#van der rohe | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

byenycfm · 23 days ago

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Scout Van Der Rohe || 26 || Sophie Thatcher || Engineer US Army

Personality:

discipline, discipline. that was the way, the only way, the van der rohe way. scout was a third generation architect, taking classes in the building that was named after her grandfather, walking through the halls her father built. they only knew one way: brutalist. though it would eventually be changed to modernist, the concrete walls accented with soft wood and wide glass panes. if there is a lesson to learn from such a softening, scout has yet to understand. all she does know is that it changed her from the inside out. a change so gruesome it left her with a scar across her throat and an inability to talk about her mother.

all that rests on her shoulders, and yet she comes across as quiet, collected, and calm. there seems to be nothing that can truly ruffle her, belayed by moments of complete outburst and meltdown. the world caves in when not properly regulated, medicated, or ordered in the particularities that the van der rohe inheritance has aligned. for scout it is an internal violence, something that turns completely inwards and implodes, it finds outlets in ways that people disapprove of. they cannot imagine it might have been external violence, she too does her best to ignore if it might be one day.

Biography:

scout van der rohe was born to name alone, and alone she would be for her entire life. the only child of elias junior and noemi van der rohe, she was beloved for what she meant to the arts community. her father was a second generation architect, with a firm niche in the world of architecture. and her mother had worked up from pianist to conductor of the toronto symphony orchestra, spending her entire career on the grandest pieces to be brought to stage. only those two could produce a child with a natural predilection for the humanities, a perfect blend of all of the arts. each child was intended to be a genius just the same as their parents. but there was only scout, there was never a second. not even the son which might have carried on a name so beautiful, so crucial. each person had their ideas for why it might have happened, but they didn’t say, not in the presence of the little girl who had to shoulder it regardless of the answer.

what others assumed had to be generational wealth was nothing more than history, pushed along by completed jobs and the naming of another center. her grandfather had famously shirked his salary rather than let his designs be altered, and he demanded the same level of commitment from his son. it left them with a legacy, a loyal following, with nothing more than recognition alongside a handful of other innovators in the field. what was an art exhibition to a month’s rent, who could dictate eternity in dollar amounts. they were about more than that, and she had to be greater than the sum of humanity’s parts. her relationship to this idea, and her grandfather was tense at first. he remained hesitant to see if she had the talent that had been so wrought from nothing in his own lifetime. he had come up from a few buildings in europe to this grand moment, where he looked down at cherubic cheeks and wide eyes, and had to decide if it would be enough. but once she had her grandfather’s blessing and more— far more than she wanted from him, she was let in on the secrets that made them so great.

she remembered the day that her mother woke her to tell her that elias senior had passed, the relief that flooded through her. to know she would not have to spend any more time in his cold home, his sparse drawing room. but her life did not change drastically enough, the path was set for his son, his tiny granddaughter even after he was in the ground. they moved into that cold home, the pine drawing table became her father’s to finish all the creations that needed a brutal touch. their only reprieve was travel. the residencies and the galas, the opening nights and six-month stays in towns that respected art and culture. scout became well-travelled quickly, vying for her own hotel rooms and her privacy in the small towns of germany and italy which requested architects and conductors for their legacies and renown.

her father had always known that there was only one way to keep a roof over his family’s head, no matter how small the project. but more importantly, he knew there was only one way to make sure that the history books never forgot the contributions he and his father made for this great nation. the buildings would stand long after all of them had gone to grave, and he refused to let a single one be unlabelled. here is the bank that elias van der rohe designed, here is the community center that the junior supervised brick by brick. here are the floors made up of bones and blood and sweat and tears. and here was the body, cast in concrete, buried and hidden away for those not clever enough to know where to look. an old trick, passed on from father to son— and eventually to daughter.

she went to college as dictated, a few years where she did not walk the white halls of the family home. she hand sketched each design with pencil and ruler as her grandfather had done for years as she watched, sat on his knee. she graduated with honors and an internship at the one place that she knew she must accept. after all, the company would be hers one day, and there was plenty left to learn that a college degree could not show. her father was sure to teach her quickly what it really took, after all this time there would be no one left to show.

