THE SQUID SISTERS - Part 1

THE SQUID SISTERS – Part 1

Jinli, Leicester Square was stifling and swamped with tourists. There were beads of sweat popping out all over the bright red faces of the two chefs, whose octopus arms were flailing in panic. I grasped the crisp, barely dead calamari on my plate between my chopsticks and felt momentarily inclined to fling it at Zac, who was out of breath and unapologetically half an hour late as usual. If I made a point of arriving late myself next time he’d be punctual for once and seething with impatience, and I didn’t want to risk it in case our strained relationship snapped for good. We’d played this game over the years without either of us admitting it was a game. But I love my cousin dearly, and my frustration with him dissipated with every crunchy mouthful of squid.

We talked about our summer holidays; mine spent in Boscombe with my husband, children and grandkids, digging holes, building sandcastles, eating junk food and laughing a lot; his spent with his new girlfriend driving down the West Coast of the U.S.A. from San Francisco to San Diego, taking 3000 photos each on their phones, imagining they were Dean and Marylou.

“The beaches were fantastic, but the food was crap”.

“Same as Boscombe, really”

“Hahaha.”

“I’ve been to California too, you know. But a long time ago.  It was a thrilling experience, but rather strange. Something happened there I’ve never really understood.

I was studying architecture in London at the time and our unit (17) went on an educational field trip to Los Angeles. We planned to visit buildings designed by Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn and others, but also to put on an exhibition of our own drawings and models at Sci-Arc, the famous L.A. school of architecture. The itinerary had been arranged for us but we were expected to make our own way there.

Penny, another mature student whom I’d only known a short while, asked if I’d like to book cheap fly-drive tickets and share a car with her. I agreed without stopping to give it much thought, which wasn’t like me, but I was intrigued by her spirit of adventure. Penny is a tall, polite, softly-spoken woman prone to occasional episodes of outrageous rebellion. I imagine the suffragettes were just like Penny. Within a month we had waved reassuringly goodbye to our husbands and 6 children (three apiece), and found ourselves squashed together in economy class on a Boeing 747 along with 465 other people, flying over the Atlantic; our portfolios in the hold, our hearts in our mouths and our feet pushed up against the wall of the cockpit due to lack of leg space.

I noticed that in the seat across the aisle from us sat one of our young part-time tutors; another economy passenger: his take-home pay was probably no more than my student grant. Soon after take-off he had started moaning very softly to himself, which I took for humming as he had his headphones on, but by the time we approached Greenland the moans had become louder and his face had become a pale mask of pure terror. “I don’t want to die!” he sobbed out loud. “God, please save me. I don’t want to die.” The passenger next to him put a friendly arm around his shoulder and pressed a button to summon a stewardess, who quickly brought the young man a double whisky. He soon calmed down and fell asleep, and every time he woke up the process was repeated. In this way we all continued our journey in peace without being reminded of our profound vulnerability, suspended as we were 40,000 feet above the earth in our fragile silver cocoon.

(Way, way down below us hairline cracks were beginning to snake across the vast Arctic ice shelf, but nobody heard its groans as the warming sea chewed away at its foundations; nobody except a tiny phosphorescent cephalopod, glowing bright in the depths of the inky ocean.)   

After a long flight our bones were stiff and aching but we were far too excited to care. We stared out of the windows as the plane softly sank into the folds of a midnight blanket spangled with golden stars.

We landed at 3am and after we’d collected our luggage were directed to a cavernous underground depot to collect our hire car.  What we found was not what we expected: an impossibly long, red, stretch Oldsmobile. Penny casually suggested we toss a coin to decide who should take charge of the beast and who should navigate. Neither of us had driven an automatic before let alone driven on the right hand side of the road but as the coin spun, ominously orange under the bulkhead lights, we both crossed our fingers behind our backs as it rolled over to reveal our fate. Penny unflinchingly accepted the responsibility of driving while I took a deep breath and unfolded a large map on my trembling lap.

Even now it is hard to describe our shock at emerging from the dark safety of the carpark to see, sprawling as far as the horizon, a seething, thundering, 12-lane lava field, and at having to launch ourselves, unprepared, down a slip road into the mighty trans-continental river of cars that was Route 66.  Although we were desperately tired after our long, sleepless night, adrenaline flooded our senses and rabbit-eyed we somehow survived the journey to the coast, where the river disgorged us at Santa Monica.

It was still pitch dark when we checked into a youth hostel for our first night, so it wasn’t until  morning that we discovered our bunk-bedded dorm was unisex and that I had been sleeping at the centre of a triple-layer sandwich between two naked men, who jumped down and stretched like cats in the sunshine streaming from the windows. Outside, spindly palm trees framed the view and the turbulent sea provided the backdrop for a mobile ballet: scores of rollerbladers gliding and spinning along the beach to a thumping disco beat.

