The Architect Page 4

  "I don't understand," Arthur Heatherstone-Flanders said.

  "Is that the servants quarters?" his wife asked.

  They were looking at a sketch of a one-story cabin that could not contain more than two or three rooms. In front of the house there was a pond or puddle, and off to the side what appeared to be a pig pen.

  "Is this a joke?"

  "Yes," Jones said. He laughed. "I think it suits you." He laughed some more.

  "I've never been so insulted," Arthur Heatherstone-Flanders fumed.

  "Yes, you have," his wife said. "Remember that time in Toledo when you thought that old man in his sailor get-up was a bellhop and you…"

  "Oh, shut up!"

  Heatherstone-Flanders stormed out of the office, followed by his wife who turned to say goodbye but changed her mind. Jones could not stop laughing.

  13

  The next morning he showed Marge his sketch of the Heatherstone-Flanders estate and told her what happened. She was not amused.

  "We can't afford to turn away clients," she said, "even snobby ones. You haven't had a new commission in weeks."

  "I build temples to pray in, not to play billiards in."

  A figure appeared against the frosted glass of the door.

  "Come in," Marge shouted.

  A short man carrying a large briefcase and looking as if he had entered the women's rest room by mistake entered the office. He looked around and stepped back to read the name on the office door again and then asked, "Is this the office of Mr. Templeton Jones?" Before Jones could answer, the man added, "Templeton Jones, the architect?"

  Jones assured him it was.

  "My name is Robert Fitzwater," the man said. "I'm from Northwest University."

  "Isn't that near Chicago?" Marge asked.

  "That's Northwestern. People are always confusing us. Northwest is here. That is, here in the Northwest. We're in Proctor, just a few miles north of Seattle."

  "And what can I do for you, Mr. Fitzwater?" Jones asked.

  "Are you Mr. Jones?"

  "Yes. Templeton Jones, the architect."

  Fitzwater explained that the college wanted a chapel, an interdenominational place of prayer and meditation, but that it did not have much money and so they could not afford to pay enough to warrant a competition.

  "So you came to me?"

  "I got laughed out of the office at Kendall, Schmidt, Hackensack, and Grogan. I think it was Grogan who shouted your name on my way out."

  "And you believed I would work cheap."

  "Well, not just that. We looked you up of course, and we admired very much your St. Thomas church."

  "How much do you have available for this chapel?"

  Fitzwater told him. Jones looked at his receptionist who was staring at the ceiling. Fitzwater began to back towards the door.

  "A decent looking chapel at that price would take a miracle," Jones said. "Come back tomorrow and we'll see what we can do."

  Even this was more encouraging than Fitzwater expected. He opened his briefcase and spread a map of the campus on Marge's desk along with pictures of some of the buildings.

  "Here is where we want to put the chapel," he said, pointing out a spot on the map with a red circle drawn around it. "And these are some of our present buildings, so you get an idea of what is there already. We would like the chapel to blend in as well as stand out, if that is possible."

  "I understand," Jones said, gathering up the map and pictures. "Leave these here and come back tomorrow. No promises. Understood?"

  "Understood. And thank you."

  Fitzwater backed all the way out of the office. When he was gone, Marge gathered up the map and pictures and started to put them in the wastebasket.

  "No," Jones said. "Give them to me."

  "You're not serious."

  "I like the guy. I'll think of something. Put these on my desk. I'll be back this afternoon."

  He stood outside the front door of Arlene’s condominium trying to decide whether it was prudent to call first or just dial the directory number to be let in. The doorman looked discreetly away. Jones started to dial her number when he saw someone leaving so he slipped through the open doorway without calling. Still, when she opened her door, she did not seem surprised to see him.

  "Are you alone?" he asked.

  "Do you want to look around?"

  Jones shook his head. "Who was that man I—" he stopped, embarrassed at the cliché that was coming out of his mouth.

  Arlene laughed. "His name is Armando Romantico and I am having an affair with him."

  "It isn't. You aren't."

