And this year’s Architects’ Journal Award for Innovation goes to…
The presenter pauses dramatically and opens his envelope. The Monkford Partnership, he announces.
Our table, made up of Partnership staff, cheers. Images of buildings flash onto the screens. Edward gets up and makes his way to the stage, politely acknowledging a few well-wishers as he does so.
This is nothing like the parties I went to at Simon’s magazine, I’m thinking.
When Edward has the award in his hands he steps toward the microphone. I may have to put this in a cupboard, he says, looking down at the Plexiglas blob doubtfully. Laughter. The minimalist has proved he can make fun of himself! But then he turns serious.
Someone once said that the difference between a good architect and a great one is that the good architect gives in to every temptation and the great one does not.
He pauses. There’s silence around the huge room. They seem genuinely interested in what he has to say.
As architects, we’re obsessed with aesthetics, with creating buildings that are pleasing to the eye. But if we accept that the real function of architecture is to help people resist temptation, then perhaps architecture…
He falters, almost as if he’s thinking out loud.
Perhaps architecture isn’t really about buildings at all, he says. We accept that town planning is a kind of architecture, after all. Motorway networks, airports—these too, at a stretch. But what about technology? What about that invisible city in which we all stroll, or lurk, or play: the Internet? What about the frameworks of our lives, the bonds that tie us, our aspirations and our baser desires? Are these not also structures, in a way?
There’s another pause before he continues: Earlier today, I was speaking to someone. A young woman who was attacked in her home. Her space was violated. Her possessions were stolen. Her whole attitude to her surroundings has been colored—I might almost say, distorted—by that simple, tragic fact.
He doesn’t look at me, but I feel as if every person in the room must know who he means.
Isn’t the real function of architecture to make such a thing impossible? he asks. To punish the perpetrator, heal the victim, change the future? As architects, why should we stop at our buildings’ walls?
Silence. The audience seems quite baffled now.
The Monkford Partnership is known as a practice that works on a small scale, with wealthy clients, he says. But I see now that our future lies not in building beautiful havens from the ugliness in society, but in building a different kind of society.
He raises the award. Thank you for this honor.
The applause is polite, but looking around, I see people are smiling and rolling their eyes at one another.
And I clap too, harder than anyone, because the man up there, my lover, doesn’t give a damn whether they laugh at him or not.
That night I ask about his wife.
I keep the dress on while we make love, but afterward I hang it carefully in the tiny cupboard behind the wall panel before slipping, naked except for the necklace, into the warm space beside him.
The lawyer told me your family are buried here, I say tentatively.
How—oh, he goes. The Land Registry plans.
He’s silent for so long I think that’s all the answer I’m going to get.
It was her idea, he says at last. She’d read about hitobashira and said that was what she wanted, if she died before me. Under the threshold of one of our own buildings. Of course, we never imagined…
Hitobashira?
It means “human pillar” in Japanese. It’s said to bring the house good luck.
You don’t mind me talking about her?
Look at me, he says with sudden seriousness, and I turn my head so I can see into his eyes.
Elizabeth was perfect in her own way, he says gently. But she’s in the past now. And this is perfect too. What’s happening right now, with us. You’re perfect, Emma. We don’t need to talk about her again.
Next morning, after he’s gone, I look his wife up on the Internet. But Housekeeper can’t find anything.
What was the Japanese word he used? Hitobashira. I try a search for that.
I frown. According to the Internet, hitobashira doesn’t refer to burying dead people under buildings. It’s about burying the living.
The custom of sacrificing a human being as part of the erection of a new house or fortress is very old. Foundation-stones and beams were laid in human blood the world over, and this abominable custom was practiced but a few centuries ago in Europe. In the well-known Maori tradition of Taraia we are told that he had his own child buried alive beneath a post of his new house.
I jump to another article.
This sacrifice must be in keeping with the importance of the building to be erected. An ordinary tent or house can be bought off with an animal, or a rich man’s house with a slave; but a sacred structure such as a temple or a bridge needs a sacrifice of special worth and importance, one perhaps involving serious pain or discomfort to the one making it.
For one crazy moment I wonder if this is what Edward can mean, that he made a sacrifice of his own wife and son. And then I find another article that makes more sense.
Today, the echo of such practices lives on in innumerable folk customs around the world: sending off a ship with a bottle of champagne, burying a piece of silver under a doorpost, or topping out a skyscraper with the bough of an evergreen. In other parts an animal heart is buried, while Henry Purcell chose to be interred “under the organ” at Westminster Abbey. In many societies, notably in the Far East, the dead are marked with a building constructed in their honor—a practice not so very different, perhaps, from the naming of a Carnegie Hall or a Rockefeller Plaza after some noted philanthropist.
Phew. I go back to bed, burrowing my nose into the pillows for any trace of him: his smell, his shape still outlined in the sheets. His words come back to me. This is perfect. I drift back to sleep with a smile on my face.