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The Art of Being Lewis
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THE
ART OF
BEING
LEWIS
THE
ART OF
BEING
LEWIS
A Novel by
DANIEL GOODWIN
Copyright © 2019 Daniel Goodwin
This edition copyright © 2019 Cormorant Books Inc.
This is a first edition.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent
of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency
(Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence,
visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through Ontario Creates, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Goodwin, Daniel, 1970– author
The art of being Lewis / Daniel Goodwin.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77086-529-7 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77086-530-3 (html)
I. Title.
PS8613.06485A78 2019 C813’.6 C2018-900028-7
C2018-900029-5
Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com
Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, tannicegdesigns.ca
Printer: Friesens
Printed and bound in Canada.
Cormorant Books Inc.
260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 502, Toronto, ON M5T 2E4
www.cormorantbooks.com
For my family.
Contents
HalfTitle
FullTitle
Copyright
Dedication
PartOne
Chapter1
Chapter2
Chapter3
Chapter4
Chapter5
Chapter6
Chapter7
Chapter8
Chapter9
Chapter10
Chapter11
Chapter12
Part_Two
Chapter13
Chapter14
Chapter15
Chapter16
Chapter17
Part_Three
Chapter18
Chapter19
Chapter20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Indigenous
Landmarks
Cover
Frontmatter
Start of Content
Backmatter
Acknowledgments
PageList
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PART ONE
Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
— ARTHUR ERICKSON
1
LEWIS WAKES UP early, hoping the day will be sunny and warm for the ribbon cutting. But when he tiptoes to the window of his room in the Westin Nova Scotian to quietly draw the drapes, he sees the Atlantic Canadian weather is in no way complying with his desires. The late July day is just barely dawning and already at 6:15 the sky threatens rain. Even worse, the fog blowing in off the Halifax harbour is heavy.
Despite Lewis’s best efforts, the thick drapes rustle loudly, and Laura is already stirring before he turns away from the window. He freezes and watches his wife of fifteen years slowly wake up. Her eyes haven’t been open more than a few seconds, and already she can see the disappointment on Lewis’s face, the way his mouth is sagging slightly at the right corner. But Laura doesn’t let Lewis infect her waking mood. She glances at the weather outside and, with a smile and a quick tilt of her head toward the empty pillow beside her, summons him back to bed.
WHEN LEWIS GREETS Drescher an hour and a half later over breakfast in the little organic restaurant in the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market, the rain has already started. It is heavy Atlantic Coast rain and appears to be falling horizontally off the harbour. But Drescher doesn’t care to notice as he picks up his breakfast tray and chooses a seat right near the window overlooking the pier. Laura and Drescher’s wife, Miriam, are still waiting for their meals at the counter and talking with great animation about something far more interesting than the weather. Lewis doesn’t know what is so entertaining. He’s too distracted by the rain smashing against the window right beside his face, but Drescher doesn’t mind. In fact, he seems cheered by the semi-hurricane scene unfolding just on the other side of the glass. For the wind has picked up off the ocean and is carrying the impossibly large drops inland. It’s an unusual reaction — or non-reaction — to the terrible weather on the morning when their latest design is about to be officially shown to the world.
“Do you think anybody will show up?” Lewis asks.
Drescher shrugs and smiles, and not for the first time Lewis notices his partner has a very charming smile. “Might keep some of the media away. But who the fuck needs them? As long as the Macdonalds are happy as a passel of pigs in shit.” Like most professionals, Drescher has an ambivalent relationship with his clients. Lewis makes a mental note to look up the word passel and comforts himself with the following thought: as profane and ungrammatical as Drescher is in private, he will be urbane and eloquent once he takes the podium. Drescher takes a bite of his heavily buttered toast, wipes a smudge from his chin, and adds, “Besides, we designed it with these kinds of days in mind. Worse, actually.”
AT 10:00 A.M., Lewis finds himself standing to Drescher’s left beside the podium in the pouring rain. The hotel umbrella doesn’t seem to be adequately shielding Lewis’s shoulders or his legs. His height doesn’t help, but neither does the wind. Drescher is holding his umbrella at a jaunty angle, like Fred Astaire in one of his dance routines. There are a few media types in attendance, but only one TV crew is present. Yet Drescher can’t seem to stop himself from smiling. The crowd itself is large enough. The Macdonalds are out in force, and the premier and half his staff. Every elected official in Halifax, representing all three levels of government, seems to have shown up for the official opening of the Macdonald Arts and Culture Building, the latest addition to the Halifax waterfront. Lewis recognizes almost the full provincial cabinet. Each member wants to be seen playing a part in this generous cultural gift. Every local and regional architecture firm is represented. Drescher is a role model to them all. Lewis is disappointed by the lack of media turnout, but Drescher keeps smiling.
