The Glass Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

concrete and glass.’
    Viktor glanced towards Liesel and smiled. She didn’t know how to read him in this kind of encounter. She was learning how to read him in matters of love and companionship, but she had never seen him in negotiation with a client or a workers’ representative or a supplier. He was smiling, sitting back to consider the matter, with his elbows on the arms of his chair and his hands in front of his face, his long fingers steepled together like the groins of a Gothic vault and his mouth composed in a quiet and confident smile. ‘Show me,’ he said.
    ‘Show you?’
    ‘Yes. Prepare some drawings. The kind of thing you would wish to do. The kind of’ — he paused — ‘
space
you would wish to enclose. Just sketches.’ Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘The site is sloping, quite steeply sloping. Overlooking the whole city. Do you know Mĕsto? Perhaps you don’t. Below the hill is a park — the Lužánky Park. It used to be known as the Augarten but of course the name has been changed. Where we live, everything has two names. Austrian. Czech. It is the way of our world. So, you must imagine a house at the top of a hill, quite a steep hill, and below it a sloping field, and then laid out before it the whole of the city. A magnificent prospect. Make some drawings.’
    Von Abt held out his hands helplessly. ‘But how large? I have no information, no idea of what you want.’
    ‘A family home. I have made that clear. A home for my wife and me and our eventual children. Say’ — he smiled at Liesel — ‘a maximum of three. What area? Say three hundred square metres. Just sketch something out.’
    ‘I will bring you photographs of some of my work. That will suffice.’
    ‘I would like to see some ideas.’
    ‘You
will
see ideas. I work with nothing but ideas.’
    Viktor laughed. Liesel had somehow expected that he would be angry, but instead he laughed. ‘Show me your ideas, then. Convince me that you are the man for our house.’
    Two days later they met again, by appointment, at Café Florian in the Piazza. St Mark’s stood like a fantasy of Arabian tents at the end of the great space and the orchestra, camped outside the café like a band of nomads, played selections from Verdi’s operas. Rainer von Abt approached their table with all the panache of an opera singer making his entrance. ‘
Ecco
!’ he announced, and placed a portfolio on their table. ‘I have laboured day and night, to the disadvantage of my current work. But the demands of true love are more powerful than mere artistic patronage.’
    The tapes were untied and the portfolio was opened and Viktor and Liesel put their heads together to look. There were photographs, large glossy prints with studio stamps on the back: an apartment block with white, featureless walls; a square, banded villa set in an anonymous garden; an office block of some kind, all plate glass and white plaster.
    ‘This is all your work?’
    ‘Of course it is.’ He leaned forward and pulled out another photograph, one showing a long, low apartment block receding down the perspective lines of a street. ‘Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. Have you seen the place? Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Behrens, Schneck. Do you know these people?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Viktor. ‘Le Corbusier, of course. And Behrens.’
    Von Abt made a small sound that may have been amusement. ‘
And
von Abt,’ he said, putting the photographs aside. ‘Those are some of the things I have done. Now, the things that I have imagined.’ He spread out some drawings. These were all architect’s sketches, rectilinear, sharp of line, devoid of any kind of embellishment. He pointed with a thick, artisan’s finger. ‘That one I am working on for people in Berlin. An industrialist and his third wife. They wanted columns and capitals and statues and I told them that if they were looking for ornament, they could look elsewhere. Perhaps you know the essay by Loos, “Ornament and