Strategies against Architecture

Here at Riddled we are loath to stand in the way of progress. No, wait, that was steamrollers. Obstruct progress all you want.

But one thing we have learned is that when hiring an architect to renovate the South Wing of stately Riddled Manor (long in a state of desuetude and decrepitude), do not pick the person whose previous client was an extremely wealthy elephant who wears a purple dressing-gown smoking jacket and travels around on a traction engine. However great his reputation for innovation and cutting-edge out-of-the-box thinking. The architect, not the elephant.*
He came to us with a name for designing fine stairways (a key feature in the renovation since there is no point in having a a vast stockpile of suet in the basement of the South Wing if we cannot get to it; not to mention the crepes in the attic).

However, the plans he has presented to us have been increasingly grandiose, whimsical and impractical. Does he think we are made of money?



Finely-machined beryllium alloy perhaps, in the case of my prosthetic spare part, but that's all. And citing passages from Borges and Bioy-Casares about the Great Chaotic of Rome** does little to allay our concerns.

It came to a head at last week's meeting. "Call me old-fashioned," I said, "but I feel more comfortable using stairs when there is a clear distinction between the treads and the risers."

"Also would they not be more efficacious if they were slightly closer to the ground?" vouchsafed Another Kiwi.

"Ah," we were told, "it is a flight of stairs."

AK muttered something about "Hairway to Steven". Market analysts are predicting a sharp increase in the consumption of akvavit and Blackwood's Shetland Gin in the near future.

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* Who stole a bicycle once. This is why I rate for the Badfort crowd.** "This noble edifice, which to some seemed a sphere, to others an ovoid, and to the reactionary a shapeless mass, and whose materials ran the gamut from marble to cow dung, consisted essentially of truncated bridges, of spiral staircases that gave access to impenetrable walls, of balconies to which entrance was impossible, and of doors than opened either into pits or into high, narrow rooms from whose ceilings soft armchairs and comfortable double beds hung upside down. Nor was there any lack of concave mirrors."