Dear Grandchild,
I wrote this while listening to Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead.
How valuable are old things? Old people? Old buildings? Old friends and old traditions?
Today I had a long call with my friend Patrick Giannini from Yale Architecture School, nearly twenty years ago now. Patrick was the one who inspired me most at Yale—always creating something unusual and unforgettable. One day it was a set of three faceted houses that emerged one from another like a living outcrop of geometric rock. Another day it was a copper-plate print where the metal had been left to rust in the rain, then pressed into paper to make unbelievable textures of green and blue. And day after day, all kinds of other unexpected things. Patrick has these huge, crystalline blue eyes, and I imagined him as some future being who saw the world with twice as many rays of light as the rest of us.
Today he asked me about making architecture in London, and I told him about my presentation to the city two days ago for the big sculptural pavilion I am working on right now. It’s still confidential, so I can’t name the project, but it definitely won’t be when you read this—remember, the one where Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia used to work? Close to Buckingham Palace? I’m sure I’ve taken you there for a cup of tea or a really tasty cake by now.
I told Patrick that one of the best things about my job is how I get to make really futuristic things in really old places. There is something powerful that stirs in me when I touch a stone today knowing the heroes of the past touched that same stone in their own time. (They say that young Julius Caesar arrived at the Rock of Gibraltar and wept, knowing that Alexander the Great had been there before him).
To work in buildings of such historical importance, I have to work with people who are absolute experts in old buildings. You know that really cool pattern I showed you in the stones of the courtyard? For the presentation the other day, I had to explain that we were going to take those fifty-thousand little cubes of hundred-year-old stone and completely rearrange them to make our own new pattern. Hannah Parham from Donald Insall Associates was there to help me understand how to safeguard the history of the building even as we made our new mark on it.
Hannah is always inspiring me with her uncompromising search for significance. She digs deep into books, grainy photos, and faded newsprint to find the true history of things, giving voice to the forgotten stories of those stones. Hannah has these penetrating brown eyes framed by horn-rimmed spectacles, and I imagine an ancient, righteous power hidden just below the surface of her youthful features. I can picture her as some temple guardian of our precious past.
You know, the future is infinite: it’s full of time, of possibilities, of second and third and fourth chances. But the past—those really important old things that hold the echoes of history and heroes? It’s limited, it’s scarce. And each time we lose some important old thing, we have lost something irreplaceable—because you can’t make something new that has a hundred years of accumulated history.
So these old buildings really do need guarding. They need guardians.
And thinking about it more, maybe it’s the same with old friends as it is with old buildings. Maybe a friend like Patrick is a precious and rare thing as well. I could always make a new friend, but if I lost Patrick I would lose those twenty years of shared moments. The shared stories of youth—learning how to see the world as an architect and artist, for the first time, through Patrick’s crystal-blue eyes. Maybe that friendship is worth guarding, because I will never have an opportunity to make that history again.
I’ve been writing these letters to you for a while now. By the time you read this, I will be an old man. Your grandfather. Another irreplaceable piece of the past. You only have four of us grandparents and when you lose us that’s it. Be a good guardian like Hannah. Do look ahead to amazing futures, but remember that no matter how bright and shiny your new things might be, you will never get back those important pieces of your past, once we’re gone.
With great love,
Your grandfather. London, 24 May 2020.
p.s. the world has been locked down for about two months because of a virus called COVID-19, that selectively kills the old. The crisis will certainly be forgotten by the time you are reading this, but I should tell you, as right now it totally defines our lives and it would be strange not to mention it.
