A Crack in the Wall Read Online Free PDF Page B

requested contradict the basic rules of architecture, so long as the costs can be transferred to the client and not reduce the profit margin too much.
    â€œI don’t know who he thinks he is. See what people are like, Pablo?” Borla said to him the afternoon that a colleague stormed out of the office, slamming the door hard enough to leave his anger in no doubt, after Borla had turned down the offer to collaborate on a project. “Are we running a charity here, or a counselling service? Do we make social architecture? If that were the case, why would I do business with a man like that when I could be building housing estates like we did at the beginning, remember, Pablo?”
    And Pablo remembers them very well: the Juan Enrique Martínez estate in Chubut, the Sindicato Textil estate in Paraná, the San Agustín estate with its seventy-two dwellings, in Rio Tercero; projects he came up with, planned and directed. Although that kind of architecture may strike some people as dull, Pablo Simó never turned out cookie-cutter houses; he went to the sites, spent a few days in the neighbourhood, walked around the area and, when possible, interviewed the people who were going to be living in the new development. They were cheap houses, but Pablo juggled the budget to find the best materials and colours. He spent the most time on designing communal areas – the places where residents were going to meet each other after a day’s work, where they would play ball games or cards, drink maté and beer, chat, listen to music or watch football, the places where each person would, in their own way, do what all people do at the end of every day: fill timeuntil the new day begins. They had won the National Urbanism Prize for the San Agustín development, eighteen years earlier. Of all the architectural jobs Pablo Simó has done in his career, the social projects are the only times he has really thought about the person who was going to live in the house he was conceiving. And he didn’t think of that person in the abstract, but as flesh and blood, with a face, a laugh, a smell all their own. That wasn’t the case later on. An era began in which in order to win a tender you had to lower the profit margin by so much that Borla decided it wasn’t worth getting involved in that sort of project any longer. Plus there was a revival of fortunes in the private housing sector, along with the growing value of a square foot in Buenos Aires and the availability of cheap credit, factors that meant Borla could make much more money buying a plot and building on it than he ever would attempting some contrivance with overheads and polynomials for the sake of a tendering process that would anyway see him getting paid badly and late. After turning down two consecutive proposals from Pablo, Borla explained to him the company’s new work philosophy: from now on they would not think of the person who was going to inhabit this building they were putting up, but of that person’s reasons for buying what they were offering. A housing development commissioned by the state, or a company or a syndicate, is already sold before the first brick is laid; not so a block of flats. And Pablo Simó, who has worked for Borla since graduating in architecture, accepted his comments without question, demurring only in the time he steals occasionally from his daily work to draw the eleven-storey, north-facing tower. And even when he is drawing the tower he doesn’t have any potential resident in mind, other than himself.
    Anyway, that April afternoon, on his way back from the estate agency, Pablo stops for a coffee at a branch of a chain that has been scattering identikit cafés throughout the city – quite a different place to the bar he usually frequents at mid-morning, where the same waiters have been toiling for years, shouting their orders over to the bar with enviable brio, and where there are white cloths over