Robert A. Heinlein
—And He Built a Crooked House
Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, “It’s Hollywood. It’s not our fault—we didn’t ask for it; Hollywood just grew.”
The people in Hollywood don’t care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon “—where we keep the violent cases.” The Canyonites—the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slap-happy unfinished houses—regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.
Lookout Mountain Avenue is the name of a side canyon which twists up from Laurel Canyon. The other Canyonites don’t like to have it mentioned; after all, one must draw the line somewhere!
High up on Lookout Mountain at number 8775, across the street from the Hermit—the original Hermit of Hollywood—lived Quintus Teal, graduate architect.
Even the architecture of southern California is different. Hot dogs are sold from a structure built like and designated “The Pup.” Ice cream cones come from a giant stucco ice cream cone, and neon proclaims “Get the Chili Bowl Habit!” from the roofs of buildings which are indisputably chili bowls. Gasoline, oil, and free road maps are dispensed beneath the wings of tri-motored transport planes, while the certified rest rooms, inspected hourly for your comfort, are located in the cabin of the plane itself. These things may surprise, or amuse, the tourist, but the local residents, who walk bareheaded in the famous California noonday sun, take them as a matter of course.
Quintus Teal regarded the efforts of his colleagues in architecture as faint-hearted, fumbling, and timid.
· · · · ·
“What is a house?” Teal demanded of his friend, Homer Bailey.
“Well—” Bailey admitted cautiously, “speaking in broad terms, I’ve always regarded a house as a gadget to keep off the rain.”
“Nuts! You’re as bad as the rest of them.”
“I didn’t say the definition was complete—”
“Complete! It isn’t even in the right direction. From that point of view we might just as well be squatting in caves. But I don’t blame you,” Teal went on magnanimously, “you’re no worse than the lugs you find practicing architecture. Even the Moderns—all they’ve done is to abandon the Wedding Cake School in favor of the Service Station School, chucked away the gingerbread and slapped on some chromium, but at heart they are as conservative and traditional as a county courthouse. Neutra! Schindler! What have those bums got? What’s Frank Lloyd Wright got that I haven’t got?”
“Commissions,” his friend answered succinctly.
“Huh? Wha’ d’ju say?” Teal stumbled slightly in his flow of words, did a slight double take, and recovered himself. “Commissions. Correct. And why? Because I don’t think of a house as an upholstered cave; I think of it as a machine for living, a vital process, a live dynamic thing, changing with the mood of the dweller—not a dead, static, oversized coffin. Why should we be held down by the frozen concepts of our ancestors? Any fool with a little smattering of descriptive geometry can design a house in the ordinary way. Is the static geometry of Euclid the only mathematics? Are we to completely disregard the Picard-Vessiot theory? How about modular system?—to say nothing of the rich suggestions of stereochemistry. Isn’t there a place in architecture for transformation, for homomorphology, for actional structures?”
“Blessed if I know,” answered Bailey. “You might must as well be talking about the fourth dimension for all it means to me.”
“And why not? Why should we limit ourselves to the—Say!” He interrupted himself and stared into distances. “Homer, I think you’ve really got something. After all, why not? Think of the infinite richness of articulation and relationship in four dimensions. What a house, what a house—” He stood quite still, his pale bulging eyes blinking thoughtfully.
Bailey reached up and shook his arm. “Snap out of it. What the hell are you talking about, four dimensions? Time is the fourth dimension; you can’t drive nails into that.”
Teal shrugged him off. “Sure. Sure. Time is a fourth dimension, but I’m thinking about a fourth spatial dimension, like length, breadth, and thickness. For economy of materials and convenience of arrangement you couldn’t beat it. To say nothing of the saving of ground space—you could put an eight-room house on the land now occupied by a one-room house. Like a tesseract—”
“What’s a tesseract?”
“Didn’t you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I’ll show you.” Teal dashed out into the kitchen of his apartment and returned with a box of toothpicks which he spilled on the table between them, brushing glasses and a nearly empty Holland gin bottle carelessly aside. “I’ll need some plasticine. I had some around here last week.” He burrowed into a drawer of the littered desk which crowded one corner of his dining room and emerged with a lump of oily sculptor’s clay. “Here’s some.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll show you.” Teal rapidly pinched off small masses of the clay and rolled them into pea-sized balls. He stuck toothpicks into four of these and hooked them together into a square. “There! That’s a square.”
“Obviously.”
“Another one like it, four more toothpicks, and we make a cube.” The toothpicks were now arranged in the framework of a square box, a cube, with the pellets of clay holding the corners together. “Now we make another cube just like the first one, and the two of them will be two sides of the tesseract.”
Bailey started to help him roll the little balls of clay for the second cube, but became diverted by the sensuous feel of the docile clay and started working and shaping it with his fingers.
“Look,” he said, holding up his effort, a tiny figurine, “Gypsy Rose Lee.”
“Looks more like Gargantua; she ought to sue you. Now pay attention. You open up one corner of the first cube, interlock the second cube at the corner, and then close the corner. Then take eight more toothpicks and join the bottom of the first cube to the bottom of the second, on a slant, and the top of the first to the top of the second, the same way.” This he did rapidly, while he talked.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Bailey demanded suspiciously.
“That’s a tesseract, eight cubes forming the sides of a hypercube in four dimensions.”
“It looks more like a cat’s cradle to me. You’ve only got two cubes there anyhow. Where are the other six?”
“Use your imagination, man. Consider the top of the first cube in relation to the top of the second; that’s cube number three. Then the two bottom squares, then the front faces of each cube, the back faces, the right hand, the left hand—eight cubes.” He pointed them out.
“Yeah, I see ’em. But they still aren’t cubes; they’re whatchamucallems—prisms. They are not square, they slant.”
“That’s just the way you look at it, in perspective. If you drew a picture of a cube on a piece of paper, the side squares would be slaunchwise, wouldn’t they? That’s perspective. When you look at a four-dimensional figure in three dimensions, naturally it looks crooked. But those are all cubes just the same.”
“Maybe they are to you, brother, but they still look crooked to me.”