 20-foot piece of clear Douglas fir is an impressive thing to behold. By virtue of its girth and length, it seems more tree than lumber, though you can easily understand why lumber is what we prefer to call it. Lumber is an abstraction, a euphemism really. Though these logs had been squared up and dressed at the mill, it was impossible not to be conscious of them as trees—and not to feel at least slightly abashed at what had been done to them on my account.

Simply by picking up the phone and placing an order for ‘eight ten-foot pieces of six-by-ten appearance-grade Doug fir’, I’d set in motion a chain of events that was as momentous as it was routine. To fulfill my order, at least two mature fir trees, green spires as old as the century, had been felled in a forest somewhere in Oregon and then trucked, or floated, to a mill in a town called McMinnville.

It’s hard not to feel sentimental about such majestic pieces of wood, especially today, when we can appreciate the preciousness of old trees more than we once did. One measure of that preciousness is price. The four timbers in my barn cost more than pounds 400, a figure that manages to seem both exorbitant and—considering what they are, or were—paltry at the same time.

Charlie had specified large timbers because our original notion of the building, as a kind of primitive hut carved out of the forest, was unthinkable without them. The archetypal hut consists of four substantial corner posts (actual trees in some accounts) surmounted by a gable. A hut’s construction should recall the forest from which it springs. Architecture as we know it is unimaginable without the tree. Frank Lloyd Wright, speaking of the very first structures built by man, once wrote that ‘trees must have awakened his sense of form’. It is the tree that gave us the notion of a column and, in the West at least, everything else rests upon that. Even when the Greeks turned from building in wood to stone (after they’d denuded their land of trees), they shaped and arranged their stones in imitation of trees.

My wife had urged that I look for someone who could help me, someone, as she put it, ‘who at least has a clue’. This was to be Joe, the carpenter.

Our first day of wood work, Joe showed up with an incongruous pair of tools: a set of fine chisels with ash handles and a fairly beaten-up looking chainsaw. The chainsaw was to cut our posts roughly to length; this would constitute the first cut made in our fir and—as I was afraid he might—Joe insisted that I make it.

I am petrified by chainsaws, a phobia I don’t regard as irrational or neurotic in the least. Yet there was no way to decline the chainsaw Joe held out to me without suffering a loss of face. So, striving manfully for nonchalance, I took the chainsaw from him, gave its starting cord a yank, and held on tight as the machine leapt menacingly to life.

Cutting the fir timbers proved unexpectedly easy, probably because there were no imperfections in the wood, no knots or bark to frustrate the blade and provoke its wilfulness. For the first time, I noticed the sweet, elusive aroma of fresh-cut Douglas fir, an oddly familiar perfume that nevertheless took me the longest time to place. Then there it was: roasted peanuts.

To trade a chainsaw for a chisel is to trade one way of knowing a piece of wood for another. Though the chainsaw acquaints you with certain general properties—a wood’s hardness and uniformity, its aroma—the chisel discloses much finer information. Something as subtle as the variation in the relative density of two growth rings—the sort of data any machine would overwhelm—the bevelled tip of the chisel’s steel blade will accurately transmit to its ash handle and, through that, to your hand.

After Joe and I had raised the front corner posts on to their rock feet and then fitted our floor beams into their notches, we traded our chisels for hammers and nails.

Our task had been to raise the rear posts and then run the floor beams from the centre knee wall on which they sat to the notches in the rear posts we’d cut for them. It quickly became clear that something was terribly wrong: neither beam met its post at anything remotely resembling a right angle. One of them missed its mortise by a full two inches—which, in an 8ft-by-13ft structure, is to say by a mile. The building had fallen seriously, inexplicably, out of square.

A few steps from the building sits a large, low boulder Joe often repaired to when he needed to study the plans closely or work through a geometry problem, and now he invited me to join him on his rock for a serious head-scratch. ‘Didn’t I say we’d used up too much plumb and level on those front posts?’ Joe said, straining to lighten a situation he clearly regarded as grim.

Joe would often talk about plumb and level and square—trueness—as if they were mysterious properties of the universe, something like luck, or karma, and always in short and unpredictable supply. A surplus one week was liable to lead to a shortfall the next. ‘We were bound to run out sooner or later, but this, Mike, is grave.’ I knew, at least in an intellectual way, that squareness was an important desideratum in a building, but part of me still wasn’t sure why it was such a big deal. If the problem wasn’t evident to the eye, then how much could a few degrees off 90 really matter? Why should builders make such a fetish of right angles? I mentioned to Joe that there were architects around, called deconstructivists, who maintained that Euclidean geometry was obsolete. They designed spaces that were deliberately out of plumb, square, and sometimes even level, spaces that set out purposefully to confound the level’s little bubble and, in turn, our conventional notions of comfort. So why couldn’t our building afford an acute angle or two? Joe cocked one eye and looked at me darkly. ‘Mike, you don’t even want to know all the problems that a building this far out of square is going to have. Trust me: it is your worst nightmare.’ We were never able to entirely rectify the problem—and therefore, the building, which we estimate to be approximately two degrees out of square. As a result, the front wall is slightly more than an inch wider than the back.

