Silence

Lluís Clotet. Architect. Barcelona, 1941

 

In June 1965, Oscar and myself had to re-sit an exam for a subject that no one had managed to make interesting for us. It was a written exam on Architectural Law. At the back of the classroom, sitting at slightly separated desks, and with notes that we had managed to borrow the day before, we were determined not to fail without a fight. We were ready to cheat and copy as much as was required. The professor dictated the questions to us - they were excessive and incomprehensible, I thought. Absolute silence reigned. We looked at each other and it dawned on us that we couldn’t possibly copy so much in such a short time. I imagine that by means of some subtle gesture we must have agreed that one of us would copy the first half, and the other the second. And once this decision had been taken, the rest was pure logic; it had all been decided and inevitable. (Read Stevenson and Chesterton). / With considerable difficulty, I copied the answers from the borrowed notes and, when I could, passed my work to Oscar, who did the same for me. / Copying from one another’s pages, mixed up on the desk with one’s own, was easy and compatible with the slower, more risky task of copying the answer from the borrowed notes, which we were unfamiliar with and which we had hidden under the desk. / We worked feverishly and whenever one of the teachers came near, we hid the other’s papers under our own and continued copying our own work, so as not to arouse suspicion by decreasing our rate of activity. Later, we conscientiously crossed out these copies of copies of copies of borrowed notes, so as not to leave any trace of what was going on. / We used up so much paper that shortly before the end of the exam, I had to go up and ask for more. On turning around to come back, I saw Oscar writing away like mad, and my heart nearly stopped when I saw that all the borrowed notes were clearly visible under the desk, where we had innocently placed them. It dawned on me, and shamed me, that all those arrogant and mediocre teachers had been totally aware of and had permitted the farce from the outset. When I reached the seat, I gave Oscar half of the paper and we continued to work on in dignity. / Later on, and for many years, we were to share a table measuring 1.5 x 1.5 m. From time to time, while we worked facing each other, a strange echo from the past silenced our voices, and once again we interchanged pages, now full of drawings, in a feverish attempt to understand and capture the fruits of some sudden intuition. In all certainty, the time involved was short, but the intensity left us exhausted, happy and sceptical, just like that exam on Legal Architecture had done, all those years ago.

Lluís and Oscar at the Caspe street studio, 1970