Chapter 68 Group Five Fights
Chapter 68 Group Five Fights
Paris on a Tuesday afternoon in October has the specific quality of a city that has decided the summer is over and is not mourning it, the air carrying a sharpness that makes everything feel more awake than it did two months ago, the light coming in at an angle that turns the stone buildings the colour of something warm and old and completely certain of itself.
Dr. Fontaine's suggestion to use the city as a thinking space was not directed at us specifically but I am choosing to apply it specifically because the alternative is the working room on the third floor where the whiteboard still has Nadia's capital letters on it despite everything and where the air has absorbed three weeks of Group Five's particular brand of tension and has started to feel like it.
"We need to walk." I tell Roe at noon.
"I agree." he says. He is already putting his jacket on. "The room is giving me weird vibes. I don't know what it is giving me but I don't want it."
"Callum." I say.
Callum looks up from his laptop.
"We're walking." I say. "To think about Quintessentialism. Bring your notebook."
He looks at me.
He looks at his laptop.
His eyebrows contorts into a frown but he still closes it.
He brings his notebook.
\---
The street outside Hotel Beaumont is narrow and cobbled in the way of Paris streets that have been cobbled for long enough that the cobbles have developed opinions about it, slightly uneven underfoot, the kind of surface that makes you pay attention to where you are walking which is, I am starting to think, the point.
Roe walks slightly ahead with his notebook open and his pen moving, writing things as he walks in a handwriting that I know from experience is completely illegible when produced in motion but that he will be able to read perfectly later because Roe's brain and Roe's handwriting have an understanding that does not include other people.
Callum walks slightly behind.
I walk in the middle.
Which is, I think, a reasonable summary of the current dynamics of Group Five.
"Quintessentialism." Roe says, to the street ahead of him. "What does this space need to be itself. Right. So the question is, what is the space? Do we get to choose the space or does the brief give us a space?"
"The brief arrives tomorrow." I say. "But we can think about the approach now. What it means to strip a design back to its essential nature. What we keep and what we remove and how we make those decisions."
"You keep what the space cannot be itself without." Roe says. "You remove everything else."
"Exactly." I say.
"Simple." Roe says.
"Simple as a concept." I say. "Difficult in practice. Because deciding what something cannot be itself without requires you to understand what it is. And understanding what something is, actually is, not what you want it to be or what it looks like from the outside, is harder than most architects admit."
Roe stops walking.
He looks at me.
He writes something in his notebook.
He starts walking again.
"That is going on the whiteboard." he says.
"What is?" I say.
"What you just said." he says. "Understanding what something actually is, not what you want it to be. That is the brief. That is the whole brief right there."
I look at the street ahead.
At the stone buildings and the ironwork balconies and the doors painted in colours that have faded to something better than what they started as.
What does this space need to be itself.
Not what do you want it to be.
What does it need.
"Callum." I say. "What are you thinking?"
Callum is walking behind us with his notebook closed at his side and his eyes on the street ahead with the expression of a man who is present in the technical sense of the word and somewhere else in every other sense.
"I'm thinking." he says.
"About Quintessentialism?" I say.
"About the approach." he says.
"What approach?" Roe says, turning around slightly without stopping walking.
"I'll share it when it's developed." Callum says.
Roe looks at me.
I look at the cobblestones.
Okay.
He will share it when it is developed.
Fine.
We are walking through Paris thinking about the essential nature of spaces and Callum is developing something privately that he will share when ready.
This is fine.
This is a completely normal collaborative process.
\---
We stop at a small square three streets from the hotel where a fountain that has been running for longer than any of us have been alive sits in the centre surrounded by benches, the water coming from a stone figure whose features have been softened by time into something almost abstract, present but not precise, the suggestion of a face rather than a face.
Roe sits on a bench.
He opens his notebook.
He draws the fountain.
Not accurately.
Interpretively.
With the specific freedom of someone drawing something to understand it rather than record it.
I sit beside him.
I look at the fountain.
I think about what the square needs to be itself.
The fountain and quality of quiet in a city square on a Tuesday afternoon, the sound of the water and the distant sound of traffic and the pigeons doing what pigeons do which is exist with complete confidence in their own relevance.
Take away the fountain and it is a square with benches.
Take away the benches and it is a square with a fountain.
Take away both and it is a space with cobblestones.
But all three together, fountain and benches and the pigeons and the Tuesday afternoon quiet, create something that is not any one of those things but is the sum of how they exist together.
What does this space need to be itself.
All of it.
Every piece of it.
Nothing that is here is here accidentally.
"Callum." I say. "What have you got?"