At the casual phenomenological level of everyday life, a building a couple degrees out of square is no big deal. Unfortunately for me, that is not the level at which I elected to have this experience. And at the considerably less forgiving level of experience, where rafters have to get cut and desktops scribed, it’s been exactly as Joe promised it would be: a nightmare. Even now, years later, consequences rear up in reminder. When I want to add another shelf for my books, I must lay out and cut, then sand and finish and dismayingly behold, the subtlest of trapezoids, a precise off-key echo of the building as a whole. It has been a most exquisite form of penance.

We were now on to the finish work, but for very good reasons, Joe and Charlie both seemed to feel more proprietary about the building than I did. There was some sort of key to it that was still missing, I felt, something that was needed in order to make it truly mine, and I began to wonder if this key might not have to do with time.

Time is not something architects talk about much, except in the negative. The common view seems to be that mortal time is what buildings exist to transcend; being immortal (at least compared with their builders), buildings give us a way to leave a lasting mark, to conduct a conversation across the generations, in Vincent Scully’s memorable formulation. I doubt there are many builders or architects in history who would dispute Le Corbusier’s dictum that the first aim of architecture is to defy time and decay—to make something in space that time’s arrow cannot pierce.

Or even scuff, in the case of Le Corbusier and many of his contemporaries. The modernists were avid about making buildings that had as little to do with time as possible, time future as much as time past. Defying the time of nature meant rejecting stone and wood, those symbols of the architectural past that have traditionally been prized for the graceful way they weather and show their age. Modernists preferred to clad their buildings in a seamless, white and, very often, machined surface that was intended to look new forever. What this meant in practice, however, was an exterior that didn’t so much weather as deteriorate, so that today the white building stained brown, by rust or air pollution, stands in most of the world’s cities as a melancholy symbol of modernist folly.

Inside, too, modernists employed all sorts of novel, untested materials to which time has been unkind. But the important modernist attack on time indoors was less direct, and this had to do with human time, which in buildings takes the form of inhabitation. The modernists were the first architects in history to insist that they design the interiors of their houses. Everything that was conceivably designable, the architect now wanted to design, the better to realise his building’s Gestalt, a German word for totality much bandied about in the Bauhaus. Had there been a way to somehow redesign the bodies of the inhabitants to fit in better with the Gestalt of their new house, no doubt these architects would have given it a try.

As it was, the architects fretted over what the owners would do to their works of art which, most of them agreed, would never again be as perfect as the day before move-in day. This is one legacy of modernism that we have yet to overcome: our stuff and, in turn, our selves still very often have trouble gaining a comfortable foothold in a modern interior.

Certainly when I think about spaces that I remember as having a strong sense of place, it isn’t the ‘architecture’ that I picture—the geometrical arrangements of wood and stone and glass—but such things as watching the world go by from the front porch of the general shop in town, or the scuffle of 10,000 shoes making their way to work beneath Grand Central Station’s soaring vault. The ‘design’ of these places and the recurring events that give them their qualities—the spaces and the times—have grown together in such a way that it is impossible to bring one to mind without the other.

No single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and thick as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past and also the future.

The first move is obvious enough: the architect borrows from the past by adapting successful patterns, the ones that have been proven to support the kind of life the place hopes to house—porches and watching the world go by, for example. But what about the time to come? There is, of course, the time of weathering: age seems to endear a building to people, to strengthen its sense of place, and the choice of materials can give an architect a way either to flout or to abet this process. But it seems to me that there is another, more profound way an architect can open a building to the impress of its future. Forswearing a totalitarian approach to its details, the architect can instead leave just enough play in his design for others to ‘finish it’—first, the craftsmen, with their particular knowledge and sense of the place, and then the inhabitants, with their stuff and with the incremental changes that, over time, the distinctive grooves of their lives will wear into its surfaces and spaces.

It may be that making a great place, as opposed to a mere building or work of architectural art, requires a collaboration not so much in space as over time.

For a long time after our house was finished, whenever Charlie came to visit, he had a disconcerting habit of staring absently at the wall. ‘What are you looking at?’ I would ask, worried he had spotted some grave flaw in construction. ‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ he’d blandly insist. We eventually realised that it was our stuff he was staring at, and we began to kid him about it. Only with the greatest reluctance did he finally admit that the way we’d arranged our books and things, was, well, not quite how he’d imagined it.

