Cube-ism Is Not a Style
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Anyone who lives with the constant infill construction in the older neighborhoods in our area has experienced the amnesia of demolition. The modest brick houses built in the early 1960s are being steadily replaced by four thousand square-foot behemoths that all but devour their modest yards. While walking a familiar route, one sees a freshly gouged pit on a property stripped bare of trees, shrubs and grass, where only days before, a house with sixty years of lived-in history stood, and one finds oneself unable to recall what the original home looked like, disturbed by a small but indelible sense of loss.
Most of the new houses are boxy, quasi-traditional structures. A very few, however, are designed in a more austere contemporary style that favors a flat roof over rigid rectangular modules with large windows and a metallic appearance.
The house next door to ours was almost a mirror image of our own three-bedroom split-level, where our older neighbors had raised a family, but when her husband died, the wife stayed on only a few more years before selling out and moving to a condominium. A claw-bucketed excavator was brought in, and the destruction of our neighbor’s house happened with the usual noisy haste. In four days, all that was left of that shady, pleasant, sixth of an acre was a deep hole in the ground.
Unusually deep, I thought at the time. Apparently the floor plan was only a slightly larger footprint than that of the original house — surprising enough in itself — which argued against the usual contractor’s model and instead for an owner of ample means hiring an architect to construct his dream home. This was the prevailing opinion among my neighbors, but none of us could have predicted the finished product, completed in late spring.
It was, at first glance, another example of that sharp-edged, flat-roofed modern style, its smooth, textureless walls painted the flat gray of carbon steel. But instead of being shaped like a lofty rectangular box with adjoining sections, the new house was a simple cuboid of relatively modest dimensions. The one-car garage was contained within the cuboid, and when its automatic door closed the seams were scarcely visible, an impressive, if odd, design feature.
The same hermetic look was employed for the front and back doors and all the windows, which when closed were covered with sliding steel shutters of the same metallic color and texture of the outer walls, affording the owners an unusual degree of privacy. With all the shutters closed and the lights off, the house must have been as a dark as a cave.
I never once saw an open window, and only rarely were the shutters up, leaving one with the assumption that the Cube (as we’d come to refer to it) was entirely dependent on central heat and air conditioning, the latter unit almost hugging the north wall like a flat-screen TV.
After the property was landscaped and new trees planted, the movers came late one afternoon and hauled in the family’s belongings, all of which, including the furniture, were contained in large, sealed boxes. The owners themselves chose to arrive at what must have been a very late hour, because I habitually stay up reading until midnight and saw no activity.
Unless they came by taxi, I assumed that their car was already inside the garage, where it henceforth stayed. For more than a week, none of us knew whether they’d moved in. And with the shutters closed, the house looked sealed, dark and uninhabited. The dim front porch light was always on, giving the impression of a family away on an extended trip.
Rumors run riot in a vacuum of information, even though nothing had happened and no one had yet been seen on the property. The new neighbors apparently had no children, never went out for a walk, were not, as far as anyone knew, pet owners, and apparently neither sent nor received paper mail. The only concession to normalcy was their house number, posted in raised, back-lit metal letters over the front door. Our facile assumption was that the homeowners lived and functioned almost entirely online, which was unusual only in their apparent degree of commitment to this indoor lifestyle.
One story that helped to feed the mystery was related by our next door neighbor, Ruth. She told of a woman living one street east of ours, whose fenced back yard bordered that of the new neighbors’ back yard. This lady suffered from chronic insomnia, and to pass the long hours between midnight and dawn, sometimes sat out on her screened-in back porch with her dog. She would sit quietly in the dark, drinking chamomile tea, almost prayerfully waiting for the gift of drowsiness. She had a fairly clear view of the new neighbors’ back yard, and although she had heard that they’d moved in, she had yet to see a light in any of the rooms and believed the house to be unoccupied.
So it was a bit of a shock when, about 3:30 a.m., she saw the back door open and close, briefly revealing a light so brilliant, she said, that it temporarily blinded her, and a fleeting impression of a shape silhouetted against the light. A few minutes must have passed before she realized that there was someone standing in the new neighbors’ back yard. It was a moonless night and the figure in deep shadow, so she couldn’t see more than a vaguely human-shaped blot of darkness.
Her dog, an aging golden retriever, was still alert and protective, so she was rather surprised, if grateful, that he hadn’t made a sound, though he seemed to be staring in the direction of the unmoving shape. She was sitting in complete darkness and doubted that the person could see her, though it was possible that she’d been heard. She thought this because the figure’s stillness, as she told Ruth, was becoming “unnatural.” She and this person seemed “engaged in a contest of silence,” which went on so long that she finally went back inside, her dog closely following.
