The Architect

by Connell, Brendan

  THE ARCHITECT

  by

  Brendan Connell

  I.

  “The Meeting Place…”

  “…needs to be something really special.”

  “These designs are all very competent, but…”

  “???”

  “…they lack vision.”

  “But it seems to me that practicality…”

  “…the servant of human life.”

  “Practicality dirties the principle essence.”

  “That is going a bit far!”

  “There is the matter of spiritual depth.”

  “Utility.”

  “But certainly we can find a compromise.”

  “Certainly—when we have something to compromise about!”

  Like pebbles cast into a gloomy mountain pond, ideas were tossed about and words rippled across the room.

  A pale and somewhat transcendental light came through white curtains which concealed four large windows. A huge framed portrait of Dr. Peter Körn (1849-1924), visionary, spiritual scientist, hung on one wall. Its sombre colouring, the stony gaze and chiselled features, carried with them the cold of caves, the brutishness of a troglodyte mixed with the ferocious cunning of a wolf. He had made a science of the human soul, indefatigably lectured his way across Europe, his prophetic and vivid experience, come upon under the influence of some faux-divine psychological, physiological state, lay somewhere between the dream and the nightmare, between bizarre and beautiful vistas, trillions of jewel-like worlds, and hoards of demons searing each other’s mutilated flesh with red-hot instruments drawn from the fire of infernal pits.

  A million busy spiders had been born from the cobwebs of his philosophies. His systems were oiled with the residue of ten-thousand fortunes, the trimmings of seemingly countless stipends. Theism has created many such hybrids, Frankensteins: the limbs of materialism stitched onto the anthropomorphic body of regeneration.

  Four people (three men and one woman) stood around a large, glossy oak table. The men were grave-looking fellows, of varying size and height. The woman was light as a cloud.

  These were the board members of the Society.

  Large sheets of paper, with architectural designs, covered the table. The party cast their eyes over these collections of lines—a confusing array of cubes and eggs, arrows and measurements.

  “What about this one, submitted by Mr. Mario Botta?”

  Dr. Enheim smoothed his moustaches gravely.

  “It simply doesn’t strike me as holistic enough.”

  “And this proposition by Mr. Yokotoko of Japan?”

  “Far too modern,” said the woman. “It leaves me cold.”

  Sheathed in an emerald-coloured silk dress, she was somewhat over forty years of age, though she could have passed for thirty. Though not pretty, she was beautiful, just as certain liquors are not pleasant to drink but none the less produce strong intoxication. Her name was Maria Venezuela. She was of strong intelligence and a highly mystical bent of mind. An advocate of homeopathic medicine and flower essences, a dabbler in massage, her public profession was that of aroma therapist—though in fact she was, through her family, independently wealthy and had no need to struggle to survive; could choose her clients, dispensing phytoncides and sassafras, marjoram and melaleuca where and when she wished.

  She was a type not uncommon in today’s world. A sort of white witch, well versed in chakra theory, the secret life of Jesus and the works of Franz Mesmer.

  But her passion was Körn.

  “Let us face it,” she said, “they are all horrible. One looks like an office building, the next a bank.”

  “From a woman’s point of view it is possible that—”

  “From a woman’s point of view?” she snarled, her white teeth flashing dangerously between the bright red petals of her lips. “Can you seriously tell me then that the rest of you approve of these monstrosities? Are you really going to let the followers of Dr. Körn meet, to learn about sacred and profound things, in some common-place structure that takes after a house of commerce? These designs reek of materialism while what we need is something that will uplift our souls!”

  “Bravo dear lady!” Dr. Enheim cried in his baritone voice. “What you have said is very true. Dr. Körn himself would never have approved of these designs. In his 1914 lecture on architecture at the University of Göttingen he said that great architecture transforms the world of material objects into a direct and immutable projection of the spirit. The current projects before us, on the other hand, seem…all too mundane.”

  The men stood stranded in a minute of silence. A minute of silence which we will artfully take advantage of by briefly describing them.

  Dr. Herman Enheim was tall, extremely stout, possessed of a belly as formidable as his intelligence. His large beard, which was raven-black despite his fifty some odd years, lent him the air of a figure out of the Old Testament—a sort of over-larded Moses—a man who, from the depths of that forest of hair, spoke to the people with the voice of a prophet. Never smiling, with a steady, eagle-like gaze shielded by two lush black eyebrows, he commanded immediate respect upon entering a room.

  His list of academic credentials was long. He spoke half a dozen European languages perfectly. It was said that he also knew Japanese and Sanskrit. In his conversation, he sometimes quoted from the Mahabharata. He had meditated on the banks of the Ganges and prayed at Mary’s tomb in Jerusalem.

  He was the world’s foremost authority on Körn philosophy, and therefore, quite rightfully, the president of the Society, Commander Adeptus Magus. He gave long, ponderous lectures several times a week. The audience, particularly the women, would gaze at him in rapture, their ears quivering as they were brushed by the deep, romantic intonations of his voice. A remarkable number of the females of his flock were in love with him. But his weakness, if it could be called such, was not for the opposite sex, but for the adventures of the kitchen. He was an impressive cook, a redoubtable eater—a man who had been initiated into the mysteries of the soufflé and had sacrificed many a leporidae at the altar of his stomach.

