Damien is an architect. Architecture is the second oldest profession, with notable affinities to the first. This morning, he has been on his houseboat, a retired Dutch barge moored in Wandsworth, finishing the text of his important new book Parametric Praxis: tectonics at the end of history. Theoretically speaking, he has been pushing the envelope with this one.
The barge, called Asymptote, is his pied-a-mer (as he likes to put it) when not in his cabanon in the Var. In Provence Damien ejected a grumbling shepherd, cleared out the peasant detritus, inserted a ground-source heat-pump and had the rustic interior coated in blinding white Corian. Naturally, it has been featured in Architectural Digest.
After writing, Damien polishes his Maison Bonnet glasses on the tail of his oversized Casey Casey linen shirt with secret reinforced iPad pocket, something he shows to everyone at parties. His statement specs were first worn by Le Corbusier and have been a signifier of a particular architectural tribe ever since.
Polishing complete, he leaps into his electric launch for the short trip to Cadogan Pier in Chelsea. The launch was acquired, with difficulty, from the Swedish Polis and is a symphony of grey paint, machine-turned steel and hand-made titanium cleats. ‘Majestic neutrality’ he tells people.
Damien is on his way to a site meeting in The City where he will schmooze his new client, a temperamental Gulf kleptocrat who has acquired a site in the Ward of Jeremiah-by-the-Knocker where Damien will build a 67-storey architectural middle-finger which will dominate a polite Wren church and humiliate a neglected Quaker graveyard.
‘Presentation is all’, Damien thinks and his costume for the meeting has been subject to much creative speculation. Indeed, everything in Damien’s life is a design project, including Lucinda, his wife, now picking-up their children Nash, Soane, Brick and Vitruvius from school in her (electric) Porsche. Forgetting the thousands of tons of carbon spent in the manufacture, the car smugly declares itself Net Zero.
More than anything, Damien likes a well-cut T-shirt. But Since Andy Burnham started wearing them, they have become haram and Damien’s uniform has required modernisation. The black Yohji Yamamoto jacket he had been planning to wear suffered a spill of Negroni sbagliato at last night’s LGBTQ designers’ reception for Salman Rushdie.
And while, being black, the stain did not show, Damien thought it wise not to be smelling of Campari and vermouth when in huddled conference with an irritable sheikh dressed in an immaculately laundered white dishdash. Hence the artfully crumpled Casey Casey. Shoes are less of a problem. They are made of creatively re-purposed yucca leaves by a Buddhist collective in the Canton de Vaud.
Emissions, of course, are a concern for Damien. He is strict with what he emits personally, in private and in public, but unworried that his new building will require more carbon to build than St Paul’s. He is also unworried that the sheikh’s Gulfstream G600 that flew him here consumes 500 gallons of avgas an hour.
At the site meeting, Damien assures the sheikh that he will decode any confusing feedback about his design. Shrugging, he says it is so advanced, controversy is inevitable. Indeed, controversy is sought. Baffled, the sheikh patiently listens to Damien on liminal space, volumetric hierarchies and biomimicry. The tower you see, will imitate the organic structure of a sparrmannia Africana. Beneath the mirrored glass skin, a subtle ‘concept’ will mimic fronds, roots and branches. Damien will have less to say about the inevitable value engineering (which means ruthless cost-cutting) that will require his finest organic design thoughts eventually to be excluded from the finished building in order to meet its modest £100m construction budget.
Damien had wanted to design cathedrals, but there are very few grand ecclesiastical commissions around so he had to resign himself to sordid architectural slumming. Still 15 per cent of £100m is a comforting thought as he takes his electric bike back to the pier, his furious pedalling disguising the shame of his prostitution.
But tonight his amour-propre will be restored. Early evening Damien is chairing a seminar about Parametric Praxis before an audience of the Perimenopausal Architects’ Collective at the famous Peckham car park venue. There will be a show of African dancing to follow. Since his student thesis concerned rammed-earth huts in Mali, he is sympathetic to a good Gumboot Dance.
Later, he will dine at The River Café, a celebrity petting zoo and a favourite of ‘creative’ London. The proprietor, Ruthie Rogers, wife of the late Lord Rogers who was Damien’s first employer, is interviewing him for her sensational podcast on Interstitial Foraging. They will eat a fresh salad of hand-imported Amalfi lemons with rucola collected at the Hammersmith bus garage, followed by a pasta made of perciasacchi, a rare Sicilian wheat.
Asymptote, by the way, is a technical expression for a curve on a graph which begins impressively then descends, but never, ever actually reaches the satisfaction of the horizontal. Just like Damien’s praxis. Which is, in fact, all bent out-of-shape. In a nightmare, Damien finds himself thinking ‘Form doesn’t follow function, it follows fiction’.
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