From time to time, she would glance out of an open window at the neighbor’s yard and could still see the person, if dimly, who never seemed to move. This immobility was so prolonged that she began to wonder if she were looking not at a man but a human-shaped topiary or a lawn statue. But somewhere around five a.m., she noticed that the figure was gone. So unsettled was she by this experience, the insomniac told Ruth, that it was almost sunrise when she finally got to sleep.
A lawn care company had been engaged to keep the new neighbors’ yard mowed and the bushes trimmed, further insuring the family’s continued invisibility. It also emerged from someone we knew living directly across the street from the new people that a neighbor boy had been hired to carry the garbage cans and recycle bins to the street and back each trash day, and the hiring had been done entirely online, the boy’s salary deposited directly into a PayPal account. The fact that this had become an ordinary method of doing business in the online world did nothing to dispel the sometimes outlandish rumors about the “recluses” of 1087 Morgan Drive.
It was true that no one besides the insomniac lady had actually glimpsed a member of this eccentric household, and it was hard not to form the impression that whoever, and how many, inhabited the Cube, they never left it, or more probably, had not left or returned when anyone was awake and watching. Unless the new neighbors really did all their work and socializing online, and had their groceries delivered — though I’d yet to see grocery or fast-food deliveries to their door — their refusal to engage with the neighborhood on the most superficial level was understandably perceived by many as an affront.
But in the absence of a physical presence, a face to whom one could direct one’s individual portion of the general disapproval, the larger concerns of our daily lives gradually crowded out the perplexing mystery of the Cube. Although one’s gaze was irresistibly drawn to the house each time one passed it, with its blank gray walls and tightly shuttered windows, it was clearly not returning that gaze. And after a while, we stopped talking about it.
Up until then, our street had avoided the general trend of tear-downs that had taken so many of the smaller cape houses in the neighborhood, but the arrival of the Cube seemed to awaken the acquisitive hunger of the infill contractors, always on the lookout for new prospects and, almost before we knew it, two more houses were sold and torn down at the top and bottom of the modest hill which comprises our entire street.
It soon became apparent, to everyone’s unpleasant surprise, that the new houses were, with negligible stylistic variations, almost exact copies of the Cube. And throughout the neighborhood, the cuboid style of architecture was cropping up more frequently, although the boxy, faux-traditional houses still greatly outnumbered them.
The problem, of course, wasn’t the Cubes themselves but the behavior of the owners to their new neighbors, and there were, as far as we knew, no exceptions. A specific type of unfriendly — one assumed — reclusive, social-media obsessed person seemed invariably drawn to build or buy a Cube, just as a certain shape of birdhouse will attract the very species for which it’s designed.
These were unverified assumptions, of course, and I’m well aware that the much higher ratio of house to yard in infill construction simply reflects the necessity of making a profit as well as the prevailing trend toward a screen-addicted inwardness in the younger families moving into the older neighborhoods.
But the Cube residents were so alike in their apparent distaste for the very concept of neighborliness that one could almost believe they represented not so much ignorance of, or indifference to, the social norms that we’d grown up with as they were harbingers of a new paradigm of suburban behavior, one that rejected even the superficial nods and hellos that pass these days for social interaction. In their mole-like devotion to invisibility, the Cube-dwellers had chosen to remain strangers among us.
The arrival of the Cubes happened to coincide with a generational changing of the guard in the neighborhood. Those residents who had bought homes around 1960, when the first houses on our street were built on what not long before had been woods and farmland, were aging out and moving to condos, retirement communities and assisted-living facilities.
Young families were the new colonists and, from my late middle-aged viewpoint, they seemed less curious about the Cube people than those of my generation, who were at least as mystified as outraged, and certainly not shy about pronouncing the death of the neighborhood as we had known it.
Months passed, then two years and, slowly, house after house in the neighborhood went on the market, was sold and torn down. In its place, much as we might wish otherwise, rose another cold-shouldering Cube. There were four on Morgan Drive alone. One couldn’t help noticing that the streets — not just ours but the entire neighborhood — once so alive with dog walkers talking to each other or plugged into devices, couples with children and baby carriages, joggers, whole families on bicycles, skateboarders, and soccer and basketball kids heading down to the junior high school playground, were gradually emptying.
Word had gotten around that the Warburton neighborhood — named for the elementary school a block north of us — was becoming a less desirable place to raise children, and younger families were choosing to settle in areas developing more conventionally. Door-to-door solicitors — tree-trimmers, roofing contractors, young people seeking donations for political campaigns or environmental causes — soon learned not to cross Cube property lines, much less waste their time knocking on those featureless doors that were never answered.
Copyright © 2025 by Jeffrey Greene
