Chapter 77
Elise graduated from the University of the West Indies School of Architecture with the highest marks of her cohort and a thesis project that her supervisor described as among the ten best she had reviewed in her career.
The thesis was about informal urbanism in Kingston about the intelligence of improvised spaces, the community garden and market structures that had evolved without formal planning, the spatial genius of people who built what they needed from what they had.
She had been thinking about it, Marcus understood, since she was three years old drawing yards at the back of his classroom.
She joined an architecture firm for two years and then went out on her own at twenty-six, which terrified Marcus slightly and which Nia regarded as completely natural.
'She watched me do it,' Nia said. 'She knew it was possible. It was always going to be when, not if.'
Elise's practice specialized in community design not grand commissions, not prestige projects, but the design of functional, beautiful, community-serving spaces in under-resourced neighbourhoods. She worked with housing associations, with schools, with community groups. She applied for grants and wrote proposals and negotiated with local government with the same persistence her mother had brought to the Trench Town space, which was now in its eighteenth year and had been replicated in three other neighbourhoods.
Marcus watched his daughter build her practice. He gave advice when asked, which was rarely, because she did not often need advice so much as confirmation that she was on the right track, which she almost always was.
'You knew this is what she would do,' Marcus said to Nia one evening.
'I always knew,' Nia said.
'How?'
'Because she's both of us,' Nia said. 'Your ability to see what people need. My ability to build the spatial response to it. She got both.' She looked at Marcus. 'We made her well.'
'We did,' he said.
He held that. He would hold it for years.