Chapter 66 Stage 4
Chapter 66 Stage 4
The Stage 3 results come on a Monday morning and Dr. Fontaine reads them the same way she reads everything, with the composed unhurried delivery of a woman who understands that the information she is carrying matters and has decided that the best way to honour that is to give it the space it deserves.
Twenty four candidates.
Eight groups.
One group eliminated.
Twenty one advance.
She reads the eliminated group first.
Three names.
None of them mine.
None of them Roe's.
None of them Callum's.
Which means us as Group Five, with its wine stained history and its whiteboard and its forty one hours of tension and its one genuine moment about a garden, has produced something the judges found worth keeping.
Roe makes a sound beside me that is somewhere between a exhale and a war cry, a sound that has no name in the English language but that communicates the specific relief of a man who has been holding his breath for longer than he realised and has just been given permission to stop.
"We're through." he says. Under his breath. To me. With his hand gripping the edge of the table in the conference room with a force that suggests his body needed somewhere to put all of that.
"We're through." I confirm.
He lets go of the table.
He straightens up.
He looks at the ceiling for exactly three seconds with the expression of a man having a private conversation with a higher power and then he looks back at the room with his face completely rearranged into something that communicates that he was never worried at all and has been perfectly calm this entire time.
Nobody believes it.
I believe it the least.
But I say nothing because Roe's ego is one of the load bearing walls of his personality and I have learned in the weeks since he joined our group that certain things are better left standing.
Callum is on the other side of the room.
He heard his name.
He nodded once.
He looked at his phone.
That is all.
\---
Dr. Fontaine moves directly into the Stage 4 briefing without a break, which tells me she has looked at the energy in the room of twenty one architects who have just received significant news and has decided that the most efficient thing to do with that energy is redirect it immediately before it turns into something unproductive.
She is a wise woman.
"Stage 4." she says. "The theme is Quintessentialism."
The room writes this down.
I write it down.
Roe writes it down and then writes three question marks after it and underlines all of them.
"Quintessentialism in architecture," Dr. Fontaine continues, "refers to the pursuit of the essential nature of a space. The stripping away of everything that is not necessary until what remains is the truest possible version of what the space is meant to be. Not minimalism, which is an aesthetic. Quintessentialism is a philosophy. It asks not how little can we use but what does this space need to be itself."
I write that down.
What does this space need to be itself.
I underline it.
"You will continue with your existing groups." Dr. Fontaine says. "The brief will be released tomorrow morning. You have seventy two hours."
Seventy two hours.
Three days.
With Roe and Callum.
I look at the ceiling.
What does this space need to be itself.
I think about that question in relation to Group Five's working room on the third floor and I think the answer is, considerably less Callum.
I keep that thought to myself.
\---
The architects filter out of the conference room slowly, the way people move when they have received a lot of information in a short time and their bodies are still processing while their legs are already walking, and the hallway outside fills with the low sound of twenty one people beginning to think out loud.
I am looking for the staircase when I hear him.
Callum's voice.
Not directed at me.
Directed at two architects from Group Two who are standing near the window at the end of the corridor with their notebooks in their hands, listening to him with the polite attention of people who have just met someone and have not yet decided whether he is worth listening to.
"The garden concept was the foundation of the whole thing." Callum is saying.
"Once I identified that as the emotional anchor the rest of the design logic followed from it. The group had some interesting ideas but the central thread was mine. The judges responded to the structural coherence and that came from the approach I brought in from the beginning."
I stop walking.
Roe, who is two steps ahead of me, stops as well.
We both stand in the corridor.
We both listen.
"The garden concept." Roe says. Under his breath. Beside me. With the flat specific tone of a man confirming that he has heard what he thinks he heard.
"He said the garden concept was his."
"He did." I say.
"The garden concept that you presented." Roe says. "In the room, on day one. Before he even said a single useful word about anything."
"Yes." I say.
"The garden concept that he then, contributed to by saying the garden is where I put the thing the rest of the house cannot hold, which was the one genuine thing he said in forty one hours and which we all acknowledged and built from because we are professionals and we take good ideas wherever they come from regardless of who,...."
"Roe." I say.
"I am processing." he says.
"Process faster." I say. "I am about to do something."
"What are you—Sera—"