[cont.] ... That's nothing (2)

I felt I had become used to being disappointed by him. I have known architects who design the same building over and over again, in some cases, chasing after what the client wants, giving more of what it was that brought the greatest eyebrow-raise, to see if, eventually, POW! His chair would topple back from the force of his eyebrows, then his arms, following, shooting up; Hooray! … And it would all be because that arch, the way it sprung from the capitals of the columns, its traversal through the great overhead, had been finally perfected in form and scale and placement to cause utter astounding delight.
Larry told me this: “When all the juniors are presenting drawings to him, I study his face. And when I see he likes it, I look and see what it is and what he’s talking about. The next time, I DRAW THAT EXACT THING! I COPY IT! I draw into the design EVERY ONE of the elements he admired that day!”
It took me years before I figured out he was trying quite earnestly to give me kindly advice. I thought he was complaining about how desperate he had gotten and how bereft of inspiration and enslaved to that single client he was. He was broken. He told me all the time he was a hack with no self-respect. “But YOU …” he’d say, and never finish.
And the client was a simpleton who liked the same forms over and over again, and wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t remark that he was getting the same oatmeal as he had had the day before. Some people not only tolerate familiarity, but prefer it, clasping their hands together and sighing with time-tinged fond delight to hear an old story once again. Comfort! Standardized tests are being devised now not for the college set, but for retirees wanting to be placed in retirement communities where everyone agrees with their positions, and no one has to feel the gnawing dissonance tearing at their brittle, drying, rubbery cracked skull pudding. No to say there isn’t something in it, but then the most terrifying thing would be going for potluck and finding oneself badgered by remaindered crackpots all day.
Perhaps I could take a different tack. Perhaps clients didn’t come because they wanted to be actively engaged in the pursuit of their own delights, but they didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t have any bigger ideas beyond the liking of the trace of a Bezier curve. All-righty, then.
The new project involved the redesign of a massive ship that had been burned down to the waterline, a few charred ribs holding up a small bit amidships. It had loped into the harbor, laboring over gentle rolls, a single sheet on its one remaining withered, charred mast and now lay swamped in the slip. I could probably just start completely over, but everyone, myself included, wanted to make it “just as it was, only better.” There were things a ship was supposed to be and have and do.