The thing about having idols — like my dad, or, once, Richard Meier — is that eventually we might get to know them. When I was fifteen, after years of mostly absence, I started reconnecting with my dad. I was in boarding school and had phone privileges every Sunday night and we just started talking, catching up on years and years and years of life we’d missed. Then I went to college on the east coast and he came to visit me, a lot, and then I moved to New York City, so we were in close proximity. We saw each other a lot but we never talked about what had happened, about why he’d left when I was a baby. Finally, when I was thirty, I took a break from contact. I told him I needed to figure some things out, have some space to feel things. A few months after that, a cyst in my brain ruptured, sending blood and protein into the space behind my pituitary. He came to take care of me after brain surgery, and we talked about the break. I told him I’d just needed a breather, that I wanted to sort of force him to give me a direct answer to the question that has driven me my entire life: why wasn’t I good enough to love?
I was born in Eugene, Oregon, grew up in a one-story house on 34th Street, and spent every weekend and one afternoon a week going to my grandmother’s house, which at some point had been my parents’ house. One year, after we moved to Edmonton, I took a Greyhound bus from Canada to Corvallis to visit her. She’d lived in the area for almost her entire adult life, since walking off a dust bowl of a farm in Nebraska in the thirties.
She could be so deeply loving and so unspeakably cruel. When I was a child, she told me a lot how much my dad loved me, that I should try and figure out a way to leave my family — my mom, my stepdad, my brother — and go live with my dad, who was in Pennsylvania. I don’t know if eight or nine-year-olds can really be “in touch” with anyone, but, like I sort of said before, I wasn’t really in touch with my dad. I idolized him, though. I thought, all the time, about him coming to take me away to live with him. I knew that he would let me do stuff my dumb actual parents wouldn’t let me do, like have ice cream for dinner and stay up late and watch Dirty Dancing. I didn’t know why he didn’t want me to be with him.
I was ferociously attached to my grandmother. I didn’t notice the ways in which she told me that my stepdad, who had been raising me since I was one and a half, wasn’t my “real dad.” Or how she constantly undermined my mom. We were a team, my grandmother and I. She loved eating what she called “junk,” lived to be ninety-four on a diet of Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches, Wendy’s, and See’s candy. She never cooked a day in her life. Sometimes, she took me to Dairy Queen and got me a banana split and told me that when I was twelve, legally I could choose to go live with my dad. I was eight. “Four more years,” she’d say to me.
Yes, I have food issues. Yes, I have dude issues.
When I took that Greyhound bus, I was twelve. We’d moved to Edmonton, Canada, by then, and my stepdad had introduced me to modern architecture. I’d made my way through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Farnsworth. Next up? Richard Meier, specifically the Douglas and Smith houses. Maybe they were in a magazine, or maybe a book, and I’d never seen anything like them. The way the Douglas house rose out of the trees, a blocky white structure with thin columns and a long deck overlooking Lake Michigan. I remember there being Le Corbusier chairs on that deck, the same chairs my stepdad would later buy for his place. The house is typical Meier. It’s white, it’s got glass, it’s got columns, it’s a mix of articulated and not-articulated, I thought it was great. And then, goddamn, the Smith house! Even boxier, even whiter, with a curved stairway, massive swaths of glass and white, I fucking loved it too. For my twelfth birthday, or maybe some other holiday, I was given a monograph of Meier’s work. It was my treasure.
I took that monograph on the Greyhound bus because I was the kind of kid who did that, and then I accidentally forgot it on the bus. I called the bus station to see if maybe they had found a book, about architecture that was all white, and they were clearly sympathetic to this kid, but no luck. I thought about trying to get a replacement but I was a child; I had no money. Still, my love for Meier (his work?) was fixed.
Every summer, we went to Germany, and one summer we went to Ulm, to see the famous cathedral and, next to it, Meier’s Stadthaus. First, we walked up what felt like a thousand steps to the top of the cathedral, and then back down and towards the Stadthaus. After years of seeing pictures of Meier’s work, seeing it in person was, my god! I was so happy. I walked around and around. I looked at the section at the end that was totally round, and I looked at the top, where three little triangular skylight things give it a little zig zag kick. I couldn’t really figure out what part of the building was what, but it didn’t matter. I was seeing a work of modern architecture! In person! For years, maybe after that trip, my stepdad had a big print of the Ulm Stadthaus on the wall of his guest room, the room I stayed in for the two months a few years ago that he went through chemo for chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
In 2018, the New York Times reported that five women had accused Meier of sexual harassment. I was a few minutes out of finishing a sexual harassment claim I had brought against a professor of mine at UC Berkeley, and I was pretty fuckin mad about harassment and institutional protection. I read about what Meier had done. The bathrobes. The everything. I read about how it had been an open secret in the community. I read about how almost no one was surprised. Should I have been surprised? I’d met Meier, once, the year I moved to New York, at an event. I told him I’d been a fan of his since I was a child, that I’d owned his monograph, that I’d loved his Smith and Douglas houses. He pulled me in for a side hug and put his face close to mine. I don’t remember what he said. I do remember how I felt.
I worked things out with my other idol, my dad. Eventually, he told me that he’d thought he was doing the right thing by staying away, but that now he realized he hadn’t been. Eventually, he told me he was sorry.
When I got married, we took a bunch of family photos. It started with like, extended family, then moved down towards less extended, and then “parents only.” My four parents—my dad, my mom, my stepdad, my stepmom—were in the picture with me. “Parents only,” the photographers said. “These four people are my parents,” I said. When I had a major surgery last year, my dad and my stepdad came to take me to the hospital. “These are my two dads,” I told the surgeon. “But not how you think.”
That Ulm print is probably still up at my stepdad’s house. That monograph has probably been recycled twenty-five times by now. Richard Meier is still out there, I guess? I’m so angry that I loved his work so much and that he turned out to be such a jackass, but I guess that’s part of life. I can’t reject the me that wanted to spend hours looking at his work, and I can’t reject the me that thought one day I’d escape my family and live with my dad, and I can’t reject the me that took a break from my dad even though sometimes I still feel really bad about it, but I also can’t reject the me that finally said something, that told my stepdad that he’s just as much my father, that just really liked a building. Life can be so deeply loving and so unspeakably cruel.
Stadthaus Ulm is at Münsterplatz 50, 89073 Ulm, Germany.
Stadthaus Ulm
Beautiful, thanks.