  "No," she said. "Come in and have a glass of wine."

  When he was seated on the couch she explained that she had gone to a dance at Seattle Center but it had been many years since she had danced and this man took pity on her and offered to give her a private lesson. "His name is Walter Pithius."

  "And now you can dance?"

  "He will come again next week. I did it because I wanted to get you to take me dancing."

  "Why didn't you tell me? I am an excellent dancer, I would be glad to take you dancing. Put on a cd."

  Arlene played a Tony Bennett cd and looked shyly at Jones. He took off his jacket, whirled it twice around his head and let go. The jacket landed precisely on the couch. Then he took Arlene into his arms and they danced until she begged him to stop.

  "My, you're in a good mood today," Arlene said as she collapsed on the couch.

  "I had a terrific idea on how to build a chapel for almost no money. Don't wrinkle my jacket."

  Jones pulled his jacket out from under Arlene and put it on. As he started for the door, she said, "Aren't you going to--?"

  "Not today. I have to get back to the office. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “And see if Mr. Romantico was here.”

  “No. Well, perhaps. Anyway, I don’t begrudge you. I was feeling good and wanted to share the feeling with someone. With you.”

  “I wish you would begrudge me a little.”

  “O.k.”

  Afterwards, he returned to his office and worked for the rest of the afternoon designing a chapel and making notes. When Fitzwater returned the next morning, Jones had not only a sketch but a model carved out of a block of Styrofoam to show him. An oval-shaped building curved up at one end like the prow of a boat. Fitzwater held it delicately. "It's beautiful," he said. He looked at the drawings, noting the series of horizontal windows Jones had proposed. Then he placed the model carefully back on Jones' desk and said, "How much?"

  Jones named the amount Fitzwater had told him was available.

  "Can you really build it for that?"

  "No, but together we can."

  Jones explained his idea. Fitzwater was to recruit the entire student body, the faculty too, to scour the city for scrap. He wanted wood, concrete rubble, glass of every color, and half-empty cans of paint. Then a dozen or so students to volunteer to work on the building. Jones would hire a foreman and enough union workers to do the job along with the volunteers. It would be Fitzwater's task to get people to sponsor seats for the interior.

  "It will be a chapel," Jones said, "you can really be proud of."

  "It will be a miracle!"

  "Yes."

  14

  Jones was gazing out the kitchen window of his fifteenth floor condominium when the phone rang. He had been sipping his morning coffee and watching a ferry boat as it seemed to effortlessly ride the current towards the city. Commuters!, he thought, and shook his head. The phone rang a third time before he paid it any attention. He looked at the clock as he picked up the receiver. A woman's voice he could not quite recognize asked if he was Templeton Jones.

  "I am. At least, I was yesterday. It's too early to know for sure today."

  "Who is this? Would you put Mr. Jones on, please."

  "This is Jones. That was just a little joke. Do you know what time it is?"

  "It's almost noon."

  "Ah ha! So, you are
calling from the east coast. Why can't you people in New York grasp the concept of time zones?"

  He hung up the phone in time to see another ferry set out for the island across the bay. His hand was already on the receiver when the phone rang again.

  "Temp, it's me, Sarah."

  He recognized his wife's voice and memories of their life together flooded back. She was eighteen when they married. He was six years older working his first job as a draftsman in an office that specialized in designing shopping malls. They met a year earlier when he was still in graduate school and she was a sophomore at the same university. He sat behind her at a poetry reading, fingering her brown pony tail and, when she turned, he admired her strong face that looked as if it was on the verge or either tears or laughter. When the reading was over and the poet had marched off the stage like some visiting general he asked her how she liked it and she replied, "I can do better." "Show me," he said, and she did. Two weeks later, she moved in with him. Now he wanted to say he missed her, but held back.

  "You know I don't like being called Temp," he said.

  "I know, but it is appropriate."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I kept meaning to call you, but just never got around to it. How did you find me?"

  "With the internet you can find anyone."