It seems we hadn’t adjusted quite enough of the adjustable shelves. Charlie had given us the freedom to complete the design; now that we had, it was all he could do not to get up and re-do it himself. I told him I’d always thought the nice thing about liberty was that nobody could tell you what to do with it.

Were I still living in my apartment on upper Broadway, almost directly above the IRT, I might not even have noticed it. But I’d recently moved to northwestern Connecticut, a hundred miles from the sounds of a subway, and I was at that very moment working in a tiny cabin in the woods behind my house—my home office.

I followed the noise east into the woods and eventually found its source. A contractor was dynamiting ledge rock to make room for a new building at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We got to chatting, and I learned that the building was going to be a trading room. Here in this quiet second-growth forest where I now went to work every day, writing my articles and books, I was about to be joined by a risk arbitrageur from New York City.

In the days to follow I watched as a crew from the phone company unscrolled a new wire along my road (which is dirt for most of its length). The guys on the crew said they were running an ISDN line—a high-speed data connection that would allow the trader to be in constant, real-time contact with Wall Street. It seems that the true currency of risk arbitrage is timely information; even the tiny lag-time it takes news and market data to squeeze through an ordinary twisted-pair phone line would put a trader at an unacceptable competitive disadvantage. But an ISDN line changes all that.

That wire and the rumble that preceded it were auguries of a new world, and a new landscape. In the same way that the Long Island Expressway transformed the lapsed potato field where I grew up into a suburb, the telephone line (along with the computer, modem, fax and Internet) is helping to transform the rural countryside where I now live into something new: an exurb. If the rows of split-levels with their stamps of lawn out front became the architectural embodiment of the postwar bedroom community, the symbol of the new landscape now taking shape out beyond the suburban fringe, in places like Litchfield, Conn., and Sonoma, Calif., and southern New Hampshire, is the on-line home office.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the realms of work and family life have been steadily drifting apart. As workers began commuting to their jobs, they reconceived their homes as strictly private spheres from which all traces of economic activity should be banished. Historically this was a novel idea—home had been the site of work for centuries—yet by the time John Cheever wrote his chronicles of postwar suburbia, the new arrangement seemed perfectly natural, even God-given. We will soon recognize it for the aberration it is, for work is rapidly returning to the home, under the spur of economic necessity and technological opportunity.

In recent years, corporate down-sizing and “outsourcing”—the farming out of work once performed within the company—have spawned millions of new home-based businesses: The in-house publicist or systems analyst is now working freelance in her own house, often for the same corporation. At the same time, the computer and modem have made many jobs in the information sector more or less portable.

According to the Regional Plan Association, 98 percent of the work force in the New York metropolitan region commutes to work each day; on any given day in the year 2010, 10 percent will “commute” by wire. Nationwide, 30 million of us are expected to be working at home by the year 2000, more than a fifth of the labor force. Welcome to the Staples economy.

What will the landscape, and the life style, generated by these new forces look like? In the case of the landscape, probably not all that different. That’s the good news about the changes under way around me: Nowadays you can build a trading room in the middle of a New England forest and leave only the faintest of environmental footprints. The new technologies make it possible to draw large stretches of rural America onto the grid of the modern economy without sacrificing its beauty in the way that the highways that drove the last wave of development invariably did. Today the economic centers can release their centrifugal energies without necessarily having to sprawl.

That’s not to say the countryside isn’t changing. As traders and architects, accountants and software developers take to the hills around here, you may not be able to see our offices from the road (and that road may not need to be widened), but we do leave our telltale marks on the land all the same. There’s that new Staples superstore in Torrington, for example, and in Litchfield, a picture-book white-clapboard New England village, the old pharmacy with its zinc soda fountain has given way to a coffee bar where you can pay $3.75 for an iced latte. The new exurb might look a lot like the old countryside, but in truth it is as urban an artifact as Central Park.

But it is the life style, more than the landscape, that the home office economy will transfigure, as the man in the gray flannel suit is replaced by the man (and woman) in the gray flannel sweatshirt and slippers, padding up, or out, to the home office. (Shlubbiness is definitely an occupational hazard: Jackets, skirts, even the morning shave and shower are strictly optional.)

If you’ve visited a model home recently, you know that the American house is changing, as it sprouts new office rooms (often replacing the old “den” or “sewing room”) and sometimes whole outbuildings to accommodate work best done out of range of the kids. And it is the kids who surely stand to benefit: One of the great advantages of working at home is the added time with one’s family it affords, once you realize how much day is left after you’ve lopped off those hours for commuting and water cooler schmoozing.