  Next comes Valentino Borromeo. A man with a face that seemed as if it had been carved out of wood. His athletic figure made him look good in any suit of clothes. In his youth he had won the Giro di Lombardia and though now a man in his mid forties, he was still remarkably fit. A head of short, black hair, the temples of which were slightly dusted with grey, relaxed behind a reclining hairline. A sharply-cut nose lent his face a certain noble quality and he could have legitimately been called handsome.

  He had come to Körn at the age of thirty-six, after being confronted by the impermanence of an athletic career, and was now as adamant a follower as any, studying the philosophy with the same regularity and perseverance he had previously used in training for the great bicycle races of Europe—pumping up his spiritual muscles with the weighty doctrines of the German sage, spinning the humble gears of his mind along the curves of the track in the hopes of reaching some indistinguishable finishing line.

  Finally, there was Daniel Nesler, a short, thin, balding individual with eyeglasses and yellow skin—one of those entities whose clothes never seem to fit them. His pants and jackets were always too large and the collars of his shirts too small, while, due to the short nature of his arms, the sleeves covered up half his hands which groped about like sea-anemones. Though he was quite well off, he would not buy his clothes from a tailor, but insisted on buying them off the ready-made sales racks—where the sizes were inevitably all wrong for his mutant physique. Though naturally unintelligent, he was possessed with a formidable energy, so that he often surpassed much greater men. When given a task, he worked tirelessly at it, with the energy of a rodent and the industriousness of an ant.
>
  “But then what are we to do?” he now pouted. “We have been going over proposals for months, and eventually we need to make a decision. Either that, or renounce the project altogether.”

  Maria glanced at the slim-banded gold watch that adorned her wrist.

  “Patience,” she said.

  “Patience?”

  “Knowledge comes with waiting,” she pronounced sententiously.

  “But what are we waiting for?” Borromeo asked.

  “He is coming just now.”

  The vague sound of outward footsteps could be heard. There was then a knock at the door.

  “That will be my nephew.”

  “Your nephew?”

  “Yes, he is, as you know, aside from being a dedicated follower of Körn philosophy, a student of architecture. He has certain ideas of his own which I have asked him to come here and present.”

  The men gazed at each other uneasily while Maria opened the door.

  A young man entered. His longish, oily black hair was parted in the middle, forming two wings which flanked a large, pale forehead. A pair of gold, wire-rimmed glasses sat on a rather long nose, and his lips, thin and dry as two wisps of straw, were stretched above a frail and clean-shaven chin which was slightly cleft.

  Peter de la Tour was one of those solemn young men who, unable to find gratification in the frolics of those their own age, open wide their arms and embrace the cold pillars of knowledge. A student of architecture, he studied the subject with the same sort of vehemence as a religious fanatic would the words of scripture. He looked for salvation in the designs of Eero Saarinen and Walter Gropius and worshipped not God, but rather the Sullivanesque style of the Wainright building, Gothic arches and flying buttresses, and those steeples of glass found in New York and Paris which mirror both sky and earth. He had let his mind absorb three-thousand years of theory as a dry desert would a sudden burst of rain. He was interested in the esoteric mystery of the art.

  Some look for salvation in religion. Some cast themselves wholeheartedly into hell by means of great crimes. A few seclude themselves from the world by living in caves or huts in the forest. Others let their bodies be swept along by the crowd and are glad to live like other men—many rich finding their way by means of gluttonous excess; many poor making cockroaches their art, their science. But then there is another breed, the eccentrics, who, discontent with the crowded thoroughfares, yet not attracted by the paths which lead through the deep canyons of asceticism, take a different way. Mozart climbed to the heights of the universe along slim ladders of musical notes. Michelangelo chiselled through countless blocks of marble to reach divinity. And there are the million others who no one has heard of. Men who dedicate themselves to the study of prairie grasses. Women whose smiles commit suicide as the tall clock in the gallery strikes midnight. People who defy easy categorisation as there has not yet been a symbolic system invented that can define centipedes in human form, roses who speak in cafés, young men with minds of masonry and glass.

  Peter’s arms, which were those of a thinker rather than a labourer (that is to say thin), were dragged taut by a huge tome which he heaved onto the table.

  “I have brought an interesting document to share with you gentleman.”

  He opened the book and the scent of mildew, long-dead cigars and verbena filled the room.

  “I am not sure I understand…” Borromeo began.

  Nesler shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

  “Please my friends,” Maria said, “I beg you to be open-minded. This is a matter of evolution.”

  “The young man has my attention,” Dr. Enheim conceded graciously.

  “If you would care to look…” Peter murmured.

  The men gathered round, dipped their noses between the great pages which displayed themselves open-armed, like crucified saints.

  Thoughts can be as powerful as fists, a drawing more violent than a bomb, a single line as spacious as a city. Books, those warehouses of consciousness, are able to reach out across space and time and grab, caress, even force. There is nothing more dangerous, more sublime than a few hundred or a thousand pages fastened together and sandwiched between protective covers.

