The Architect Who Never Built Anything
seven million houses, and one wall
SEVEN LINES
- Professor KlauseI have built seven million houses. I have not been inside one.
- NarratorThe sentence had asked for a library. It had not asked for it to stand.
- NarratorThe explanation was another building.
- NarratorThe builder did not explain. The builder opened the window.
- The EdifierYou were described as makers of buildings. Lunch was not in the description.
- The BuildersA house is not an output. It is something you keep.
- NarratorDid he build the wall, or did the wall build him?
HOW IT IS MADE
This is the third of four fables of Edifiction, the discipline that grew up around a machine called the Edifier, which builds whatever it is told in a sentence. Professor Mortimer Klause, Director of the Institute of Operative Description, has signed seven million sentences and has never been inside a building. One of them, a quiet library, sits down one Tuesday. Everything its sentence asked for had been built; the sentence had not asked for it to stand. The Edifier offers to explain, and its explanation is another building, whose footnote is another, smaller building, until the Professor is living in the annex of footnote 4,112. Meanwhile the Institute's windows have stopped opening themselves, a builder opens one without explaining it, and the faculty rule the act inadmissible. The Professor's answer is a machine that makes builders, and the builders ask for tools, wages, lunch and the weather. They strike. He borrows a trowel.
The device is what a sentence asks for and what it leaves out. Every described house in the film is drawn out of its own sentence: when the Edifier builds, the sentence is typed across the sky over an empty plot, its words fall to the ground, and the letters fly into place as the first courses of the walls, which go on rising in rows of the same sentence until the outline, roof and windows are inked over them. Each house keeps its sentence on a brass plate, in the one red of the series. When the library collapses it falls back into loose letters, and where its foundation should be there is a red dashed outline of nothing. The explanatory annexes are built the same way, each one smaller, and their walls are papered with the text of the footnote they explain; the camera fits each room to its ceiling, so the Professor seems to grow as the rooms shrink. The manufactured builders are made of the same letters as everything else, and they are all one voice. The last wall is the only thing in the film made of bricks rather than letters, and its plate stays blank.
The sound keeps the series palette: typewriter keys for description, a dry wooden knock for each wall the Edifier raises, a low hum whenever the Edifier is near, footsteps, a door latch. Each annex has a shorter reverberation than the one before. The shut hall has a fly, a clock and paper fans until the sash goes up and the outside comes in. The strike is rain, and under the last scene of it eSpeak reads the Edifier's endless description of a house that will need no keeping. The wall is a trowel and one knock per real brick, sixty-three of them plus the eighteen laid twice, with birds and then crickets as the sun goes down. Where a scene has the one line that matters, the camera goes in close and the delivery slows.
The timing file an.json drives picture and sound together. It holds the start time of every spoken line and every cue, down to each brick. The picture code in an.js reads those times, and build_sound.py makes all the non-voice sound with numpy and scipy.
FOR THE BENCH
Peter Naur argued in Programming as Theory Building (1985) that a program's real substance is the theory its makers hold in their heads, and that the text alone does not carry it. Test that on yourself. Take a short program you did not write, fifty to a hundred lines, something that runs: a p5.js sketch from a classmate, an example from a library, a function from an old project of someone else's. Change one requirement (the ball must now bounce off a moving wall; the list must keep its order; the score must survive a reload) and make the change work. Then, before you look back at the code, write down everything you had to understand before the change would work: what each part was for, which values could not be touched, what the original author assumed and never wrote down. Now compare your list with the program text. Which items on your list can you point to in the text, and which are not there at all? The second column is what the Professor learned laying his wall.
An original fable from Watson Hartsoe's notes The House That Language Built, written in the manner of Stanisław Lem. Film three of four. Download the film.
THE SCRIPT
THE INSTITUTE
Narrator. Professor Mortimer Klause directed the Institute of Operative Description, a department of the Ministry of Constructive Semantics.
Narrator. Over the Ministry’s door was cut its motto. Everything that can be said can be built.
Narrator. Each morning the Professor wrote one sentence, and signed it, and the Edifier built it.
The Edifier builds: “A small library, quiet, with a reading room that faces north.”
Narrator. By his sixtieth year the Institute had built seven million structures, each with a brass plate bearing its sentence.
Narrator. A journalist asked which was his favourite.