The loss of this ritual is often cited as a drawback of working at home, and isolation (social and office-political) is certainly a problem. Yet I’ve discovered that the lack of society during the day whets one’s appetite for social activity at night—going out, having people over, even getting involved politically.

The rap on bedroom communities has always been that a society of commuters, with one foot in the city and the other in bed, had no time or energy left for local politics and community activities; the commuter’s sense of attachment to a place was attenuated. I find that after a day spent in the solitude of my hut, the prospect of a P.T.A. or zoning board meeting begins to look pretty exciting. A society of home-office workers could wind up actually revitalizing our communities. What might look like a formula for social atomization could prove precisely the opposite. At least that’s what my own experience suggests. Is it representative? I’d be the last person to tell you a writer’s life is typical of anything. And yet maybe in this one case it is. For in a way, the writer’s existence is a model for the life style now emerging.

Long before the trader and the accountant and the software developer pulled up stakes to move to the woods, the writers were already here, tapping away in the solitude of their attics and cabins. Writers have always had the freedom to live out beyond the reach of the expressway, to map their day, to figure out how to make something of their isolation and the gift of all that time. For better or worse, millions of us are writers now, freelance souls set loose by the American centrifuge, making our own way across territory that only looks familiar, building something new.

Since I am someone who lives in his head much of the time—who makes his living as a writer—this probably sounds reasonable enough, if perhaps a little dreamy. What made considerably less sense, however, was that I wanted to build this place myself, with my own two unhandy hands. This part of the dream would entail a journey for which I was singularly unprepared, a journey into a realm where I had never attempted anything more ambitious than the weatherstripping of a window. It was a journey that certain comfortable abstractions would not survive, including one called lumber. That particular euphemism fell one snowy morning in January, the day a flatbed truck from the lumberyard backed four massive timbers of fir—prone trunks more than 20 feet long—into my driveway: so these were the trees I was proposing to turn into the frame of my little house.

Since each timber weighed more than a quarter of a ton, the lumberyard had sent two men to help unload. A friend also happened to be on hand, and after taking a few minutes to small talk and gather ourselves for the task, the four of us slid one of the timbers off the flatbed and, with a collective groan, hoisted it up onto our shoulders. Moving at an almost ceremonial pace, we walked the great trunk up the long, snow-crusted incline to the barn where we planned to work on the frame till spring, when we would raise it on its site out in the woods. “We” consisted of myself and a friend named Joe Benney, who, at 27, is one of those geniuses of the how-to you still sometimes meet in the country, a man equally at home in the realms of stone, steel, internal combustion, gardens, guns and plumbing as well as wood. Working on a hourly basis, Joe had agreed to be my Virgil.

Although these logs had been squared up and dressed at the mill, it was impossible not to be conscious of them as trees—and not to feel slightly abashed at what had been done to them on my account. Simply by picking up the phone and placing an order for four 20-foot pieces of 6-by-10 Doug fir, appearance grade, I’d set in motion a chain of events that was as momentous as it was routine. To fill my order, at least two mature fir trees, green spires as old as the century, had been felled in a forest somewhere in Oregon and then trucked, or floated, to a mill in a town called McMinnville. (This much I knew from the yellow cardboard tag stapled to the end grain.) There they’d been skinned of their bark and, after several passes through a saw and then a planer, transformed into the slabs of salmon-colored lumber sprawled on the floor of my barn, looking more than a little forlorn.

It’s hard not to feel sentimental about such majestic pieces of wood, especially today, when we recognize the preciousness of old trees more than we once did. Each of the timbers in my barn, destined to serve as the corner posts of my building, cost $150, a figure that manages to seem both exorbitant and—considering what they are, or were—paltry at the same time. Since the corner posts would be a conspicuous element of the interior as well as the exterior of the building, Charles Myer, an architect and old friend who’d designed the structure for me, had specified the highest-grade clear—that is, knot-free—fir, wood that is typically found only in the unbranched lower trunks of the oldest trees. It is the fate of precisely such Douglas firs, and the creatures whose habitat depends on them, that loggers and environmentalists have been fighting over in the Pacific Northwest, a fight that has already closed down hundreds of sawmills like the one in McMinnville, and turned fir into one of the most precious of woods.

The reason Charlie had specified such large timbers was that he’d conceived of the building as a kind of primitive hut carved out of the woods. The archetypal hut consists of four substantial corner posts (whole trees in some accounts) surmounted by a gable made of timbers only slightly less substantial. A primitive hut’s construction should recall the forest from which it springs, and that’s more easily done with 6-by-10 timbers than with slender sticks of what carpenters call two-by.

