They climbed out. Rita collected her bags and ventured through the arch. At the point where it opened into the wider room there was a line visible across the floor, a fine gap of darkness. Beyond, the couches waited, wide and deep, arranged around a large oriental rug, and at the bar decanters and bottles glistened on the shelves.
‘Take a seat and we’ll be underway,’ said Clara. She attended to two large doors that slid smoothly from either side of the arch, closing off the room. That done, she pressed a button set in a panel on the wall—there was only the one—and after a pause of some seconds, with barely the slightest jolt or sound, Rita realised they were moving.
Clara lifted a hand to the bar. ‘A drink of any kind?’ she enquired. ‘The ascent takes about seven minutes. It can go faster in an emergency, but then not quite as smoothly.’
Rita found that her mouth was dry. They were really going to climb fully two and a half kilometres up a single shaft, dangling on no more than a steel cable, while an abyss grew beneath them all the while. No amount of sumptuous furniture and fine oriental rugs could change that. She longed, suddenly, for a long swig of wine.
‘Just a water,’ she breathed.
‘It’s perfectly safe, of course,’ the major-domo reassured her as she opened a concealed refrigerator within a cabinet. ‘It’s already been running for three years and more, you know, without a flaw.’
‘How did they do it?’ Rita asked, casting around for any distraction from her nervousness, scarcely feeling their motion upwards but also terribly aware of it, of the gulf opening. ‘I mean, how do you actually dig a giant shaft from the bottom of a mountain to the top?’
Clara handed her the water. ‘It’s really rather ingenious, if you’re interested. The method is called raise-boring. At the bottom, you dig a tunnel to the centre of the mountain—the tunnel we just came through. Then by helicopter, piece by piece, you lift a drilling rig to the top of the Mount. Then you drill a small shaft, say half a metre wide, down to meet with your tunnel. And now comes the clever part. You attach a big reaming disk, eight metres across, to the bottom of your drill shaft, and slowly haul that disk back up. It spins as it goes, carving out a much bigger shaft, and meanwhile all the refuse falls back to the bottom to be hauled out through the tunnel. Very elegant and cost effective. Though I won’t lie, at two and a half thousand metres, the two shafts we dug here were pushing the technology to its limits.’
It was more information than Rita needed, but she clung to it anyway. ‘Why isn’t this car round then,’ she asked, ‘if the shaft is round?’
‘Practical reasons,’ the major-domo replied. ‘You still have to build a gantry inside the shaft, within which the elevator runs, and a square gantry is easiest. Plus, a square gantry leaves space around the edges of the shaft which can be used to run cables and conduits for power and water and waste disposal and the like.’
Which all made sense, but the ascent was all Rita could think about. How high were they already? And yet the strange thing was, there was nothing for her to be afraid of here, not even the old her: no matter how deep the shaft, it was not open air, it was not a natural void where deadly presences might dwell. But her nerves were singing. And why did her head feel so thick and slow?
Then her ears popped, and she thought of course, it was only the change in altitude. She sipped on her water, and as she swallowed, her ears cleared further still. Snap out of, she told herself.
‘You might notice a few effects as we go,’ Clara was continuing. ‘Two thousand eight hundred metres is not a height that normally poses any great risk of altitude sickness—you generally have to go well over three thousand before that becomes an issue—but travelling from sea level up to twenty-eight hundred all but instantaneously like this can make people a little light-headed and dizzy sometimes.’
Yes, that was all it was, just the speed of the ascent affecting her. The other thing, the sense of vertigo and dread, that was just vapours, just her inner ear and her lungs adjusting to the thinner air …
‘Almost there,’ said Clara after a time.
Rita had closed her eyes. She opened them, saw the major-domo staring expectantly at the panel on the wall. A barely perceptible slowing made itself felt in her stomach. There was no elevator ‘ding’ of arrival, but a green light blinked on the panel.
‘And we’re here,’ said Clara.
Another set of sliding doors stood on the opposite side of the room from the first set. Clara opened these second doors, then moved to one side. ‘You’re okay? Are you ready?’
Rita rose cautiously, but the dizziness had departed now that the motion had ceased. Beyond the doorway was a rectangular foyer, windowless and austere, carved out of the native stone. An archway opened from it to the left. The only furniture was a high stone bench, or perhaps it was a low table, cut, like the room itself, from the bedrock. And the only decoration was a painting on the right-hand wall—a large dark canvas, very old-looking, and crowded with figures and faces.
For the moment, however, Rita was interested only in what lay beyond the foyer, for through the archway a golden light was streaming, not artificial, but natural. Sunlight. She moved from the elevator into the foyer and then to the archway. She stared at what waited beyond, took a further few steps forwards, and then stopped.
‘My god,’ she said.
Clara had followed to stand at her side, her smile serene. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
8
THEORIES OF DESIGN
Portion of the transcript of a lecture delivered by Richard Gausse to the North American Institute of Architectural Historians, Boston, 2010.
And so, we come at last to the subject for which most of you have no doubt been waiting—the house that I am currently designing for Walter Richman.