Later that day we saw other performances: at Muscle Beach mahogany-skinned Olympians flexed their glutes and pecs, while further along the front a turtle-faced woman with sun spots took her Vietnamese pot-bellied pig for a walk. We were in TV Land, and everyone behaved as if they were being filmed.

The rest of the week we stayed at a bungalow in Venice Beach on a street edging one of the sluggish  man-made canals which give the district its name (a district which in no way has ever resembled   Venice). The tiny house, almost hidden from the street by overgrown jacarandas and bottle-brush trees, was shared by an architect and a singer who prided himself on being a dead ringer for John Denver.

Our hosts kindly gave up their double bed, two thirds of which Penny would occupy due to her largeness. That evening they organised a party, inviting a handful of friends. The architect made pasta with pesto from scratch, getting us to help her crush the garlic, shred the basil leaves and grind the pine nuts. We finally ate at 10 pm, by which time we had consumed several bottles of Californian red, so this was the best meal we had ever tasted in our lives.  

Next day we set off for Hollywood. Downtown was a seedy assemblage of peeling hoardings, warehouses, garages and shops with chicken-wired windows: about as exotic as Willesden Green, but we followed our itinerary and met up with our beloved unit head Peter Cook (not the comedian) and fellow students from Unit 17 at the offices of several well-known architects.

In the office of Morphosis I met my idol Thom Mayne, a genius draughtsman who makes intricate models and finely hatched drawings. Early in his career, Thom had decided that houses actually look better if they are upside-down, standing on their chimneys (check it out).  His designs would give rise to buildings with unusual apertures and unexpected shadows which chase the occupants from room to room.

In the office of Neil Denari we found a Japanese student playing on the floor with the mixed-up brightly-coloured plastic contents of several modelling kits, which would give rise to buildings resembling aeroplanes, racing cars and aerodynamic hybrids, and make their occupants tingle with childish nostalgia.

We marvelled at several drawings by an architect who shall remain nameless: of habitats with no exterior walls or roofs. These designs would give rise to houses which he considered pure geometric poetry, while his clients would consider them cold, damp and draughty and sue the pants off him.

In the offices of Frank Gehry, whose spontaneous scribbles give rise to buildings resembling spontaneous scribbles, the great man himself was out with better things to do, so I sat down at his desk and stared up in wonder at the huge paper fish dangling above his work space. In another room we found numerous students gluing together random cardboard boxes, which would give rise to big art galleries in Paris, Bilbao and Toronto.  Some of these art galleries would resemble giant fish, as would the copper sculpture on the seafront of the Olympic Village in Barcelona – of a giant fish.

We visited one of Gehry’s houses, which had a fake façade of the same house built right in front of it, causing passers-by to double-take and regret their liquid lunches. But what astonished us the   most was Gehry’s design for a restaurant called Rebecca’s, whose silent black velvet interior was straddled by illuminated crocodiles, ruby red octopuses and vast glass replicas of deep-sea plankton.

As agreed, we and our fellow students visited Sci-Arc and put up a display of our work. Penny had brought and reassembled, a model which was both intriguing and utterly obscure, but she explained it beautifully. I remember it featured an inflated rubber glove and some tubing. I had brought with me drawings of my proposal showing biomechanical mosquitoes rendering Canary Wharf porous enough for occupation by squatters: not the design I proposed the following year, showing Canary Wharf sinking back into the bog it once was, to be occupied by aquatic creatures.

The Californian students and their tutors were blown away by our exhibition; they loved the artwork, even if they didn’t understand any of it.

While we were at the school our tutors were invited to participate in a “crit” of the degree project  and all of Unit 17 was invited. We watched as the American students in their shorts and T shirts rolled up in their open-topped sports cars – surfboards in the back -  straight from the beach: tanned, smiling and high as kites on a windy day. Our young tutor who had had the panic attack on the plane was now sober and back to his usual hypertense self.  One of the students stepped forward and placed on the table before us a large, wonky model of his proposal for an apartment block. Our tutor, chin in hand, let the student finish his lengthy justification for the design before  saying “Thank you for explaining your design process. Sometimes that can be more interesting than the finished product. In fact I think that is probably true in this case.  However there is clearly room for improvement here. I suggest you pick up this model, take careful aim,  and throw it into that bin over there with as much force as you can muster”

Now this would have been bad enough had the tutor, immediately realising his own excruciating   rudeness, not turned a very deep shade of crimson and fled from the room muttering “Oops – didn’t mean to say that. Sorry! So sorry! Terribly sorry! Really, really sorry!”   The student in question seemed remarkably nonplussed (that is if he heard the tutor at all), but the behaviour of English tutors was a revelation to this group of happy surfers and their teachers, and this would be the last time Unit 17 was invited to L.A.

Later we visited the college stationary shop and all of us bought rolls of yellow tracing paper which you couldn’t get in the U.K. (From that day onwards and for the rest of our careers, the alumni of Unit 17 have continued to do our drawings on yellow paper, just like Frank Lloyd Wright.)

After that, things got really weird….