“What are you going to do now?”
This has been the most frequent question put to me on and after my graduation day last Tuesday.
I was lucky enough to listen to a great speech by the successful author Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) while sitting in Canterbury Cathedral with my brand new doctoral degree certificate clutched tightly in my somewhat relieved hands. He had reflected on his own lifepath now that he was in his eighties, telling us how he had faced many struggles along the way, but had triumphed in the end.
The tortoise always beats the hare. That’s certainly my motto in life.
What then is the answer to the original question?
There are a number of non-answers. Not becoming a ‘standard’ university academic, struggling with increasingly administrative tasks while fitting research and publishing into shrinking gaps between teaching commitments. Not returning to the world of commuting into and back from the centre of London that I experienced for 17 years of my life.
I am going to write another book (already mentioned in Building #46), having learned from research and writing undertaken over the last 5 plus years that produced the original ‘Building Passions’, two novels (one historical fiction, one pure fiction) and a PhD thesis.
The new work will be historical fiction about a single building, an antidote to the dark and highly disturbing approach taken by the Oscar-winning film ‘The Brutalist’. Great that it put a radical genre of Modernist architecture on the map, but its real focus was very much on the human aftermath of the Holocaust.
The challenge will be to blend fact with fantasy in the ‘right’ mix so that the reader is both informed and entertained. Not too much dumbing down, not too much intellectualising.
Balance is in fact the theme of the proposed story - between two extremes of building design approach, one that is ‘purist’ (some might say Brutalist) and one that is ‘decorist’ (some might say Postmodernist). I will explain these attributes more in future posts.