First, some caveats. For one, construction is only just now beginning on the site, and as any architect will tell you, the design as it currently stands will certainly undergo some alterations in the building process.
Second, I am bound by certain limits of confidentiality. For reasons of both security and privacy, Mr Richman has only given me permission to discuss his residence with you on the understanding that I will not divulge any precise details of the house’s layout. Nor am I to show you any accurate schematics of the design. But never fear. A general description will be enough, given the extraordinary nature of the structure.
You will all, of course, be familiar with Observatory Mount, standing near to three thousand metres high upon the historic Theodolite Isle, at the foot of the world’s highest mountain, in the remote Southern Ocean. A more beautiful, rugged and wild prospect is hard to imagine.
It is not by any means a virgin site, however. For the last two centuries Theodolite Isle has been continually inhabited and put to a wide variety of uses, commercial, military and civil. In the process, even the summit of the Mount, though much less trampled than the rest of the island, has witnessed its fair share of construction and alteration. By the time our surveyors arrived, the summit was already littered with a motley collection of old weather huts and empty generator bunkers and defunct satellite dishes, the detritus of years past. But that said, no one until now has tried to erect a permanent habitation upon the peak. A house. A home.
A house, I call it. But the word is perhaps misleading, for when I say ‘house’, many here will no doubt picture a structure that rises above the ground, a building that sits on top of Observatory Mount, as out of place as an unfortunate pimple. But in my design, nothing will extend above the level of the summit. Indeed, in silhouette, the Mount will appear exactly as it has always appeared. It could not be otherwise. I have no wish, despite what my critics say, to change the mountain in its essence. My design has its roots in the desire to respect the mountain, not to injure it.
Those of you familiar with my life’s work will not be surprised by this. I am famous, if I may use that word, for what has become known as an ‘enfolded’ or ‘buried’ style of architecture. Put simply, I prefer,
wherever possible, to build into the earth, to delve within it, rather than to construct on top of it. I have designed houses that extend into sheer cliffs, or into gentle hillsides, or into flat desert ground. I have delved into the slopes of a great sand dune, and beneath the roots of an immense redwood tree, and once even dug into the ice of the Antarctic cap. The variations are endless. But the crucial thing about all my design is, first, that it seeks to respect and preserve the environment in which it is built, and, second, is that it makes a fundamental break with the standard concept of what a building, a residence for humans, a house, actually is.
Consider this in terms of the matrix—the space in which a structure exists. A standard house creates its own matrix as it is built. Foundations are laid, a floor is put down, the walls rise, and a roof goes on. There is no matrix except the house itself. Hence everything must be connected, every surface perform a double duty. The ceiling of a lower level is also the floor of an upper level. Interior walls are shared between rooms, and every corner and angle must match up within one set of external walls.
An enfolded house, however, is built within an already existing matrix—in this case, the solid rock of Observatory Mount. There is no need now for surfaces or walls to be shared. A floor need only be a floor, a ceiling need only be a ceiling. Rooms can be dug wherever we like, as large as we like, and need no relation or connection to other rooms beyond a communicating passage. Angles can take any form we please, and levels need not be stacked upon one another in storeys. In short, there is, for the architect, an utter freedom to create within three dimensions.
In some ways, it’s easier to think of this sort of home as a burrow, rather than a building: a free-floating collection of chambers set within a matrix and connected by tunnels. Of course, the places I design are nothing like burrows—they are not dark, or cold, or maze-like. And that’s where the skill of this form of architecture lies, to make these homes feel light and open and completely natural in their form and function.
Such a house I have designed for Walter Richman—and I say with confidence that it will be the greatest work of my career.
But down to the details.
Let us examine the house in the manner of a visitor arriving there for the very first time. How, for instance, will such a visitor even reach the top of Observatory Mount? Until now, it has only been possible by climbing. True, the Mount is not in fact a difficult mountain to climb by professional standards, and a regular route has been carved out over the years, involving ladders and stairways cut into the stone, so that even non-climbers can make the ascent with relative ease. Still, this is hardly adequate, hence we have installed elevators, of a scale and magnificence unlike any other, running up shafts some two and a half kilometres high.
All very well. But this affects the design of the residence immediately, for while our visitor can enjoy their ride to the top in heedless comfort, the architect must find space at the top of the mountain for the great winches that draw the elevator cars up and down, and space for the motors that drive the winches. And likewise, although electrical power for the house will be provided from a station at the foot of the mountain, several independent back-up generators, each one as big as a truck, must also be installed somewhere at the top of the Mount. Then there are things like water tanks and pumping plants and air-conditioning stacks—all of which will be of industrial scale, given the size of the residence.
On any normal build, all these utilities would require ugly protrusions or extensions from the house itself—but here we have no such problem. Winches, generators, tanks, no matter how vast, can be secreted within the central mass of the peak, completely out of sight from the main body of the house. And out of earshot too, with as much as ten or twenty metres of solid rock to act as dampener between utility spaces and the nearest living quarters. On a day-to-day basis, our visitor, and the residence’s occupants, will not even know that such equipment exists.
