Chapter 74 I can live with that

Chapter 74 I can live with that
I snap, my nose flaring as I raise my head to look at Roe.

Roe looks at me, his eyes widening.

"Sorry for snapping" I say immediately.

I feel bad for yelling at Roe. 

Honestly, he owes me nothing, yet has been nice to me.

Roe just smiles, "It's hard picking a side when in the middle of you too. I just want to work and move to the next stage of the competition. Do you think you can do that?"

Do I think I can do that?
I HAVE been doing that.

I want to shout at the top of my lungs that I have been present in both body, mind, soul and ideas for each of our submitted projects while Callum sat, nodded his head and threw a little of his 'opinions' here and there, but I just apologized. 
Don't let me make it a second time.
So, I roll my eyes inwardly and fake a smile.
Roe claps his hands excitedly.
"Walk me through the whole concept." he points to my drawing.

"Here, you can see the logic behind the structure, the spatial flow and materials rationale. The elevation drawings are in the notebook. I need to work through the lighting approach this afternoon and the acoustic considerations for the reading zones but the foundation is completed."

Roe looks at my notebook.

He looks at the elevation drawings I have taped to the wall beside the whiteboard in the sequence they belong in.

"You did this since yesterday." he says.

"And this morning." I nod.

"I was up early."

"You were up early." he shakes his head with his tone processing information about a timeline that does not fully make sense to him but that the evidence in front of him is not allowing him to dispute.

"See this" He points to his eye bags.

"Yet, I could not come up with anything worthwhile." He groans.

"Coffee helped." I say, and give him a little pat on the back.

He looks at me, then at the whiteboard.

He picks up a marker.

He looks at everything I have written and drawn and mapped and worked through since seven in the morning in a hotel working room in Paris with the sun rising and meeting me already awake and working with the annoying focus of a woman who has found the thing underneath the thing and is not stopping until it is on the page.

He caps the marker.

He puts it back on the table.

"I have nothing to add." he says. 
"And I mean that as the highest compliment I am capable of giving another architect. I have nothing to add. This feels complete. This is more than complete in fact."

He turns the whiteboard to himself, "This is the kind of work that makes other architects feel shit about their own careers." He sits down. 

"You don't have to put yourself down just to make me feel good about my drawings." I say.
"No... No, no, no" He waves his hands in front of me.

"Maybe I'm not seeing much because I'm borderline a zombie right now, but the bones of your drawing are very strong."
"At most, I am going to help you refine the acoustic zoning this afternoon because I have feelings about acoustic architecture that I have been waiting for an opportunity to express and this is apparently that opportunity, but the concept is yours and it is extraordinary and I am going to tell everyone I was involved."

"You are involved." I smile happily.

"Maybe, but I know I'm doing so less than you are." he shrugs 

"However, I will describe it like I did more than I am doing for my social media." He chuckles.

"Roe."

"Yes?"

"Thank you." I say.

He looks at the whiteboard.

"No." he corrects me
"Thank you. For coming back yesterday despite what happened and for choosing to stick with this." He gestures at the whiteboard with the open hand of someone indicating something larger than what the gesture contains. 

Not like I have a choice, but I'm not about to tell Roe my sob story.

"Thank you for being the kind of architect who chooses drawings irrespective of the people involved." He adds.

I look at the whiteboard.

At the concept that came from two syllables and a warm café and a question about what something cannot be itself without and the specific knowledge of a woman who spent a year finding out the hard way what she herself could not be without.

The removal is the design.

What you take away is what makes it true.

"Let's work on the acoustics." I say.

Roe uncaps his marker and gives me a toothy grin, "Food first."

Callum arrives at eleven.

He walks in without knocking, which is technically chill since it is the group's working room and not mine specifically, and he looks at the whiteboard and the notebook pages taped to the wall and the work that Roe and I have been building since early morning, and he stands in the doorway for a moment with his jacket in his hand and something moving through his expression that I clock and do not comment on.

He sits down and looks at the whiteboard that has more scribbles on it by now.

"The materials choice." he says. "For the reading zones. You've gone with pale timber and natural stone."

I roll my eyes, "So?"

"The stone will create acoustic issues in the open reading area." he ignores my barb.
"Depending on the ceiling height."

"We're working through the acoustic zoning now." Roe says. 
"Your thoughts on the stone are welcome. We are specifically looking at the relationship between the ceiling material and the floor surface in the central zone."

Callum looks at the elevation drawing.

He looks at the notebook.

He pulls the brief toward himself and reads it again with the focused attention of a man who is finding his way into a project that has already started without him and is deciding where he fits.

"Suspended acoustic panels in the central zone has to be designed to look intentional rather than corrective. If the brief is Quintessentialism the panels cannot look like a solution to a problem. They have to look like they were always meant to be there."

Roe looks at me.

I look at the ceiling.

He is right.

Whatever 

"Write that on the board." I say.

Callum gets up with a smug smile.

He writes it on the board.

And Group Five, for the first time in the entirety of Stage 3 and the beginning of Stage 4, he starts drawing.

What he is drawing? 

I don't know.

He did not mention it.

But right now, we finally look like three architects collaborating on one brief which is to be submitted in a few hours.

I can live with that.