The Inhospitable Future

Paris, 1967. Jacques Tati is sixty years old, his masterwork is finished, and he has just lost everything. Playtime is in the can. He shot it in seventy millimetre. He built an entire city for it -- Tativille, fifteen thousand square metres of glass and steel on the wasteland outside Paris, with movable façades and a working metro stop. It took three years. It bankrupted him. He has lost his house, his production company, the rights to his own films. The film follows Monsieur Hulot and a group of American tourists through a single day in a Paris where every building looks the same, every door is made of glass, and the old city -- the Eiffel Tower, the cathedrals -- appears only as reflections. The film is about to flop. Tativille is being demolished while he waits for the premiere. He is proud. He is terrified.

London, 1970. Ove Arup is seventy-five. The day before, he delivered the Key Speech to the partnership he built -- a thirty-page address on Total Architecture, the principle that buildings should be designed by one integrated team and not by architects and engineers working in separate rooms. He is the Danish-born philosopher who studied Kierkegaard before he studied engineering, which explains a great deal. The Sydney Opera House is still rising. The shells are up. The interiors are being finished. Jorn Utzon, the architect who designed it and whom Arup loved like a brother, has been gone for four years -- driven out by a political minister in a fifteen-minute meeting. Arup chose the building over the friend. The building stands. The friendship does not.

Last week Fermi asked Paula where everybody is. The universe should be loud and is silent. The civilisations should be everywhere and are nowhere. Today Paula brings together two men who spent their lives inside a smaller version of the same gap: the one between what a designer intends and what a body actually does once it walks into the room. One films buildings that do not work. The other builds buildings that do. Paula wants to know what happens when they meet. The answer, it turns out, is a great deal of laughing about plastic chairs -- which Tati has been listening to for thirty years and considers one of the great underexplored comedies of the twentieth century -- and a steadily deepening conversation about the gap between the building's intention and the body's reality.

Tati explains Hulot first. The character does not rebel against the modern world. He does not protest. He just does not fit. The raincoat is too short. The pipe is never lit. The doors of the new buildings are made of glass and he cannot find the handle. The comedy is not at his expense; the comedy is what happens when a human body meets a building that was designed by somebody who forgot the body existed. Arup listens, and after a long pause says: I have spent fifty years building those buildings. I tried to remember the body. I did not always succeed.

The conversation turns to Sydney. Arup tells the story he has told nobody well enough: the four years of failed shell geometry, the breakthrough that came when Utzon realised every shell could be cut from a single sphere, the political ambush of 1966, the choice between his architect and his building. He chose the building. He believes he was right. He is not certain. He is, he says, a man who has spent fifty years being certain about load calculations and stress distributions -- certainty is his profession -- and in this one matter he has none. Tati listens. Then says: Sometimes the building wins. The body loses. That is not your fault. That is the building.

The episode closes on cost. Tati spent everything on a film that nobody understood; Arup spent a friendship on a building the world will eventually call a wonder. Both regret the money, neither regrets the work. Tati tells Paula he would have done it anyway -- but he would have been more anxious. Arup says he thinks about Jorn every day. He has not solved the calculation. He may not solve it. The two men sit in the same room -- one who could not finish the joke, one who could not finish the certainty -- and conclude, with great mutual respect, that they are doing it wrong. And that doing it wrong, done well, is the only thing the modern world has not figured out how to mass-produce.