News Where You Are

24

Rhombus House was designed by Douglas H. Allcroft and Partners. Built in 1974 to house several council departments in the heart of the city centre, its bold, brutalist exterior was striking enough to cause a stir in the local media. Frank recalled sitting with his parents watching the broadcast of his father being interviewed by a reporter for the regional news slot. Years later he discovered that Phil had been the large-collared man conducting the interview. His father’s contribution was cut down to a few words and the rest of the report was filled with a vox pop of passers-by.

A middle-aged woman with a clipped voice and pointed glasses spoke as if she had just been waiting to be asked: ‘I’m afraid to say I think it is terribly ugly. A blot on the landscape. If that is the fashion, then I’m very glad I’m not “with it”.’

A young man with enormous sideburns grinned shyly: ‘Iss all right, ennit? I mean it looks modern; it looks now. I dunno where the door is, though.’

The entrance, in fact, was situated thirty feet off the ground and approached via two large concrete ramps forming an apex in front of the building. At some point the rumour started that the architects had forgotten all about the entrance and the ramp approach had been added as a hasty afterthought. It was amazing to Frank that anyone could believe such a clearly improbable tale, but the idea that architects were so out of touch with the needs of ordinary people that they might overlook something as fundamental as a doorway rang true for many.

In the early nineties the council departments had outgrown the building and moved to new premises. Rhombus House, like all of Frank’s father’s buildings, had been designed in close consultation with the clients, the features and layout tailor-made for their specific needs and the idiosyncrasies of their complex departmental relationships. As a result, no other tenants could be found and its obsolescence combined with an exterior appearance that had passed from being avant-garde and controversial to just controversial meant the council opted for demolition.

Frank remembered the shock of hearing the news. It was the first of his father’s buildings to be destroyed. Douglas had always talked about building for the future; Frank was relieved he hadn’t lived to discover just how brief that future had been.

Before it was demolished Phil and Frank walked over to the site one evening after work. Phil looked up at the dark grey exterior. ‘I don’t like this. I don’t like it one bit.’

‘What?’

‘Outliving a building. It makes me feel old.’

‘You are old.’

‘Mature is what I am. Distinguished maybe. Suave certainly. Not old. Your tie is old.’ He looked at the boarded-up entrance. ‘I remember doing the report on the ribbon-cutting; I didn’t expect to be around at the demolition.’

‘I remember watching it and thinking how incredibly suave the reporter was.’

‘You’re funny. It was a landmark building, though. I remember how ahead of its time it looked then. Your father was very intense. He was talking in terms way over the heads of the viewers. We kept having to retake, get him to just say something simple. In the end we gave up and slapped in some members of the great Joe P. instead.’

‘Communication wasn’t his strong suit.’

‘What do you think of them tearing it down?’

Frank struggled to answer. ‘Too many things.’ He had a brief image of himself as a boy looking at drawings of the tower on the wall of his father’s study. He shrugged. ‘It’s hard to take in.’

Phil nodded. ‘No offence, Frank, but the building has seen better days. It’s a bit of an eyesore now. I mean this whole part of town has been redeveloped and here’s Rhombus House still stood in the middle in all its concrete glory like an old pair of flares lurking in the wardrobe. I know when it was built your father had the best intentions, and it looked amazing then, but it’s better to rip it down now than watch it fall apart.’

Frank had heard this argument before. ‘I don’t think so. It’s the newer buildings that are the problem. The council sold off the area around Rhombus House that was supposed to be a series of tree-lined plazas and gardens. That was an integral part of Dad’s plan. You can’t just hack the scheme to pieces and then blame the building for looking wrong. The council flogged the land and let developers build right up against Rhombus House and now they notice that it looks out of place. It was a landmark building — it should have been respected; it should have been planned around.’

‘But they gave it that facelift ten years ago and it didn’t make any difference.’

‘It made it worse. It was a cheap eighties fascia on a seventies building. They should have respected it for what it was, not tried to reinvent it and not tear it down.’

Phil shook his head. ‘I don’t think it works like that in the real world. Things age, they start to look tired and crap and nobody wants to see them … even if they age well. Look at me. I’m an extremely well-maintained, handsome bastard, but I have to change with the times — change my appearance, change my patter, and it’s not bloody easy keeping up with it. The fashions change and you have to look like you know what’s going on. You have to act like you know why a load of young kids suddenly think you’re cool again, or why some twenty-five-year-old git in a trilby wants you in his advert. Facelifts — Jesus, yes, I’m all for ’em. And when that stops working then I’m afraid it’s time for demolition.’

Frank shook his head. ‘I never understood that advert. Why were you dressed as Mr T? What did that have to do with banking?’

‘Irony apparently. It’s always irony.’

Frank nodded. ‘I bet it is.’ He turned his back on Rhombus House and looked at the newer buildings around them. He tried to imagine Rhombus House gone, disappeared from the earth and how that would feel. ‘It’s not just that.’

Phil frowned. ‘Not just what?’

‘What I was just saying about the building. It’s more than that.’

Phil waited and then finally said: ‘Jesus, Frank. Is this pause supposed to be building suspense? What’s more than what?’

‘I mean this demolition. It’s not just because it was my father’s building, or about its architectural merits, or the lack of foresight and planning. Even if you disagree with all that, even if you think this building is a hideous mistake, I don’t think you should simply erase your mistakes.’

‘Of course you don’t, Frank. Cling stubbornly to them, keep them as a penance, a constant reminder of how you fucked up. This explains those shoes with the rubber soles you insist on wearing for work. You’re punishing yourself.’

‘No, I’m punishing you with those shoes — that’s my only reason for wearing them. Okay, some mistakes can be erased, but I think to wipe out all traces of the past is wrong. Do you remember the mechanized car park they built in the original Bull Ring?’

‘Course I remember it. I was one of the few people to use it and get out alive. You drove into a lift thing and then left the car there — the magic of technology did the rest, transporting the car to a space. Total ease and comfort for the motorist, until it broke down on the second day entombing that last Ford Anglia there for the next twenty years.’

‘That’s what I like about this city.’

‘What? That it’s crap and everything fails?’

‘No. That it has these ridiculous dreams, that it always tries to reinvent itself, to be the city of the future, but then always changes its mind about what the future should be. I love the little glimpses you catch of the old dreams, the old ideas of what Utopia should be. I think if you get rid of all of them, no matter how embarrassing or naive they are, then you lose something essential about the place.’

‘Is that how you feel about your father’s buildings? I mean behind all your talk of their architectural significance, is it just that you think they’re quaint reminders of what used to seem like good ideas?’

Frank shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s different when it comes to my father. I know how hard he worked on this building, on all his buildings. He built them for the future. They were his legacy.’ He turned back now and looked at Rhombus House and sighed. ‘You know it’s an incredibly beautiful building inside? The people who worked there loved it.’

Phil smiled. ‘You’ll never understand, will you? It’s only the outside that’s visible. That’s all people care about, mate.’

Looking back, Frank thought he did understand now. He’d had a hard schooling. Worcester House, the last but one of his father’s public buildings remaining, was due to be demolished the following week. Frank knew that even if all his father’s buildings were torn down, his memory would live on in him, but he knew also that such an intangible legacy would have meant nothing to his father.