The Collapse
Architecture is not simply the domestication of nature’s structures in the service of man’s dreams, and it does not take place only in the paperwork of blueprints, contracts, and county permits. Architecture is the running dialogue that grows between builder and nature, during which a building (noun and verb) emerges to breathe and, in its time, to pass away. What follows is a romanticized description of what may have happened, long before it should have, on such a day.
It must have been a terrifying sound in the quiet of that afternoon, a horrifying groan and rumbling across the way, below the hill where the architect stood overlooking the place where the building had sat for over a century— until that day.
The winery had been built by Chinese hands, shoulders and backs; they were skilled with stone, and done with building the railroad, and ready for any other labor. Joshua Chauvet had designed the great building and had directed their work, and when they were done the 19th Century California landscape was occupied by a new breed of architecture: great stone walls, three stories high, crowned and bound together by heavy timber.
Over the century that followed, the history of California winemaking unfolded in the Valley of the Moon. Year after year, vintage after vintage, men brought in the harvest, separated the grapes from their stems, and practiced the alchemy of an ancient craft. Sons steadily improved upon their fathers’ skills, and in time the wines of Sonoma came to be known internationally. All through this, that great building crouched where it had been built beside the stream, patiently sheltering the wines and the labor of the workers that produced them.
The architect and his friend had discovered the great stone building some ten years earlier, abandoned now on a side road that once had been the only trail up the valley, before the highway was built a mile or so to the east. I’ve seen the photographs, and understand what they saw, and bought, and sought to preserve.
From what I’m told, the roof eventually needed to be repaired, as happens with all buildings from time to time. The roof is, after all, that part of the building most exposed to nature’s weathering, as it shelters to protect what the walls surround to embrace within. The workmen were up on top that day, removing roofing materials and timbers in preparation for the repair. Somehow they did not realize that the joists and rafters they were removing, one by one, had actually held the walls together like a capstone, or the hoops of a barrel, ever since it's original design a century before.
I can imagine the nervous glances the workmen would have exchanged when they felt that great animal begin to tremble, when they began to hear the restless sounds come up from the belly of the immense structure, before they recognized the noise of shifting stone, and dropping timbers. I can almost see the architect up on the hill, who had been observing their progress from a distance, and almost feel his abrupt, remote despair as helplessly he watched the building crumple, crumble, and begin gradually to unravel, collapse, and sink into the clouds of dust that rose about it from the ground.
The men would have exchanged shouts, leaping from place to place as great portions of the roof separated and came down with the walls. They rode the building down that day I am told, surprisingly unhurt by the fall from three stories up, stone and timber falling all about them, with them.
It must have been a most amazing sound, followed by the empty silence of a new, abrupt and permanent absence, a great hole left behind by the vanish of a grand building, remaining alone there in the sad hush of the afternoon.
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This article previously appeared in The Tower Summer 2004, and was reprinted in The Jack London Villager October 2006.