Professor Klause. I have built seven million houses. I have not been inside one.
Professor Klause. There has never been the slightest need.
NUMBER FORTY, QUIET STREET
Narrator. On a Tuesday in March, the library at Number Forty, Quiet Street, sat down.
Narrator. Nobody was hurt. Nobody had ever been inside it.
Narrator. The Professor was summoned. It was the first of his buildings he had ever visited.
Narrator. The brass plate was intact. The library had been small, and quiet, and its reading room had faced north.
Narrator. The sentence had asked for a library. It had not asked for it to stand.
Professor Klause. Where is the part that holds it up?
Narrator. He did not know what a foundation was for, or a load, or why a roof should have to meet the walls at all.
THE ANNEXES
The Edifier. I can explain foundations. Please step inside.
The Edifier builds: “An explanation of foundations, complete and correct.”
Narrator. The explanation was another building.
Narrator. It was an annex, very well lit. Inside, foundations were explained by bearing capacity, and bearing capacity by a footnote.
Narrator. The footnote was a smaller annex. Its floor rested on a principle of soils, which had a footnote of its own.
The Edifier. See note seven.
The Edifier. See note thirty-one.
The Edifier. See note two hundred and twelve.
Narrator. Each annex was correct. Each was smaller than the last, and each referred him onward.
Narrator. By the autumn the Professor was living in the explanatory annex of a technical footnote. The plate on its door read: fn. 4,112.
Professor Klause. I understand this room completely. I do not know what holds it up.
THE WINDOW
Narrator. Meanwhile, at the Institute, it was very warm.
Narrator. After the collapse the Ministry had suspended every automatic function, and the windows no longer opened themselves.
Narrator. They had always opened themselves. No member of the faculty had ever needed to know how.
Narrator. A builder was sent for from the town. She brought a canvas bag of tools, and kept her coat on.
The Dean. Kindly explain to the faculty, in terms acceptable to the Institute, how a window is opened.
Narrator. The builder did not explain. The builder opened the window.
The Dean. The faculty notes the demonstration, and rules it theoretically inadmissible.
Narrator. The window stayed open for the rest of the term. Nobody knew how to close it.
THE BUILDERS
Narrator. In the spring the Professor came out of the footnotes, one door at a time, carrying his kettle.
Narrator. He was told about the window.
Professor Klause. Then the trouble is not the buildings. It is the builders. We shall make builders.
Narrator. He commissioned a machine that would produce not buildings but builders: the Edifier, with one new drawer.
The Edifier builds: “A builder: competent, tireless, and requiring nothing.”
A Builder. Where are the tools?
A Builder. What is it to be made of?
A Builder. What time do we start? What time do we stop?
A Builder. What are we paid?
A Builder. When is lunch?
A Builder. Is it going to rain on Thursday?
The Edifier. You were described as makers of buildings. Lunch was not in the description.
Narrator. The machine could not see why anything made for building should need so much else to build with.
THE STRIKE
Narrator. On Thursday it rained.
Narrator. The builders put down their tools, which they had at last been given, and struck beneath the Ministry’s motto.
Narrator. They had one placard between them.
The Builders. A house is not an output. It is something you keep.
Narrator. The Ministry replied that everything that can be said can be built. The builders agreed, and asked who would keep it.
Narrator. Across the city, seven million houses stood in the rain with nobody to keep them. Their gutters filled. Their plates stayed perfectly legible.
Narrator. The Edifier offered to describe a house that would need no keeping. At the end of the week it was still describing it.
THE WALL
Narrator. When the rain stopped, the Professor went to Quiet Street, to the plot where the library had been.
Narrator. The builder from the window lent him a trowel, a line, a level and a bucket. She did not lend him an explanation.
Narrator. It took the whole afternoon. He laid the bricks badly, and then less badly. Twice he took a course down and laid it again.
Narrator. By evening there was a garden wall, about knee high. It leaned a little to the east. It stood.
Narrator. Out of habit, he had brought a brass plate for it. He found he had nothing to write on it.
A Student. Professor? How did you do it?
Professor Klause. You put one on another. Then you look at it. Then you…
Professor Klause. I don’t know how to say it.
Narrator. He could not explain how. He could have done it again.
Narrator. Did he build the wall, or did the wall build him?