Every architect in Port Ellery knew two things about Gus Marlowe. His buildings never leaked, and he had never designed one in shoes.
I learned the second thing on my first day at Marlowe Fenn Architects. I was twenty-six, three years out of grad school, and I believed buildings happened on screens. I had once clicked an entire library into existence for a final review. It had four hundred windows and no bathrooms, and nobody noticed until the jury asked.
The studio was an old textile warehouse by the river. You came up in a freight elevator that groaned at every floor like it had opinions about your portfolio. Then the doors opened onto the Floor.
That was what everyone called it, capital F. It was eight thousand square feet of reclaimed maple from a demolished high school gym. You could still see the faded arc of a three-point line near the coffee machine. And across the whole thing, in blue painter's tape, someone had laid out a building at full size.
"Shoes," said Marisol.
Marisol Ortega was the office manager. She was forty-one and owned four label makers, which she called "the fleet." She stood by a long bench beside the elevator, above a row of cubbies. Every cubby had a label, and mine already said O. PIKE.
"Off on the Floor," she said. "House rule. Not mine. His."
At the far end of the room, a tall, narrow man was walking slowly along a strip of tape. His gray hair stood up at the back as if it had been startled. He wore corduroys and a fisherman's sweater with a hole in one elbow, and he had his shoes off. He walked with his head tilted, the way people listen to a song they almost recognize.
"That's Gus," Marisol said. "He's feeling the floor plan."
I took off my shoes and socks and put them in O. PIKE. I did not know what else to do. Marisol glanced at the socks and made a small note on a clipboard.
"Socks are optional," she said. "But you committed. I respect that."
Augustin Marlowe was fifty-two. He had founded the firm with Walter Fenn twenty-five years earlier, in a rented room above a bakery. Fenn had retired to a lake and sent back nothing since but one postcard of the lake. Gus kept the firm running the way he kept everything running, which was by walking around on it.
His method was simple and made no sense. Once a plan was close, Marisol and two interns laid it out on the Floor in tape. Every wall, every door swing, every step. Then Gus took off his shoes, walked the building for an hour, and came back and changed things.
"Why?" I asked him, on my second day.
He was standing in the tape outline of a clinic waiting room. He considered the question so long I thought he had forgotten me.
"Most architects design buildings sitting down," he said. "Then everybody else has to stand in them. I like to stand in them first."
"You could stand in shoes."
"Shoes are an opinion about the ground," Gus said. "I'd rather hear the ground's."
He went back to walking. His conversations always ended that way, without warning, like a hallway that turns out to be a closet.
For six months I watched him. I did not understand him, but I watched.
I watched him walk a fire station and add a second door to the kitchen. "They'll leave in a hurry," he said. "Holding plates." The fire chief later sent a fruit basket with a card that just said HOW.
And I watched him cross the whole Floor, stop at the coffee machine, and say, "Marisol. The building settled. Northeast corner, about two millimeters."
She called a structural engineer, mainly to prove him wrong. The engineer came back with a laser and the face of a man who has seen a ghost. Two millimeters, northeast corner. After that, nobody argued about the shoes.
The first time he walked one of my plans, I was not ready.
It was a small community center, my first lead design. It had a long gallery corridor with high windows that I was especially proud of. Marisol and I taped it out on a Thursday. It took four hours and most of a roll.
Gus came in at five, left his shoes in his cubby, and walked the building without a word. He walked my corridor all the way to the end and stopped.
"Too long," he said. "By a stride."
"It's dimensioned to the brief. Ninety-two feet."
"I know what it's dimensioned to." He walked it back. "By the time you reach the end, you've forgotten why you came. Take out a stride."
"How long is a stride?"
He looked at me as though I had asked how long a Tuesday was.
I checked the brief. Then I checked a follow-up email from the client that I had never opened. The gallery had to fit inside a parking setback, and ninety-two feet was over by thirty inches. Roughly a stride.
I sat there a long time. Then I went and stood on the Floor in my socks, feeling nothing at all.
There was one more thing about Gus, and it lived in the bottom drawer of the flat file by the elevator. Marisol had labeled it in 2009, her first week. EMERGENCY LOAFERS — DO NOT DISTURB.
Inside was one pair of brown leather loafers, bought for a wedding. Gus had worn them for the ceremony and never again. Every few months Marisol dusted them. The drawer had the atmosphere of a small museum.
"What counts as an emergency?" I asked her.
"Funerals. Court. He got jury duty in 2016."
"Did he wear them?"
"He was dismissed during selection. He asked the judge whether the courtroom floor had ever been leveled." She smoothed a fresh label onto a box of pencils. "It hadn't."
The trouble arrived in a quarter-zip.
His name was Bryce Talbot, and he was thirty-eight. The partners had hired him from a consultancy to be the firm's first managing director. Gus had not wanted one. But Gus had not personally sent an invoice since 2011, and the bank's letters had grown personal.
Bryce came up in the freight elevator on a Monday in September. He was clean and pleasant, and he carried a tablet the way some men carry a small dog. He stepped out of the elevator directly onto the maple in gleaming white sneakers.
Every person in the room stopped breathing. At the far end, Gus paused mid-step, like a deer hearing a car door.
"Hi, everyone!" Bryce said. "I've heard so much about the culture."
Marisol rose with a label maker in each hand. She walked over and stood beside the bench without a word. She waited until Bryce looked down at the cubbies, then the labels, then his own sneakers.
"Oh," he said. "Is this a whole thing?"
"It's a whole thing," Marisol said.
He took them off and made a little joke about yoga. He was a good sport. But I saw him glance at Gus and tap something into the tablet. I knew what word he had typed, because he said it nine times that week.
"Optics," Bryce said on Wednesday, about the tape on the Floor.
"Optics," he said on Thursday, about the hole in Gus's sweater.
"Optics," he said on Friday, in his socks, in the middle of the room. Then he told us the news.
Port Ellery was replacing its old City Hall. There would be a new civic center on the riverfront, the biggest public building in forty years. Five firms had been invited to pitch, and we were one of them.
"We present in five weeks," Bryce said. "And the committee will include a senior building inspector. We need to look like a serious firm. So I've made some changes."
The memo went out at 6:02 that evening. I read it twice on the bus home, because I assumed I had misread it.
Subject: Updated Professional Standards
Effective Monday, all staff will wear closed-toe footwear at all times on firm premises. This includes the studio floor. Thank you for helping us present our best selves!
— Bryce
I called Marisol. She picked up on the first ring, which meant she had been staring at her phone too.
"Has Gus seen it?"
"He's seen it."
"What did he say?"
There was a long pause. Behind her I heard the soft click of a label maker. She kept part of the fleet at home. Of course she did.
"He said, 'Fine,'" Marisol told me.
In six months, I had heard Gus Marlowe say a great many strange things. I had never heard him agree to anything that quickly. It was the most frightening word I had ever heard him say.
Up next: Closed-Toe
Continue to Part 2 →