Lewis catches Laura’s eye. She is standing two rows back from the front. She gets to see her husband often enough and doesn’t want to spoil anyone’s view, so she has let some of the local politicians elbow their way into the first two rows. Like Lewis, she is tall. Miriam has to lift her head to whisper something in Laura’s ear. Both women laugh, and Lewis assumes he is the object of their amusement. Perhaps he is looking far too serious when he should be happy and relaxed. After all, the Macdonald Arts and Culture Building, or MAC as it has already affectionately been christened by proud Haligonians, is a Drescher and Morton building. The name on the firm might still only be Drescher & Drescher, and Leon Drescher might have done the lion’s share of the design for the $100-million building, but many of the touches that have already been nominated for international awards are Lewis’s. And architecture is an art of accumulated detail.
SPEECHES GENERALLY SHOULD be brief, especially when the audience is cold and wet, but family patriarch and cultural benefactor Darren Macdonald likes to talk. This is his moment in his second career as philanthropist, and no amount of rain is going to rush him. Besides, Lewis remembers, long before their client built a typical Atlantic Canadian family-owned billion-dollar empire — spanning transportation, construction, and fish farming — he got his start on the family fishing boat. Seventy-year-old Darren Macdonald is used to rain.
Thankfully for the audience, Darren Macdonald has the Atlantic Canadian gift for plain-spoken, colourful speech. And everyone appreciates a hometown boy who loves his city almost as much as he adores his wife. He speaks with simple eloquence about Margaret and Halifax and his desire to pay tribute to both with a multi-purpose space for the performing arts and a place to train young people to participate in them.
He reminisces about starting out on his career in business: “When I got the chance to buy this parcel of empty land on the waterfront — for a good price, I have to tell you — everybody, including Margaret even, wondered what the devil I was up to. But I knew one day I would build something special for my city and for my Margaret.”
And he speaks touchingly about his beloved Marg
aret’s early career as a ballet dancer. He even tells a funny, self-deprecating anecdote about one of their first dates when he asked her to a community dance and found out she could dance circles around him. “And fifty years later she continues to do so,” he concludes to loud applause. Standing to his left, Mrs. Margaret Macdonald, still slender at sixty-eight, smiles affectionately.
The premier speaks next, and then it is Drescher’s turn. Lewis and Drescher always work together on designs, but it is Drescher who brings in the commissions and speaks at ribbon cuttings. Leon Drescher has always been the front man. He gives the same speech he delivers at every opening, but each time the audience is sufficiently different, and Drescher is a good speaker so it always succeeds. It’s the same speech Drescher gave Lewis when he interviewed him straight out of the McGill School of Architecture eighteen years ago. Despite his newly minted degree, at the time Lewis thought he was qualified to do nothing outside of university, and he was looking to escape his memories of Montreal. Lewis was impressed by Drescher then, and the feeling has never left him. Drescher at fifty is only — and, somehow surprisingly to Lewis, always — ten years older than him, but a generation ahead of him in world view, experience, and self-confidence.
After four years of architecture school, it was Drescher who taught Lewis how to draft, how to work with clients, how to think. Drescher immersed Lewis in all the complexities behind the decisions made by their predecessors hundreds and, in many cases, thousands of years before. This wall a certain height, this tower’s walls a particular thickness, this orientation of a room to the rising or the setting sun. Stairs that curved at this, not that, angle. A banquet hall that was 150 feet long, not one more nor less. The brightness at which the sun shone through the bedroom at dawn. The infinite ways that finite space could be enclosed. “This is how architecture differs from sculpture, Lewis. It is not about displacing space. It is about enclosing it.”
Drescher is about to give his “What is architecture” speech. A lesser architect, that is to say every single architect in attendance and most in the profession, would speak at length about the building and the client and let the audience in on some of the more benign mysteries of the design process. Drescher touches on each of these subjects in turn, but he is perfunctory and brief. When describing the building he kicks off with the requisite Maritimes tour guide’s joke: “If you could see through the fog, this is what you would see.” But he saves his passion and eloquence for the speech he can deliver without any effort. The fog is so heavy now that the outlines of the building are just barely discernible when Lewis quickly glances behind. But Drescher is undeterred. And the audience doesn’t look uneasy.
“Architecture, my friends, is one of the few activities that separates us from animals and from chaos. Architecture is considered one of the prerequisites of civilization, even more so than a written language.” As Drescher warms to his topic, he lets the umbrella slip even further from a vertical axis. The rain is hitting him straight in the face now, but it doesn’t detract from his well-chosen words or his appearance.
The Art of Being Lewis