The primitive hut is a myth, really, a story about the origins of architecture in the state of nature. As the story goes, architecture was given to man by the forest, which taught him how to form a shelter out of a quartet of trees crowned by pairs of branches inclining toward one another like rafters. Like many myths, this one is fanciful but also in some deep sense true, for architecture as we know it is unimaginable without the tree. Speaking of the very first structures built by man, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote that “trees must have awakened his sense of form.” It is the tree that gave us the notion of a column and, in the West at least, everything else rests upon that.

If the idea of a hut dictated the big, treelike timbers, the timbers in turn dictated the building’s system of construction. It would be a variation on the traditional post and beam, in which the frame of a building is made up of large and generously spaced vertical posts joined to horizontal beams. Traditionally, the joints were of the type known as mortise and tenon: the ends of each beam are chiseled into a protruding shape called a tenon that is inserted into a matching notch, or mortise, carved into the post. Until the 1830′s, when builders in Chicago invented the modern balloon frame, in which relatively light pieces of lumber are joined with nails, virtually all buildings built out of wood had post-and-beam frames held together with mortises and tenons.

Traditional post-and-beam joinery requires a specialized set of skills not many carpenters possess anymore, so Charlie had proposed an idiot-proof alternative involving a store-bought piece of steel and a handful of nails. But Joe would have none of it. He insisted that we mortise our posts, despite the fact that no one would ever see the joints in question. “Doesn’t matter,” Joe said when I, feeling powerfully attracted to the idiot-proof, tried to point this out. “We’ll know.”

ON THE FIRST DAY OF WOODWORK, JOE SHOWED UP WITH AN incongruous pair of tools: a set of fine chisels with ash handles and a beat-up chain saw. The chain saw was to cut our posts roughly to length; this would constitute the first cut made in our fir, and as I was afraid he might, Joe insisted I make it.

I am petrified by chain saws, a phobia I don’t regard as irrational or neurotic in the least, but there was simply no way to decline the Homelite Joe held out to me without suffering a loss of face. Even though Joe and I shared no illusions I had any clue what I was doing as a carpenter, it would have been a mistake to compound my ignorance with a lack of pluck right at the beginning. So, straining for nonchalance, I took the chain saw, gave its starting cord a yank, and held on as the machine leapt menacingly to life.

But cutting the fir timbers proved unexpectedly easy, perhaps because there were no imperfections in the wood, no knots or bark to frustrate the blade and provoke its willfulness. The snout of the saw moved like a cleaver through the soft, cheddary wood, its gasoline howl—deafening indoors—the sole evidence of effort or resistance. For the first time, I noticed the sweet, elusive aroma of fresh-cut Doug fir, an oddly familiar perfume that nevertheless took me the longest time to place. But then there it was: roasted peanuts and hot spun sugar, the summery scents of the fairground.

Trading a chain saw for a chisel, which I needed to cut the mortise in my post, is to trade one way of knowing a piece of wood for another. The chain saw acquaints you with certain general properties—a wood’s hardness, its aroma—but the chisel discloses information of a fineness any machine would overwhelm. Something as subtle as the relative density of its springwood and summerwood—the two distinct rings a fir tree lays down each year—the beveled tip of the chisel’s steel blade will scrupulously transmit to its ash handle and then through that to your hand. Tap by tap, the blade of the chisel gradually ate into the body of the tree, and the material it encountered there felt less like wood than dense flesh—almost like a slab of tuna. As long as it remained sharp, the blade sliced easily through the wood’s layered grain, raising a plume of curled shavings I half-expected to be moist to the touch.

After some practice the tool began to feel light and alive in my hand, almost as though it knew what it was supposed to do. Which in some sense it did. Like any good hand tool, but especially one that has been fine-tuned over centuries, a well-made chisel contains in its design a wealth of experience on which the hand of a receptive user can draw. Working properly with such a tool awakens that experience, that particular knowledge of wood; at the same time it helps to preserve it. When the chiseling was going especially well, it reminded me of what it is like to work with an exceptionally well-trained animal; if I paid close enough attention to what it wanted to do, even let it steer me a bit, the chisel had things to teach me.

After Thoreau cut down the pine trees for the frame of his hut at Walden, he hewed and mortised the logs himself, a process—an intimacy, to judge by his account of it—that he felt had somehow righted his relationship to the fallen trees. “Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree,” he wrote, even though “I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.” I used to think this was a too convenient rationalization for Thoreau’s having done something that ordinarily he would have deplored. This is, after all, the same Thoreau who once composed an elegy for a pine tree felled by a lumberman (“Why does not the village bell sound a knell”). Suddenly we’re supposed to believe that the care he has taken hewing these pines, the purpose to which he has put them and the knowledge they have yielded are enough to compensate for the sacrifice.

