The Architect (3 page)

After ordering two beers, Peter commenced:

“I have been looking for you for some time.”

“I see.”

“I have been commissioned by the Körn Society to find you. I am in possession of your book,
Omegastructures.
Fascinating stuff. The Society is currently in need of a meeting place. They wish for a fitting structure to be built. They are currently considering proposals from a large range of architects and—”

“Architects? They have not existed for hundreds of years! The morons you see today building their feeble prostitutions are nothing more than rats in human form, gnawing at scraps of Vitruvius and gurgling the academic banalities of Alvar Aalto. Architecture is a lost science, buried with the Atlanteans. It is a word bandied about latrine-like universities—those places where, when originality occasionally shows its face, like the bloom of the century plant, it is instantly put to death, stoned like a blaspheming Naboth.”

He leaned back in his chair, his ample belly pushed forward, and reached for the cylinder of beer before him. He drained half the glass at a draught and, after licking his pale and flaccid lips, continued:

“For long now has the human race been covering the earth with brutish structures, committing edificial sins and wallowing in an orgy of architectural shame. The modern city is nothing more than an incongruous salad, a hodge-podge of gross ugliness and blatant stupidity where glass beer halls contend with concrete chalets in a putrid barbarism not unlike the archaeological remnants of an ancient muscovite outhouse. Decisions are made by people with as little taste as intelligence and the patrons of the arts are cliques of men in suits and ties, bands of brigands who briefly pause from selling washing machines and circuit boards in order to piss out their inadequate millions on giant gypsum board barns. The intelligent man has no choice but to either bury himself in some hole in a mountainside like the saints of old, or bandage his eyes with the numbing fumes of vodka and quietly await the apocalypse when the earth will be cleansed of all inequilibrium.”

Peter was impressed. He gazed at Nachtman as one would a prophet, for the latter’s words touched the inner being of the younger man.

“But there is still hope,” he murmured, a hint of desperation apparent in his voice.

“Hope? When you speak of hope you might as well be speaking Eskimo.”

“But good men…can build a better world.”

“Maybe by stacking block-heads one atop the next…”

“But the project—are you interested in submitting a design?”

“Me? What do you want with me? Why do you want
me
to submit a design? I am not, after all, either pinhead or worm, either sycophant or numbskull, and will not have either my person or intellectual property toyed with. My ambition is as tame as an old eunuch. Give me a patch of sunlight under which to sit, a piece of meat to eat and a bottle to drink, and I am content. What need have I to mix with the world and contend with younger men—cringing gigolos who would trade their pallid thighs for the merest hint of fame.”

“I can promise you my full support. And my aunt, who is a member of the board, will be your advocate.”

“It takes money to build.”

“There is money—plenty of it!”

“And…I am wanted?”

“You are, um, expected.”

“Well, if there is lots of money…”

IV.

The board waited in silence. The windows were open, letting in the warm spring air. Dr. Enheim stood silently beneath the portrait of Körn, occasionally running his fingers through his beard in a thoughtful manner. The others sat as still as statues.

“I don’t like waiting for people,” Enheim observed.

“Yes, they are late,” Borromeo said, looking at his watch.

Maria: “Only ten minutes.”

“Still, not a propitious beginning.”

Presently however the architect did arrive. Accompanied by Peter, he entered into the room, pompously, a bundle of papers tucked under one arm.

Handshakes. Formalities. Uncertain glances wandering over Nachtman’s grotesque form.

“You wish to submit a proposal?”

“I am willing to let you look at some plans I have drawn up.”

Dr. Enheim nodded his head gravely; Nesler sneered; Maria smiled slightly; Nachtman spread his papers out on the table and waved his hand before them as words came marching from his mouth.

“The structure will be audacious, as brave as God himself, as lyrical as
Die Zauberflöte
, that greatest opera of Mozart. It will be poetry in stone, a symphony of wood and steel. The exterior will be violently coloured, embedded with painted glass and lit by interior search lights. The central dome will be higher than St. Peter’s in Rome—a half-oval that will dwarf Brunelleschi’s Florentine masterpiece, and represent the cosmic womb which spits forth all life.”

