My visit with Inga yesterday

[pegkerr]

I am grateful to Inga; she generously gave me two and a half hours of her time, which was really extraordinarily generous.

She gave me a tour of her office. Her architectural firm is quite large (I think she said about three hundred employees), which gave me a good opportunity to see many different types of arrangements and departments, more than I might have seen had her firm been smaller. I had brought the questions I'd prepared for her, but actually, I found it even more helpful-and certainly fascinating--to simply trail along in her wake as she showed me around and answered my questions. She showed me her desk and demonstrated the autocad program on her computer. She showed me the resource centers, the model-making workshop, the print room, and explained a smattering of her specialized professional vocabulary. (I took pages of notes, which look rather like chicken scratches to me, but they helped focus as I tried to absorb the huge amount of information she was giving me, and they will serve as a mnemonic device.)

The most charming detail of the day was the name for that semi-transparent tracing paper they use for overlays all the time when sketching architectural plans: bumwad.

Then we went to lunch, and we just talked. She was very engaging and friendly, and pleased to answer anything I could come up with. She also told me that I should feel free to contact her with further questions, or even visit her office again if I liked.

One hitch: she suggested that the timeline I'd tentatively set for the ice palace, from the point that the firm announces it has won the contest to the point that the palace gets built is too long. It would be more likely that the announcement might be made three months in advance, rather than six. So . . . at what point do I begin the book, then? Is all the summer magic stuff necessary? Must think further about what Jack's role might be. She suggested there might be two design members of the team, and one engineer. So should Jack be the other designer, or the engineer? (If Solveig's in her early thirties, she might not be considered senior enough to be the designer of a project like this on her own? Presumably, she wouldn't be the senior member of the design team.) And if he's the engineer, what role would the other designer have in the story?

Inga also indicated that Solveig might have to struggle a bit both in terms of income and in terms of the hours she has to keep, raising a child by herself at this early stage of her career.

Lots to think about and absorb.

Peg

Comments

Noodling on that

[papersky.livejournal.com]

How about if there's an older designer who has been Solveig's mentor to some extent, a kind of in a way replacement father figure, and he's in charge of the project but he let her do the design, as part of the mentoring, but she's aware he'll check any mistakes and be a backstop and so on, and Jack is the engineer. Then as it goes on, something happens to the mentor designer -- illness, cold, something plot fittingly relevant like that, so that she has to do it entirely on her own with Jack, where she was expecting fatherly protection/rescue?

In some ways, if her father died saving her and Ingrid's father is the villain, you have to deal with the absence of fathers, and that could be another way of connecting that up?

As for the timing, do you need the summer magic in this novel? Maybe you could leave the summer things for another time and concentrate on winter?

Ice Palace Timeframe

[(Anonymous)]

I verified my information with a couple of people, who were actually involved in the Ice Palace of '86: the competition for the design of the palace was announced sometime in the previous summer, probably, with the end of summer submission date. Then the design work would have been done through the summer, with some consulting involvement from the structural engineer. After the entries were submitted, you need some time for the decision from the jury panel on who the winner would be, so that announcement would have been sometime in early autumn with subsequent work on production drawings (construction documents) through the fall... You would have a lot more close work involvement within the architectural design team, rather than with the structural, who really would not have been participating much until the fall. The actual construction of the Palace was 3-4 weeks just before the Winter Carnival.
Hope this helps! Take care.
Inga