  "Yes, of course. How are you?"

  "I'm good, Templeton. Still writing poetry."

  "I know. I saw your poem in The New Yorker last month. 'Too Many Sunsets,' I think it was called. It was very moving. I couldn't stop thinking of you. That's when I meant to call you."

  "Thanks. That's sort of what I'm calling you about."

  He felt his knees buckle just a bit and had to resist the temptation to say he was busy and hang up. For just a moment he held the phone down by his chest. Outside, where the ferry had been there was a cargo ship heading towards the city, its deck piled high with containers. When he put the phone to his ear again she was already speaking.

  "…old-fashioned gentleman who won't live with me unless we are married."

  "Don't say it."

  "I want a divorce. I have already filed papers."

  "But, I don't want to be divorced."

  "What difference does it make to you, Templeton? We haven't seen each other for seven years."

  "I'm sorry about that, Sarah. I kept meaning to see you. I've been busy."

  He thought of telling her about the buildings he designed recently, but he realized that was not what she cared about. Sarah wanted children. He didn’t. It would tie him down, he said. Besides, the world is overpopulated. After that, she lost interest in sex. They started to fight about it. Finally, he began to see other women and she said she could no longer live with him. Each of them expected the other to start divorce proceedings and the years just slid by with neither of them doing anything about it, until now.

  "Why now?" he asked.

  "Templeton, you won't believe it—I'm pregnant!"

  "Well, congratulations. And the father is the man you want to marry?"

  "Yes. That's the real reason."

  "I guess he's not such an old-fashioned gentleman after all. What's his name?"

  "Avram, and he is not that old-fashioned, but old-fashioned enough to want the baby to be legitimate. And you, Templeton, don't you have anyone you want to marry?"

  Since leaving Sarah he had thought many times about being married. There was Alice in New York who left him when he said he did not want to marry, and when he first relocated to Seattle he had his eye on his secretary, a young woman named Susan who quit when he made advances. Now there was Arlene. Falling asleep with her, as he sometimes did, and having someone to share a good meal or his latest design was worth a lot. But there were also the times he needed to be alone, and then there were the temptations of other women. No, he thought, he could not be anything but a part-time husband, so staying married to Sarah was the only fair thing to do.

  "Templeton? Are you still there?"

  "Yes. No, I don't want to get divorced."

  "I get it," Sarah said. "Staying married to me gives you a good excuse not to marry someone else."

  "Maybe I still love you."

  "Maybe I still love you too. Goodbye, Templeton."

  He could still hear her voice, even after she hung up.

  15

  "Thank you for inviting me to speak at the university's architectural forum. I would like to say simply that my buildings speak for themselves and go home, but I do not want to offend my gracious hosts.

  "The guiding slogan in architecture for much of the twentieth century was 'form follows function.' Of course it does. It could hardly precede function unless one were to design a building without regard to its purpose. But let's think about what such a construction would look like. Two things come to mind, and they illustrate the extremes of the recent past and the present in architecture. Ask a child to draw a building without telling him its function, and he, or she, would likely draw a box with windows and a door. And the child would be correct. The most efficient use of space in architecture is a box, just as the most efficient use of a canvas in painting is to leave it blank. That, in fact, was the ideal, or perhaps the reductio ad absurdum, of the modern movement in architecture.

  "Of course, no architect went that far. Even Louis Sullivan, the father of the form follows function movement, decorated his buildings. If you look at one of his buildings that epitomized the movement—first slide, please—you can see that indeed the structure is decorated. Yet, some post-Sullivan architects did take the idea to the extreme, producing structures so minimal in elaboration that a child could have drawn at least the outline of the building. These buildings, and you have some here in Seattle as elsewhere, are completely functional and utterly boring to look at.

  "A rather brutal example of this school of architecture consisted of two buildings we can hardly speak about any more, not because fanatics destroyed the buildings, which might in itself have been a welcome act, but because they murdered thousands of people who were in the buildings. Yes, the Twin Towers did make a statement beyond their function as office buildings, but it was not a pleasant statement. It went something like this: 'We represent number one and number one and a half and if you don't like it, too bad.'

