The Whiteley Building

It’s raining outside and you can hear it pattering, you can hear a lot of things. People talk while coffee machines vomit out their insides. Change makes noise, at least in plural as hands pass currency and continue on their way/get back to work. The place is decked out in stylistic furniture, white tables, white chairs, yellow chairs, bean bag-like seating. All the place is missing is a few egg chairs and perhaps a retro some sort, here or there.1

Sitting down to eat; a deli and a hot chocolate, listening to echoes and background ambience. Hearing workmen on drills and screwdrivers and looking round to the half finished balcony, half finished staircase, almost done entranceway and packaged away desks. Swallowing down the last of the hot chocolate, naturally staring at the roof. ETFE (Ethyl Tetra Fluoro Ethylene) as the project website said, monitoring its progress via webcam. You had watched its creation from birth and now found yourself inside; saw it flip outside-in, internal out of external. Watched the white girder-like support beams go up, now filtering out rainwater from their hollow ends. You saw the glorified foil laid out, instead of glass, an Eco-friendly Eden Project wannabe. Perhaps too harsh, couldn’t say it was bad, this atrium, this greenhouse, this half of a geometric dome, this Hub.2

I would’ve called it something else, I could’ve won that iPod in the naming competition, I’d probably sell it again, but either way make a profit. The one’s I had sent in were a bit basic, I had ‘The Glass House’, now a name rather redundant, ‘The Green House’, although I think it aspired to be more than a gardening centre and ‘The Atrium’. They went with none of these, they went with something else: ‘The Hub’. Looking back I knew I should’ve entered that other idea, one a friend and myself discussed at length: The Whiteley Building. After all we have the Richmond Building, the Horton Building, the Chesham Building, why not one named after the late Bradford born Richard Whiteley? It’d be adorned with pictures of him, we’d have an Andy Warhol on one end, a Hockney on the other, we’d dedicate the place to Countdown and have a dictionary corner in the corner. Given the lack of a clock in the place, we’d hang the Countdown one from the roof, after 30 seconds we’d get a bit lost, but it would’ve worked for the opening ceremony. Carol Vorderman cutting the red tape at the final bong of the ‘der-der-der der-der-der de-der der-der de-la der-der Bong!’ - Just a thought.3

Going off on tangents is an easy thing to do in a place like this. Collecting thoughts and ideas that spin round in your head, and off from walls and off from heads. Looking to your watch, reflecting the place around you, from high plastic roof to three tiered balcony and red lift adjoining. It’s cold on this morning/early afternoon and warm thoughts aren’t enough to heat the bloodstream. It’s a miserable 10-minute walk back to the house, but it has to be done. Wrappings go to bins, cups go to recyclables and you leave by the other exit, the one where steel railings don’t wait to block you off.4

Having left the place you now watch from a webcam again. It glows in blue and orange and purple, in kaleidoscopes and rainbows, it doesn’t make sounds now, it comes silent and muted and it uses colours to speak.5

‘‘I am’’