it was lockstep with each design, the need for control, perfection, balance and symmetry. those who were in the way must be adjusted or removed completely. she couldn’t say when she knew that the legacy of a van der rohe was not merely in architecture but in murder. there was suddenly just a day when she saw her father push an intern into a closet for later, and a day when he asked her if she really knew what it meant to inherit the family legacy, all of it, unending in responsibility. of course, one it was there, she could see it everywhere. each sharp edge and unpolished step was made for injury just as much as it was for function. the buildings were built for so much more than she had considered, and so much more than she wanted in this life. she didn’t let the secret go, she held tight to it, but that didn’t mean that fate was done with the knowledge.

the fbi found the first body in the first presbyterian church in new hope pennsylvania, as it was undergoing renovations to make office space. interpol found the last bleeding out on the toronto philharmonic stage. it had seemed for days like the walls were closing in on them all, a tension at the dinner table of performance anxiety, and was in fact much more. her mother had asked her to join her at the dress rehearsal of the latest concerto, a residency that had been years in the making, and finally would come to fruition. and there, elias van der rohe jr. had charged on stage with the knife outstretched and stabbed his wife of twenty years. there he stood in crimson glory before anyone could claim to know what he did or didn’t do, what he wanted with the world writ large.

she wished she could have saved her mother, but she was barely able to save herself. the violence had left her paralyzed, a dawning connection between each and every. her father called her on stage, and she had a fleeting moment of the spotlights her mother so loved, the attention that her father craved. and then the knife was at her neck, her blood covered the stage in a stain that they wouldn’t be able to completely scrub out. even now, after everything, there is a pink tinge under the hottest lights. but she survived somehow, her neck held by an officer who didn’t let go until she was in surgery. she survived, on kindess she couldn’t extend another, on something she didn’t even fully understand.

once she was cleared from physicals and therapy, when she had moved everything to a storage unit, unable to sell what one day might be evidence, she only knew she wanted to get out. she had to. there was some way to step away from this lineage of the brutal, the triaged. with a high profile in art circles, and a lack of funding throughout, she only had a few options to consider. and finally, it seemed possible through the military. who could deny service to the country that had taken them in all those years ago. and the write-off on the degree that would have otherwise taken her years to pay off if she had stepped into something other than her father’s legacy. the army called her a civil engineer and refused anything other than the most practical solutions to their problems. of course, those somehow also ended up being brutal, in the most roundabout of ways. still, service was good for her in as many ways as it was bad. the order, the discipline, keeping her focused on the task at hand and not the bloody past or the stormy future. it came with the nicknames, the jokes, the tasteless photos, and those who wanted to test if she was her father’s daughter.

she’d been in canada when the outbreak hit, sending a ripple so far up the region that it had been it was lucky that santiago was as close has he had been. he’d given her a point man in the sudden chaos. otherwise, scout would have just been a gun and nothing more, a loose cannon of confusion and misdirection. she didn’t even think to try and make it back down to the united states until he set the course. this last drastic shift in her life has left her unsettled, unable to logically think through a daily schedule unless she’s given direction. luckily for her, her family made sure that she had skills which would be indispensable to a world that had crumbled. only she was capable of rebuilding from scraps and the most basic of ingredients. only she could hang on to the last of her sanity with white-knuckled fierceness.

Special Skills:

architecture, civil engineering, electrical wiring, infrastructure maintenance, basic water resource management.

Connections:

gray gardner: the two of them don’t know, but they’ve got quite a lot in common including half of their dna. while noemi’s first family was but a brief detour on her path to orchestral success, she did give birth to gray. her parents were quick to annul her marriage and move the baby to a different home before she had a chance to decide for herself. it was only a few years later that she was married to elias, and the rest is history. though, there would forever be the lurking reminder of the son she had given up, the one person in the world who might have understood her little daughter.

santiago diaz munoz: when the outbreak hit in canada, she knew a little about how to survive. but she knew nothing about direction or duration, or how it would even be possible. santiago pulled her from the ruins of the philharmonic building and the two of them made up the foundation of the group that would eventually make its way down to new york. she trusts him with her life, although she’s unsure exactly how long they should be staying in this building.

anora horowitz: she’d always been cautious of romantic relationships. when she was younger, it had been a matter of scheduling. there was no way to keep track of everything that she needed to do (needed to be) if there was love on the line. but once her parents were dead, she’d been searching for something to tether her to this reality. and it turned out anora was looking for something fun to poke at: a serial killer’s daughter in the palm of her hands. needless to say, the relationship didn’t last.

#van der rohe #closed #chara #immune

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