  "But what if your function is something not so simple as a warehouse or an office building? Suppose it were a museum of rock 'n roll music. How does form follow that function? Well, you can see the result right here in Seattle at the Experience Music Project. (Slide, please.) Frank Ghery was told to make it 'swoopy,' This multi-colored jumble of shapes may indeed convey the spirit of rock 'n roll music to some, but once the novelty wears off it is something of an eyesore, resembling a windy day in a balloon factory. There is, however, something to be said for novelty.

  "Another slogan that enthralled architecture, or, rather, architects, was promulgated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who proclaimed 'Less is more,' which became the battle cry of the International or Modernist Style. It was, incidentally, a slogan he did not apply to his own name. He was born simply Ludwig Mies. Perhaps you have seen pictures of his famous Farnsworth House. (Slide, please.) It looks like a double-wide with glass walls. Less is not more anymore than short is tall, but it did lead to sleek, modern buildings that at their best were elegant in their apparent simplicity. A prime example is the Seagram Building in New York, built in the late 1950s. (Next slide.) At their worst—well, you have several examples right here. (Next. And next.) Carried to their logical conclusion, 'less is more,' like 'form follows function' results in buildings that are actually boring. Imagine ordering a salad and getting only some lettuce leaves with no dressing.

  "It was in fact Robert Venturi who said 'less is a bore.' Too bad he didn't keep that in mind when he designed your Seattle Art Museum. His way of making buildings interesting to look at was to tack incongruous elements such as arches or columns on to otherwise plain buildings. Perhaps it was a good thing he hadn't thought of that when he designed the art museum. The most
famous example of this so-called post-modern style is Philip Johnson's AT&T Building in Manhattan with its Chippendale pediment. (Slide, please. No, don't bother.)

  Let's see, who have I left out? Oh, yes, Frank Lloyd Wright. His Guggenheim Museum isn't bad. The only place in the world where you can skate downhill and look at pictures at the same time. And Fallingwaters is a pretty house, (Do we have a slide?) but you wouldn't want to be stuck with the repair bills. His most lasting contribution, however, is one people today are largely unaware of, though they often live in it. Wright designed what he called Usonian houses. The idea was to make single family houses affordable to middle class people not by raising the standard of living but by lowering the standard of housing. His Usonian houses had pleasant but plain exteriors and a free flow of interior space. That is, the living room and the dining room were essentially one area. Often, there was no wall between that space and the kitchen. They all flowed into each other. You may know these houses as Levittowns. It is also the floor plan of most modern condominiums.

  Of course, it was also the floor plan of tents and log cabins. I think most people, surely most families, would like to compartmentalize their lives to some degree, to create some structure. It is difficult to have a sense of ceremony when everything takes place in the same room.

  What causes changes in styles? In architecture we went from classical to Romanesque, to Gothic, to Baroque, eventually to International or modern, and then to post-modern. Partly it's a question of working with the available materials. Partly it's a matter of expressing new ideas. Cathedral builders in the Middle Ages wanted to bring their congregations closer to God. Modernists wanted to express the sleek, fast pace of contemporary life. Have you noticed that the more labor-saving devices we invent, the faster the pace of life seems to be? Ah, but that's a topic for another day. We don't have time to get into it now.

  New materials and new ideas are perfectly legitimate reasons for new styles, but fashion is not. The essence of fashion is here today, gone tomorrow. It afflicts clothing more than buildings, but it is a curse of both. How does it happen? It begins, I suppose, because someone wants to be noticed and the quickest way to do that is to be different. He or she is aided by the fact that people grow tired of the same thing, want change, want to be the first on the block with the newest thing, does not want to be caught with last year's style. In clothing, that is good economics, at least for the manufacturer and the retailer. In architecture, in which the very essence of the enterprise is permanence, it is a bad thing.