His eyes became glazed over like those of a visionary. He uttered his words in the manner of one reciting holy scripture.

“I can promise you,” he said, his voice erupting from the depths of his torso, “that this will be the greatest structure built in the post-Atlantean age! It will be a symbol of the liberated spirit, of mankind’s final dominance, not only over nature, but over physicality itself.”

His enthusiasm was apparently contagious, for the eyes of all present had grown wide. They were no longer looking at the hodge-podge of lines and paper before them, but a massive edifice rising out of their dreams—each one’s spirit stimulated, inflated by a mirage of future glory, gilded and dripping with arabesques.

The architect, thrusting his fingers here and there like daggers, baring his teeth like an angry dog, held forth:

“First we need to level this mountain. We will create a flat plateau upon which the structure, the Meeting Place, will be built. For the entrance, I suggest a hyperbolic paraboloid, and the interior will be a combination of upside-down and right-side up arches. The entire building, upon completion, will be 159 meters long and 119 wide and will mirror the cosmos, not only for its profundity, but also because it will be a harmonious system, modelled to some degree on the ideas of Petrus Apianus—a gemstone with the wings of a dragon, an ocean wave kissed by the moon.”

And in long phrases piled one atop the next the architect set forward his scheme. He spoke of a building of great spiritual depth, of a place as wonderful as anything ever created by man and indeed which might more justly have been compared to some natural
theamata
, such as are found in the deserts of Utah or the depths of Australia—a thing that would easily rival the wonders of the ancient world and attract gods as readily as men.

“But this would take centuries to build!” Nesler objected.

“For an ordinary man, yes. But, fortunately enough, you are not dealing with an ordinary man. I propose to have the structure completed in four years time.”

“That is not long,” Borromeo commented.

“I have known postcards that have taken longer to be written,” Maria said.

Nesler threw his hands up in the air, like a man half defeated, and it was indeed clear that, as extravagant as had been the architect’s claims, his audience was not entirely ill-disposed towards his plan. For though the thin gentleman whose hands were lost in the cuffs of his shirt objected, the others gazed at the plans with dreamy eyes and seemed to be imagining themselves already strolling through its vast interior, hearing the voice of Körn echoing through its halls.

“Mr. Nachtman,” Dr. Enheim said gravely. “Your presentation has been undoubtedly interesting. Of course we will need to deliberate this matter amongst ourselves.”

“As you wish. I can go for a drink and come back in half an hour.”

“Normally the decision making process takes weeks if not months.”

“That is all very well. It is the same to me whether you hire me or not. For I must tell you that there are others currently seeking my service and, naturally, I work on a first come first serve basis.”

“Naturally.”

“And it is spring. If you expect me to get started this year, you had better give me a definite answer—today if possible.”

“Let him come back in an hour,” Maria said, “we can surely tell him something by then.”

And so it was that the architect and the young man found themselves at a nearby bar, awaiting a word from the board.

Nachtman ordered a beer, Peter an espresso.

“My aunt was very impressed. I could tell.”

“Your aunt, young man, is a minotaur in skirts.”

“She is a remarkable woman.”

“Hell, in the end women are all the same. Pretty, ugly, intelligent or idiot. Good for one thing.” He took a swallow of his drink. “For a hundred and fifty francs…”

“What?”

“You can get yourself the best of them.”

Dr. Enheim stood behind his beard, one hand stretched before him dramatically.

“Mr. Nachtman” the man said gravely. “The Society has decided to accept your proposal. You will build the Meeting Place!”

“I will need money.”

“You will have it.”

“And full, undiluted authority concerning both the architectural and engineering aspects of the project.”

“It shall be as you wish. But…”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Nachtman, are you a member of the Society?”

“I am not.”

“The one stipulation we have, is that you become a member.”

“And what do I need to do that?”