Now that idea no longer seemed self-serving or crazy. It was the work that purchased this intimate knowledge, and its price, fair or not, is indeed the death of a tree. Though it’s probably wrong to think that only the handworker, with his traditional tools, gains such a close acquaintance with trees. The lumberjack working with his screaming chain saw knows trees, too, he just knows different things. Both, however, can fairly claim to know the tree better than any of its more distant admirers.

MORTISING BY HAND TOOK FOREVER, BUT ANY TIME I GRUMBLED about the cumbersomeness of traditional joinery compared with nailing together a frame of 2 by 4′s, Joe would spring to the defense of the post and beam. Timber frames are structurally superior to modern balloon frames, he contended, and they make a thriftier use of a tree; the extra passes through a saw needed to turn a log into 2 by 4′s wasted far more wood (in the form of sawdust), not to mention energy.

As soon as we had raised our posts outside on their footings and fitted the floor beams into the notches we’d chiseled, I could see there was a certain poetic economy in post-and-beam framing, in the way it seemed to carry the treeness of lumber forward into a building. The vertical posts performed like trunks, exploiting the strength of wood fibers in compression, and the horizontal beams acted very much like limbs, drawing on their strength in tension. Also, the mortises and tenons locked together in a satisfying knotlike way; instead of the superficial attachment made by a nail, the beam nested into the body of the post almost as if it were a bough.

But soundness and sentiment aside, it seemed to me that, as much as anything else, it was the very difficulty and mystique of traditional framing that commended it to a carpenter like Joe. Since not everyone could do it, those who could were entitled to a special status. It’s no accident that, until the invention of the balloon frame, the housewright, or joiner, ruled the building process from design to completion, wielding the sort of cultural authority and prestige that architects do today.

The shift from post-and-beam to balloon framing (named for the dubious-seeming lightness of the new structure) marks an important historical shift, and not merely in building technique. For between the two types of frame stands a gulf of sensibility as well as technology. This is something my own building helped me to at least begin to appreciate, since its frame was actually a hybrid that drew on both traditions. After Joe and I had raised the main posts and beams, we traded our chisels for hammers and nails. The building’s floor and sections of its walls were all to be framed out of conventional 2 by 4′s and 2 by 6′s, in the way most wooden structures have been put together since about 1850 or so.

Now that we were swinging hammers rather than tapping chisels, I felt as if I was back on at least semi-familiar ground. But on the first morning of floor framing, I noticed Joe watching me closely as I pounded nails, clearly weighing whether or not to interrupt.

“Can I show you a better way to do that?”

“What—to hammer a nail?” I was incredulous, and then, after he explained what I was doing wrong, crestfallen: it turned out I didn’t even know the proper way to swing a hammer. It seems I was holding the side of the hammer with my thumb, a grip that forced my wrist to deliver most of the force needed to drive the nail. Joe reached over and moved my thumb down around the shank of the hammer. Now as I brought the hammer down I felt a slight loss of control but a substantial gain in power, for suddenly the tool had become an extension of my whole arm and not just my hand. Joe never said it, but I’d been holding my hammer as if it were a tennis racquet poised for a backhand, a realization that heated my cheeks with embarrassment. Once I corrected my grip, I found I could drive a big 10-penny nail through a piece of two-by with half as many blows as before, and the business of framing moved smartly along.

It wasn’t hard to see why balloon framing had caught on. Where it had taken the two of us to raise and manhandle our posts and beams into position, I was able to frame most of the floor by myself in less time than it had taken me to mortise a notch. It is only after struggling with 6-by-10 posts that you can understand how carpenters could ever have thought of 2-by-4 studs as sticks—by comparison, these were as easy to handle as toothpicks.

Though this wood, too, was Douglas fir, I was only dimly aware of this fact, and would not have noticed had the yard slipped in a few pieces of pine or spruce. Balloon framing doesn’t acquaint you with the particularities of wood in the way post-and-beam framing does, and it’s easy to forget that these are trees you’re working with. In this sense 2-by-4 framing is a more abstract kind of work than timber framing, with an industrial rhythm that places a far greater premium on the repetitive task and the interchangeable part. Which is why an amateur like me could frame a wall in an afternoon.

What I was discovering in the course of framing my little building, an entire culture had discovered in the middle of the last century. Contemporary accounts of the new technology brim with a kind of giddiness at the rapid feats of construction it had suddenly made possible—houses put up in days, whole towns rising in weeks. Since a couple of men could assemble one of the new frames without the kind of group effort or specialized skills needed to raise a timber frame, a pioneer family could now build a house just about anywhere they wanted to, even out on the treeless prairie, and in just about any style. By comparison, the technology of timber framing—communal, hierarchical and conservative by its very nature—had been supremely well adapted to the kind of close-knit religious communities that had settled the forested East. Looked at from this perspective, the new way of cutting and joining trees added a powerful centrifugal force—and a force for individualism—to the settlement of the West.

