Jim Crace - Arcadia

He took a room at the Excelsior and spent a day looking at the Soap Market and its garden. The team of three from the Busi Partnership who had spent two months on site earlier that year had warned the Signor in their briefing papers that the market was ‘cheap, inefficient and artificial’. Busi thought so too. ‘Squalid’ was the word he muttered to himself. His taxi had abandoned him to walk — all very well in precincts and pedestrianized streets, but here was chaos, a nightmare for pedestrians. To cross the market by foot was to volunteer for service in the bruising labyrinths of an ants’ nest. It was — for sure — neither beautiful, nor functional; neither playground nor event. It failed the Busi litmus test. It turned the simple task of buying fruit into an expedition. He marvelled at the depth and animation of the crowd and at the patience of the traders obliged each day to erect their stalls, barrow in their produce over cobbles, and then to box and barrow out each night the unsold residue, to end their day dismantling the stalls again. Inane. Insane.

Signor Busi ended up exhausted by the place, his suit dishevelled, his shoes discoloured. He rested in the Soap Garden but was not happy with the coffee and the pastry that he bought, or with the waiter who was too hurried and lacking in finesse. He tried but could not find his way back to a traffic street. The market was not logical. It had no signs, no thoroughfares. A man in cellophane had sent him deeper in. He had to pay a boy to guide him to a taxi rank. He was elated that the Busi Partnership of New York, Paris, and Milan might be the ones to introduce some Order and some Uniformity. A modern, regulated city should be governed not by the impulses of crowds but by the dictates of its tramlines, pavements, traffic lights, timetables, laws. A modern, regulated city would not allow such squalid topsyturvydom.

When at last they met, Signor Busi complimented Victor on Big Vic and on the mall which was its artery.

‘It is gracious and it is legible,’ he said. ‘I applaud you that you wish to extend such geometric harmony into the ancient centre of the town where, evidently, legibility and graciousness are out of fashion.’ He waited for an instant to allow Victor an opportunity to respond to these pleasantries. But he saw at once that Victor was no conversationalist and would be silent but attentive, too. He unzipped the black portfolios of draft proposals which he had brought from Milan, shook his body in his suit, and fixed his merchant client with his finest 3H smile.

‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he said. ‘But you are not the man to like such things. You are a man of now . So let’s not waste our time with these survivals from the past.’ His hand dismissed his rivals’ plans. He lifted the corners of a design by the Ultra Studios and raised his eyebrows: ‘And let’s not bother either with science fiction. It is dated just as soon as it is built. You see my Ultra colleague — should I talk behind his back? — has designed another Centre Lyons-Symphonique for us, all pipes and tubes and vents, but this one is for cabbages and not for culture. He thinks it’s witty to put a building’s guts on show, to put the inside on the outside. But this is what I have to say to you: you are a man of eighty, this I know. Witty is not what you want. You want a little dignity. You want a marketplace which comprehends and celebrates your business intellect and not the artful vision of an architect. I’m right, I think. So, we dispense with inside on the outside. For you, for this great marketplace, we put the outside on the inside, we bring the outdoors indoors.’

He spread the drawings over Victor’s desk. His partners had had the sense to keep them small and simple, at one-five-hundredth scale, so that the spirit of the group’s proposals was more evident than their complexity. For Signor Busi, the outdoors which they planned to bring indoors was more than just a scheme to shield the market stalls from wind and rain and temperature. The ‘outside’ meant the countryside as well, the world beyond the margins of the town.

‘What is a market anyway, but country brought to town?’ he asked. ‘Let’s give the people a country walk right at the city’s heart.’

He pointed to the ‘conceptualizations’ which had been sketched in ink and artist’s wash.

‘Please, pick them up and take a look,’ he said. ‘What do these elevations recall for you?’ He smiled, but furtively, while Victor shook his head. The design was called the Melting Glass Meringues by colleagues in Milan. Four spectacular glass ovals which seemed both like cakes and the domes of viscous mosques filled the Soap Market. Nine tapering barrel-vaulted aisles — spaceframed in wood and steel, spaceglazed — radiated from the centre without geometric logic but in the pleasing, balanced way that surface roots spread out from trees.

‘Here is a landscape at the city centre,’ Busi said. ‘There are no straight lines in our design, no matching planes or pitches. Instead we have the horizontal disunities of the natural landscape. We give you hills and plains and ridges made from curving sheets of glass. We look for coherence. We look for harmony. We let the natural city light, which is absorbed by brick and stone, pass through our glass and flood the building in the way that light can flood and warm and make fertile a country greenhouse. The inner walls are mirrored, and all the framing is constructed out of reflecting steel or polished wood, so that the journey of the natural light is not truncated. We have a greenhouse, then. We have the temperature and air control to maintain the perfect environment for plants and shrubs and trees. The walls are breathing walls. Outside, the city; countryside within. We have glass-bottomed elevators rising on a scenic ride through the foliage. We have nine trading corridors in human scale. And then the scale is more divine — four domes, the largest fifty metres high and visible from far away. It is a sculpture made from glass and greenery. It is a living carapace frozen in metal. It is …’ (and with a flourish Signor Busi revealed the project’s title) ‘… Arcadia. But modernized. Climate-controlled. Efficient. Accessible. Contemporary. Defended.’

With this last word, Signor Busi spread his hands, the saddened pragmatist: ‘Arcadia must be defended. Of course! We must admit the truth. If it is your wish to lure into Arcadia those better citizens who have good taste and incomes to dispose, then we must promise them security from …’ Again he spread his saddened hands. ‘… from the city itself. You see we have provided surveillance cameras, anti-theft shutters, suicide netting, commissionaires. The building is a fortress. A hand grenade would only shake its glass. It can survive the full impact of an intercontinental airliner. But this is not enough. We owe it to your customers to keep out drunks and tramps and demonstrators and people who do not come to spend, but simply wish to shelter from the rain, or sleep, or cause unpleasantness. Arcadia — as you will see — is far too good for them.’

He took Victor on a tour, beginning with the two-storey basement, cushioned in poured concrete and served by a delivery ramp concealed by lines of trees. He showed where refrigerated storage pods kept produce fresh, where ripening units brought on bananas, apples, mangoes to the colours judged best and most tempting for shoppers. Here were the offices, the basement studios, the service workshops, the market courtyards, recapturing — intensifying — a medieval market atmosphere, with coloured awnings, painted signs, terrazzo flooring, augmented natural light. And beds of shrubs, and greenhouse trees, and displays of bedding plants, with ivy, vines, and bamboo stands.