Hidden away also will be an entire complex of domestic storage facilities. Wine cellars, larders, cold rooms, linen closets, laundries—all the necessary impedimenta of a stately house can be tucked away inside the rock of the Mount. The same goes for the service tunnels by which the staff will access such facilities. Oh, and another ‘by the way’—as you can by now begin to guess, a lot of excavation will be involved in this build. Where will all the discarded stone go? The answer is down the shafts and out into the harbour, where the fill will be used to reinforce the dock facilities—which have been, up until now, somewhat deficient.
Anyway, back to our visitor. When their luxurious elevator ride is over, what will greet them? At first it will be a plain foyer, quite modest in size. It is only when they exit that foyer that they will get their first glimpse of the residence’s true scale—the Entrance Hall.
And trust me, it will be a shock.
For Observatory Mount, as it approaches its summit, narrows into a wedge-like ridge that will incorporate the Entrance Hall—a single great chamber lined either side with giant windows, allowing light to flood in.
Anyway, this is what our visitor will see—
Note—Mr Gausse’s address is here interrupted by shouts and commotion from the rear of the hall, a party of protestors having made a clandestine entrance. The group, representing various environmental bodies opposed to construction taking place on Observatory Mount, was armed with water balloons and paint bombs and proceeded to attack the crowd. Security was soon on the scene, but it was some time before order could be restored, and Mr Gausse declined to resume his address, other than to respond to the protestors before departing the podium.
Desecrating the Mount? What are you talking about, you fools? Nothing I could do could pay the Mount more homage.
9
THE TOUR
Rita stood in a golden glow, the rays of the westering sun cast in vast slants through tall windows. She had forgotten, after the time spent in the dim lighting of the foyer and the tunnel below, and then during the long elevator ride, that it was still day outside. Nor had she considered that in their two-and-a-half-thousand-metre ascent they would have risen above the rain and cloud. But here she stood, aloft in the open sky.
And also, within a cathedral.
That was her first impression—that she stood at one end of a soaring gothic church. Of course, it wasn’t that, there were no pews, no altars, no icons of saints; it was a place of purely secular worship. Yet in the leaping arches, and in the tall pillars, and in the towering windows ranged down the sides, each ten times her own height at least, she might well have strayed into some great cathedral of old.
The size of it! The space had to be near to a hundred metres long, carved out of the ridge that formed the Mount’s crest. The ceiling followed that ridgeline in all its jagged leaps and thrusts, an organic steeple no man-made church could ever rival. The great pillars, single spans of stone left by the excavation of the interior, marched in two lines down the centre and met overhead in arched ribs, between which, fifty metres overhead, glass panes opened directly to the sky.
Clara Lang had waited politely for some moments as Rita absorbed the sight. Now the major-domo said, ‘This is the Entrance Hall. You’re catching it at a good time of day. The afternoon sun really sets the interior alight. And, of course, the view outside is something extraordinary.’
‘Yes,’ breathed Rita.
To the left, displayed in sections through the row of tall windows, was a deck of low cloud, the roof of the rainy day below, extended westward to the horizon, bathed orange in the afternoon light. Here and there rose towers of cumulonimbus, palaces lofting above misted lowlands, each casting long shadows eastward. And high above, a sheet of icy cirrus shimmered with rainbow colours, through which a marbled network of fractures showed blue-black glimpses of the winter sky. It was a cathedral of cloud dwarfing even the cathedral of stone.
And yet it was as nothing compared to the view to the east. There, revealed to Rita at last, and defying comprehension, rose the Whee
l.
The mountain filled every window on the right side of the Hall, seemingly within hand’s reach, even though it was kilometres away, so crystal was the air. Its immense West Face was a multitude of landscapes and colours all in one: sheer cliffs frowned a reddish grey from far above; vast slopes of snow reared dazzlingly white; shadowed couloirs waited dark and ever frozen; and great glaciers perched blue above silver falls of tumbled ice. It was overwhelming, as if an entire continent had been upended to ninety degrees and was hanging there by magic.
And yet this was only part of the mountain, for even now the Wheel’s ultimate height remained unfathomable. The veil of high cirrus, which the peak pierced as sharply as a titanic blade, hid the uppermost reaches. Rita remembered reading somewhere that even the highest of clouds could only reach about halfway up the Wheel, which meant, incredibly, that the hidden summit might lie twelve or thirteen kilometres higher still. So much stone, lifted so remote into the air.
It was too much, she had to look away, back to the safer majesty of the Entrance Hall, to stop herself from becoming dizzy.
And indeed, two people were now approaching across the Hall, striding down the central aisle between the pillars: a middle-aged man in a grey suit, and a young woman dressed in black and white. The two paused before the steps leading up to where Rita and Clara stood, and the man gave a brief bow.
‘Ms Gausse, welcome to the Observatory. My name is Bradley, and I’m the house manager here. If there’s anything you need during your stay, you have only to let me know. Giselle is the maid on duty in your wing of the residence, and she will take your bags to your apartment now, as I understand that Ms Lang is eager to take you on a tour of the house before you are shown to your quarters.’
‘If that’s okay with you,’ the major-domo added. ‘Just so that you can orientate yourself.’
The Rich Man’s House Page 9