“Initiation and payment of member dues, five-hundred Swiss francs annually…Naturally, the latter could be deducted from your pay.”

“And what is my pay?”

“The pre-determined sum is seventeen thousand francs a month throughout the duration of the project and an additional four-hundred thousand upon its successful completion.”

“Then initiate me, by all means,” the architect said, with a sudden unpleasant obsequious note in his voice.

V.

Nachtman’s past was clouded in obscurity, was like some tattered document, illegible in places, with bits torn off—dog-eared and smelling faintly of the sewer.

Some facts however were clear, from phrases the man himself had uttered, from comments Peter heard made by others‡.

He had been born in a small village near the Swiss-German border. His father had been a civil servant who collected books. As a child, he had been very manual and enjoyed working with wood. In school he received poor grades, which seemed due to laziness rather than a lack of intelligence. At a young age he was apprenticed to a neo-functionalist furniture maker in Bern and, wandering beneath the chilly arcades, influenced jointly by the fine old buildings around him and the modern work he was being trained in, he let his mind plummet into the past while carrying with it bomb-like fantasies of the future.

‡A teacher at the architectural school in Mendrisio, who had studied with Natchman at the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences: “I remember him. He was a very good-looking young man. I have no doubt that he won the hearts of many ladies. He was the sort of fellow one both admired and hated…I lost track of him completely. Then, years later, I saw him again. I did not recognize him at first. He was overweight and had lost most of his hair. Undoubtedly he had been living a life of recklessness and debauchery. I talked to him. He was haughtier than ever. His views were far too anarchistic and dark for me. I had no desire to renew my acquaintance and, pleading a pressing appointment, wished him a good day.”
• He became further interested in architecture after reading Hermann Muthesius’s
Das Englische Haus.

• He began making little models of buildings out of scraps of wood—beautiful towers, castles with egg-shaped turrets.

•A rich man saw his work and supplied him with a grant to go to school and he went on to study architecture at the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences.

In school, instead of basing his designs on standard geometrical shapes, he often imitated the shapes of plants and animals—of flowers and birds, studying nature’s angles and curves and transposing them onto buildings—towers which rose up like giant mushrooms, housing complexes in the shape of bee-hives. Places that looked as if they had been shaped by wind and waves. Public buildings without doors and houses that were like labyrinths with hallways like intertwined ribbons. He dreamed of building hyperboloid places, hallucinogenic structures, towers which dived down into the earth and crypts which rose into the air, integrating the fluidity of water into his designs and energetically studying catenary principles.

Stimulating his young brain with glasses of schnapps, he snatched inspiration from the recesses of his soul and laboured to transfer these chimeras to paper. He read a great deal, devouring everything from the best known works to the most obscure, everything from Pugin’s
Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts
to Shen Kuo’s
Dream Pool Essays
.

His peers, for the most part, hated him, as mediocrity hates genius. His designs were laughed at and scorned, making lips curl in disdain and drawing forth blunt insults from the mouths of those young scholars who in general could not see their value and were glad to make them a running joke around the school. Others, the more intelligent, could well perceive their merit, but ridiculed them all the same—out of jealousy and fear. They considered him perverse and took whatever opportunities they could to slander him and he, hypersensitive to criticism, rebelled and let invectives pour from his mouth like filth from an overflowing sewer. As he had no friends at school, he made them at the local bars—drunken old men, women of pornographic virtue, thieves and brutish labourers who shared with him their vices, as some saints might their crusts of bread.

He could well enough have got on without the love of his fellow students, but difficult indeed is it to be despised by one’s teachers.

One day, near the end of his second term, he submitted a series of designs to his professors—ideas he had developed through long meditation—through sleepless nights and potions of liqueurs. There was an apartment complex shaped like an amoeba, a house in the shape of a blade of grass, and an office complex shaped like a pebble. This adoption of biomorphic forms won him no sympathy from his teachers. They felt affronted, challenged—and the young man’s attitude did little to cure them of this impression.