‘Let’s not disguise, but celebrate, the probity of rectangles and cubes,’ she said.
One handsome local architect, a young man much adored by social columnists for his daring disregard of public taste and of the women in his life, called for buildings which were visual metaphors, the city’s aspirations made tangible in bloated glass and stone. The metaphor which he’d prepared for the Soap Market was most visible to God. Viewed from above — from a helicopter at a pinch, or even the roof-top garden on Big Vic — its shape was cruciform, a square-winged bird in flight. Its split swallowtail was, for the people on the ground, two tapering wedges which welcomed and embraced its clientele. It guarded them from wind and sun, and led them to the market doors at the swallow’s rump.
‘This building holds a dialogue with the people passing through,’ the architect proclaimed. ‘Its language is the language of the street.’ Victor was deaf to what it had to say. If he had wanted metaphors for God he would have built a church.
He was more taken and more patient with the esperanto architects whose Shanghai-Aztec market halls were decorated with facades which owed their haywire debts to Marrakesh and to Mondrian, or to pyramids and pagodas, or to the paint-by-numbers graveyard classicism of Rome and Greece and Père Lachaise, or to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the IBM Garden Plaza on New York’s 56th and Madison, or to spas and fairs and paddleboats. It was amusing to be guided through these global ‘theme’ environments, to hear of screens in bamboo and in steel, and roofs in metalthatch, and market ‘trading modules’ whose veneered marble counters were friezed and plinthed like tombs.
But there was never any doubt who’d win the contract once Signor Claudio Busi arrived and told the old man that his creed was this: ‘My allegiance is to what you want. Great buildings such as this must glorify the vision of the man who pays. I quote dell’Ova and I say, “The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows. Thus great men make their mark.”’
He’d done his homework, God knows how, for Victor’s passions and aversions were not documented, and Anna, in the ascending lift, was tempting but not helpful. Or perhaps this Busi simply had the gift of insinuating images into an empty head with flattery. But, by luck or cunning, everything he had to say was pleasing and on target.
Claudio Busi was a stringy man of sixty-nine, the eldest partner in a practice celebrated for its taste and pragmatism. It was Busi who designed the Riggings, the waterfront development at Port St Phillips which had been laid flat by Hurricane Eduardo two years before and had not been rebuilt. The wrought-iron Exhibition Hall in Amsterdam was his work, too. And so was the Curtains Project in Milan which won the UN Prize: ‘A stunning engineering adventure’. And the Centenary Center on the lake in Michigan. His book, The World Beneath a Single Roof, had started a short-lived vogue for ‘space as playground, building as event’, and had established Busi as a charming, architectural pundit at colloquiums and on television shows. A lady’s man, they said. He had the kind of peachy voice that could soften stone.
His younger partners had to treat him with respect — but they had largely forced him from the drawing board. He had become too careless, too passé. He did not understand the functional obsessions of the modern clients who wanted ‘splendour out and squalor in’, that is to say, huge entrances, but offices as cramped and mean as prison cells. He travelled in his olive suits between their studios in New York, Paris, and Milan much like a bishop travels his diocese, with great pomp but little power or control. He was a figurehead — and just the man, his partners judged, to win for them the Soap Market contract. A man of eighty could both patronize and trust a man of sixty-nine. So Busi was despatched from Milan, to be their mouthpiece — and to give them all a break from his phrasemaking and his charm.
Signor Busi would have preferred to be the spokesman for his own designs — but he had convinced himself that this task was his because he was considered by his colleagues and his rivals ‘a philosopher amongst journeymen’. (A journalist had once described him thus, though with the nuance that, perhaps, Signor Busi talked more convincingly than he performed, with buildings and with women, too.)
He took a room at the Excelsior and spent a day looking at the Soap Market and its garden. The team of three from the Busi Partnership who had spent two months on site earlier that year had warned the Signor in their briefing papers that the market was ‘cheap, inefficient and artificial’. Busi thought so too. ‘Squalid’ was the word he muttered to himself. His taxi had abandoned him to walk — all very well in precincts and pedestrianized streets, but here was chaos, a nightmare for pedestrians. To cross the market by foot was to volunteer for service in the bruising labyrinths of an ants’ nest. It was — for sure — neither beautiful, nor functional; neither playground nor event. It failed the Busi litmus test. It turned the simple task of buying fruit into an expedition. He marvelled at the depth and animation of the crowd and at the patience of the traders obliged each day to erect their stalls, barrow in their produce over cobbles, and then to box and barrow out each night the unsold residue, to end their day dismantling the stalls again. Inane. Insane.
Signor Busi ended up exhausted by the place, his suit dishevelled, his shoes discoloured. He rested in the Soap Garden but was not happy with the coffee and the pastry that he bought, or with the waiter who was too hurried and lacking in finesse. He tried but could not find his way back to a traffic street. The market was not logical. It had no signs, no thoroughfares. A man in cellophane had sent him deeper in. He had to pay a boy to guide him to a taxi rank. He was elated that the Busi Partnership of New York, Paris, and Milan might be the ones to introduce some Order and some Uniformity. A modern, regulated city should be governed not by the impulses of crowds but by the dictates of its tramlines, pavements, traffic lights, timetables, laws. A modern, regulated city would not allow such squalid topsyturvydom.
When at last they met, Signor Busi complimented Victor on Big Vic and on the mall which was its artery.
‘It is gracious and it is legible,’ he said. ‘I applaud you that you wish to extend such geometric harmony into the ancient centre of the town where, evidently, legibility and graciousness are out of fashion.’ He waited for an instant to allow Victor an opportunity to respond to these pleasantries. But he saw at once that Victor was no conversationalist and would be silent but attentive, too. He unzipped the black portfolios of draft proposals which he had brought from Milan, shook his body in his suit, and fixed his merchant client with his finest 3H smile.
‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he said. ‘But you are not the man to like such things. You are a man of now. So let’s not waste our time with these survivals from the past.’ His hand dismissed his rivals’ plans. He lifted the corners of a design by the Ultra Studios and raised his eyebrows: ‘And let’s not bother either with science fiction. It is dated just as soon as it is built. You see my Ultra colleague — should I talk behind his back? — has designed another Centre Lyons-Symphonique for us, all pipes and tubes and vents, but this one is for cabbages and not for culture. He thinks it’s witty to put a building’s guts on show, to put the inside on the outside. But this is what I have to say to you: you are a man of eighty, this I know. Witty is not what you want. You want a little dignity. You want a marketplace which comprehends and celebrates your business intellect and not the artful vision of an architect. I’m right, I think. So, we dispense with inside on the outside. For you, for this great marketplace, we put the outside on the inside, we bring the outdoors indoors.’