Julian's Choice

The eleventh of January was thirty-four degrees by nine in the morning, and the Design Review Panel met in a council chamber with air conditioning that had been installed in 1987 and had opinions.

Meera was not client-facing. Meera sat in the third row of the public gallery in a linen jacket she had bought specifically so that she would not look like a woman who had been stood down, and watched Odette Frame stand up to defend her roof.

Odette was magnificent for nine minutes and then a panel member asked about the wind loading on the north terrace planting, and Odette — who had read the file, who had read it twice — said, “I’d need to take that on notice.”

Meera closed her eyes.

It was not incompetence. It was the thing nobody outside a practice ever understands, which is that a drawing has a hundred small…