THE CULMINATION OF TIMBER FRAMING arrives with the raising of the ridgepole, a moment of high drama that Joe approached as one of his biggest scenes. For weeks now, I’d been asking him how we were going to do it—should I be lining up some sort of crane for the day?—and for weeks Joe had been telling me not to worry, that he’d figure out something when the time came. But it was definitely on his mind. During breaks, I’d follow his gaze as it slowly traveled up from the top of the walls to the overhanging trees, only to suddenly plunge again; I guessed he was testing out scenarios (a block and tackle maybe?), running calculations on what it would take to lift a 4-by-10 ridge beam 16 feet overhead.

On the appointed Saturday we began indoors, framing the two end gables—the triangles that hold up the roof at either end of the building. At the apex of each triangle, we left a 4-by-10-inch gap between the two rafters: this was the slot in which the ridgepole would ultimately sit, once we had managed to raise the gables into position. It seemed as though we might still want the crane (the gable assemblies themselves weighed a couple hundred pounds apiece, the ridge beam even more), but Joe said all we would need was one more pair of hands to raise the ridgepole, no particular skill required. So I arranged for an exceptionally tall friend named Don to come by later that afternoon.

After we carried the first gable out to the site, Joe carefully arranged a pair of ladders and set a 2-by-10 plank across the top of the walls. “O.K. Mike, here’s the plan,” Joe said. “First we turn the gable upside down and inside out. Then, together, we lift the thing just high enough so that this rafter tail here hits that spot there on the plate. You’re going to have to balance everything right on that point long enough for me to climb up onto the top of the wall. Then we pivot the whole assembly this way until the other rafter tail hits that point over there, and slide the 2 by 10 under the peak to hold it up. Follow me? Then you get up on the other ladder, and together we flip the thing around, shimmy it forward, and then get under and lift it to vertical.”

No, it made no sense to me either, none whatsoever. I told Joe that following his plan was like trying to learn origami over the radio. He wasn’t smiling, and I realized then that what we were about to do was not without danger. I said to Joe that maybe it would be better if he just told me what to do one step at a time.

So I followed his instructions, moving first this way and then that, hoisting, holding, pivoting, and then climbing on cue, an obedient pyramid ant, not even aspiring to grasp the big picture, and trusting utterly in my carpenter-turned-choreographer. And then, astoundingly, there we were, each of us holding one side of a 300-pound assembly that we’d managed somehow to raise high into the trees without a crane. I wanted to cheer, except that I was still holding my breath as I waited for Joe to brace the gable. So instead I thought about this newspaper article I’d read that claimed men are especially adept at mentally rotating an object in space, a skill I’d never had much reason to appreciate before. Women supposedly have the edge in verbal agility, which seemed much the better deal. Not today. And here it was, right in front of me, a full-dress display of the male genius.

After raising the second gable, we were ready to set the ridgepole. Don, the six-and-a-half-foot friend I’d recruited for the event, arrived as Joe and I were preparing to mark and cut the gorgeous length of knot-free fir we’d selected for the building’s spine. This timber, too, had come from Oregon, according to the stencil on its flank. My tentativeness handling such a piece of wood had vanished; I felt well acquainted with fir, if not quite friend, not foe either. I took up the circular saw, found my mark and worked the blade through the familiar wood flesh, breathing in its sweet midway scent.

“This is what you call a ridgepole?” Don was slightly horrified at just how big the beam was: “I was picturing something a bit more bamboolike.”

“We call it a ridgepole to make it feel lighter,” Joe said. “But it’s really a big tree with the bark taken off and a few corners added.”

As Don and I shouldered the ridgepole from the barn out to the site, Joe trotted out ahead, climbing up into the frame to receive it. Now Don, his face reddening with the strain, pressed his end up over his head barbell-style while Joe guided it to a spot on the wall plate; I then did the same with mine. Don and I joined Joe up in the frame, as he directed a new choreography that had the two of us manning opposite gables while he flew back and forth across the structure, helping us each in turn to hoist and then align our beam ends over their intended slots. Don’s end went down first, sinking comfortably into its wooden pocket; I watched his tensed expression suddenly bloom into relief. My end needed some manhandling to force the beam down into its slot, where it didn’t seem to want to go.

“Time for some physical violence,” Joe advised, as he handed his big framing hammer up to me. Now I pounded mightily on the top of the ridge beam—holding the hammer correctly, I might add—and inch by inch it creaked its way down into its slot, the tight-binding wood screeching furiously under the blows, until at last the beam came to rest on its king post, snug and immovable. That was it: the ridgepole set, our frame was topped out.