  Peter remained silent. The pictures spoke—chanted, screamed, and fell into caressing whispers.

  Huge edifices, megastructures, poured from the leaves. Bridges which spanned oceans, towers which stretched into the clouds, huge fortresses which looked as if they could withstand the destructive force of an Armageddon. Vertical cities rose up from desert plains in startling anaxometrics, while spatial cities, cities built fifteen or twenty meters above their counterparts, stood forth as visions of utopian architecture, only to be outdone on subsequent pages by floating cities, vast nests of hexagonal pods resting atop lakes and oceans. Structures which straddled the earth and others which burrowed under it. Buildings which brought to mind lost civilizations or seemed to be the habitations of beings from another world.

  Maria Venezuela’s eyes gleamed with an enigmatic light. Nesler licked his thin lips greedily. Borromeo stood solemn, his face noble—like that of Alexander gazing off towards the unknown lands of Asia that he felt impelled to conquer.

  Dr. Enheim turned towards Peter. “What is this you have brought us?”

  “It is a very rare book, privately printed twenty years ago in an edition of only fifty copies.”

  “And who is the architect?”

  “His name is Alexius Nachtman.”

  “I have never heard of him.”

  “Very few have. It is only chance that brought this book into my hands at a flea market in Milan. You can imagine how it fired my enthusiasm!”

  “I can.”

  “When I first saw it, I was left speechless.”

  “The designs are magnificent.”

  “True mystery and grandeur,” Borromeo commented, flexing his arm.

  “The language of this book, a language without words,” said Maria in a soft and charming voice, “strikes me as the language of deep spirituality…”

  It was only Nesler who objected, straightening his back, repulsing his initial attraction to the fascinating designs with a scepticism that seemed pronged with arithmetic, prickly with narrow logic.

  “This is all very fine, as far as science fiction goes,” he said, “but I do not really see what it has to do with the subject at hand, that is the Meeting Place.”

  “I was under the impression that you were accepting proposals for the design,” Peter calmly stated.

  “And we are. We are accepting serious proposals from serious architects.”

  “And how would you define serious?”

  “That which does not incite laughter. Free from extravagance.”

  “Great men, great artists, are never free from extravagance. And, though it might be bold of me to say, Dr. Körn himself was not without this quality and was in fact accused by his detractors of many follies.”

  “What the young man says is true,” Borromeo put in. “Maybe it is because I am Italian, but I must say that I would prefer to have with us someone with a certain artistic flair. A sense of adventure is not a bad thing.”

  Peter pushed his glasses to the back of his nose. “When I suggested to my aunt that you might consider Herr Nachtman, she was not opposed to the idea.”

  “I was not,” she said. “And, seeing that there seems to be some measure of interest, I propose that we ask Mr. Nachtman to submit a design for the Meeting Place.”

  “But this is the work of a madman!” Nesler cried out, waving his thin arm at the great book.

  “No, it is the work of a visionary!” Peter responded.

  “The only difference between a madman and a visionary is that the latter creates what the former only dreams of. After all, what has this man actually built? Theoretical architecture is one thing, reality another.”

  “It would be interesting to see the physical work he has done,” Enheim added.

  “My understanding,” Peter replied,
“is that his actual portfolio of finished buildings is, um, somewhat limited due to his, um, political beliefs.”

  “Ah, then we cannot waste any more time on this nonsense,” Nesler cried in a sharp voice.

  “Mr. Nesler,” Dr. Enheim said, “I understand that you consider yourself to be the voice of reason in this assembly. But I fear you are forgetting one of the principal tenets of the Society. We are open to all. Surely if this Nachtman were to be interested in, were to be willing to submit a proposal, we should condescend to consider it. We must follow our own divine impulses and not let our egos impede us on the path to knowledge.”

  II.

  Dr. Maxwell Körn had been born the son of a the German composer Arthur Carl Körn, better known as Hans Johann, a figure virtually unknown today but who, in the 1840s, had a brief celebrity for his work Salmoneus, a series of linked sonatas for arpeggione and piano. Little is known of his mother, though Körn himself stated her to be an extremely pious woman who, while in church, was often taken with fits of trembling. She died while he was still young, of an overdose of strychnine which had been prescribed by a homeopathic physician.

  Possessed of piercing black eyes and a mane of chestnut coloured hair, young Körn had an intensity about him that few failed to notice. When he entered a room all eyes turned to him. Even those who disliked him admired him, and those who liked him loved him.

  He studied under Professor Brockhaus at the University of Leipzig, and also under Schelling; was highly interested in comparative mythology and is said during this period to have been heavily influenced by the Philokalia, particularly those portions written by Saint Gregory Palamas. Undoubtedly these early Christian writers provided him with inspiration and set a foundation upon which the mighty fort of his philosophy would later be built.

  Through unhappy speculation pertaining to the Ottoman Empire, his father went bankrupt and was unable to support his son. The latter took up the life of a poor student, maintaining himself by translating, giving lessons in Hebrew and Greek, and writing newspaper articles.