I asked Joe to hand me his big carpenter’s level; along with the tool he gave me a look that said, You’re really asking for it, aren’t you? There was exactly nothing we could do, after all, if we discovered that our ridge beam was not true. I laid the level along the spine of the building. From where he stood Joe had the better view into the tool’s little window, and I read the excellent news in his face. “It doesn’t get any better,” Joe said, reaching out his palm for a slap. None of us wanted to come down from the frame, so we stood up there in the trees for a long time, beaming dumbly at one another, weary and relieved.

IN COLONIAL TIMES THE topping out of a frame was followed by a ceremony, half-solemn and half-raucous, that invariably included the nailing of an evergreen bough to the topmost beam. Most of the ceremony has been lost to time, but the tree-hanging survives. Even today on a balloon-framed split level in the suburbs you’ll often see a conifer tacked to the ridge board before the vinyl siding goes on. I’ve seen steelworkers raising whole spruce trees to the top of a skyscraper frame high above midtown. Perhaps it’s nothing more than superstition, men in a dangerous line of work playing it safe. Or maybe there’s some residual power left in the old pagan ritual.

I’ve read many explanations for the evergreen hanging, all of them spiritual in one degree or another. The conifer is thought to imbue the frame with the tree spirit, or it’s meant to sanctify the new house, or appease the gods for the taking of the trees. These interpretations seem reasonable enough, yet they don’t account for the fact that someone as unsuperstitious and spiritually retarded as I am felt compelled to go out into the woods in search of a evergreen after we’d raised the ridgepole. Joe probably would have done it if I hadn’t, but it was my building, and there was something viscerally appealing about the whole idea, the way it promised to lend a certain symmetry to the framing process, tree to timber to tree. But now that I’ve actually performed the ritual, I’m inclined to think there’s more to it than that. Like many rituals involving a sacrifice, there’s an emotional wrench right in the middle of this one. The hanging of the conifer manages all at once to celebrate a joyful accomplishment—the transformation of trees into a dwelling—and force a recognition that there is something vaguely shameful in the very same deed.

Sacrifice seems to be an inescapable part of our condition—we kill to eat, we chop down trees to make our houses, we exploit other people and the earth for our gain. One of the things a ritual does is help us to frame, acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in the paradoxes of being human, reminding us at once of the power and the shame undergirding our achievements. Without such a double awareness, we’re apt to find ourselves either plundering nature without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it’s not surprising that most of us bring either one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature nowadays. For who can hold in his head at the same time a feeling of shame at the cutting down of a great oak and a sense of pride at the achievement of a good building? It doesn’t seem possible.

And yet right there may lie the deeper purpose of the topping out ceremony: to cultivate that impossible dual vision, to help foster what amounts to a tragic sense of our place in nature. This is something I suspect the people who used to christen frames understood better than we do. To cut down a tree, to build a house, their rituals imply, is in some way to alienate ourselves from the natural order, for good and bad. The topping-out ritual, with its peculiar mix of solemnity and celebration, must have offered the early builders a way to square the shame and the nobility of this great, dangerous accomplishment.

I’m more than a little embarrassed to utter any such words in connection with my own endeavor, so distant from my world do they sound. But along with the remnants of the old rituals, might there also be at least some residue of the old emotions? I remember on that January morning when I took delivery of my fir timbers, how the sight of those fallen trees on the floor of my barn had unnerved me—”abashed” was the word I’d used. In the battle between the loggers and the northern spotted owl, I’d always counted myself on the side of the owls. But now that I wanted to build, here I was, prepared to sacrifice not only a couple of venerable fir trees in Oregon but a political conviction as well.

So maybe it was shame as much as exultation that brought me down off the frame that early summer evening, sent me out into the woods in quest of an evergreen to kill. Joe had forgotten which you were supposed to use, pine or hemlock or spruce. I decided any conifer would do. It was spruce I came upon first, and after I cut down the little tree and turned to start back to the site, holding the doomed sapling before me like a flag, I saw something I really hadn’t seen before: the shape of my building in the landscape. The simple, classical arrangement of posts and beams, their unweathered grain glowing gold in the last of the day’s light, stood in sharp relief against the general leafiness, like some sort of geometrical proof chalked on a blackboard of forest. I stopped for a moment to admire it, and filled with pride. The proof, of course, was of us: of the powers—of mind, of body, of civilization—that could achieve such a transubstantiation of trees. Look at this thing we’ve made! And yet nothing happens without the gift of the firs, those green spires sinking slowly to earth in an Oregon forest, and it was this that the spruce recalled me to. Joe had left a ladder leaning against the front gable. I climbed back up into the canopy of leaves, the sapling tucked under my arm, and when I got to the top, I drove a nail through its slender trunk and fixed it to the ridge beam, thinking: trees!