Half-Imagined Edifices

The term Half-Imagined Edifice denotes a structure within the Tower that has been conceived in full but built only partially, and whose standing is consequently disputed between the offices that catalogue what exists and the offices that catalogue what has been decided. The class is distinct from that administered under Guild of Latent Structures, which concerns structures that are complete but whose function is not manifest at inspection; a Half-Imagined Edifice is incomplete in its fabric and entirely manifest in its intention. It is also distinct from the provisional forms held at Floor 709, The Gallery of Half-Ideas, which have never been committed to stone at all. The Registry of Partial Fabric, which maintains the class, records 1,914 standing instances as of the 44th Spiral, of which 211 are occupied.

Definition and the threshold of fabrication

An edifice enters the class at the moment its foundation courses are laid and its elevation has been drawn to at least third revision. Both conditions are required. A drawing without a trench is a proposal; a trench without a drawing is a hole, and holes are administered separately by the Office of Excavated Ground, which resents the comparison.

The Registry distinguishes three degrees. A first-degree edifice has foundations and no more than two courses of wall. A second-degree edifice stands to a partial elevation, with openings roughed in but no lintels set. A third-degree edifice is roofed over some portion of its plan and unroofed over the remainder, and is the only degree for which occupancy is permitted, under a licence renewable at each change of season.

Dispute over where the class begins has run since the ratification of Addendum 12 in the latter half of the Third Cataloguing Cycle. The Synod of Precise Meaning holds that Half-Imagined status begins at the application of the Registry's stamp to the elevation, and not at the laying of the first course; the Verificationists hold the reverse, arguing that a stamp applied to a drawing cannot confer standing on stone that does not yet exist. The Concordance 34 appears to support the Synod; its Fourth Annex, added eleven years later, supports the Verificationists. Both readings are currently cited in the same intake disputes, occasionally by the same clerk in the same afternoon.

Administration and the dual seal

No alteration to a Half-Imagined Edifice may be entered in the Master Ledger of Edifices without dual authorization, one seal from the Registry of Partial Fabric and one from the Progressive Indexing Guild. The requirement dates from the Schism of the Mirror Catalogue, when it was discovered that two offices had for six years been recording the same half-built stairwell under two different designations, each convinced the other's version was the phantom.

In practice the second seal is slow. The Guild's representative on the eastern stair circuit is required to inspect the fabric in person, and the fabric of a second-degree edifice is frequently the fabric of a wall that was taken down the previous winter for reasons the Registry did not record. The standing instruction to Guild representatives is to inspect at dawn and to carry a plumb line of not less than nine feet; the register of inspections abandoned for want of adequate daylight occupies four folios and is consulted by no one.

"Where an edifice is half-imagined, the half that is built shall not be presumed to govern the half that is not, nor the reverse; the Registry shall hold both in equal repair."

— Second Concordance, Annex 11, clause 2

The Ashmere dispute

The class's most cited case concerns the Ashmere Stair, a third-degree edifice on the western landings completed in the winter of the 431st Cycle to the second gallery and uncompleted thereafter, its upper flights remaining on the drawing-board of the mason Halloway Rusk until his death. Rusk's estate claimed the building was finished in intention and merely unbuilt in fact, and petitioned for full registration. The Registry refused, on the ground that intention is not a course of stone.

The dispute was still open when the stair was pressed into use as a route to the Calibration Annex, whose own approaches had been closed for the sounding season. For nine years the Ashmere Stair carried traffic to a partial third gallery that itself led nowhere, and the situation was resolved not by ruling but by the Annex's relocation in the following Spiral. The stair retains its classification. It is swept every second Thursday.

Relation to other classes

Half-Imagined Edifices are sometimes confused with the material handled at Half-Processed Intake, but the confusion is administrative rather than substantive: intake concerns documents whose processing is suspended, while an edifice in this class is suspended in stone. The two classes do share a boundary in the Inquiry into Latent Manifold Events, which convened in the 39th Spiral to establish whether a half-built structure generates a latent manifold of the unbuilt portion. The Inquiry returned an inventory of 33 elevations and no conclusion, which the Registry has adopted as its working position.

The Guild of Stonewrights and Measurers has twice petitioned to have the class abolished on the ground that it licenses poor workmanship by giving it a category. The petition of the 437th Cycle was refused by reference to the Concordance 308, whose language the Guild's own secretary had drafted and later described in a private note as "not what I meant." That note is not in the Ledger and its citation is disputed.

Inventory of standing instances, selected

The Registry's summary folio for the 44th Spiral lists, among others:

• The Ashmere Stair, western landings — third-degree, occupied, unroofed above the second gallery.
• The Rill Bastion, lower eastern approaches — second-degree, unoccupied since the sounding season, lintels never set.
• The Pellow Arcade, eleven bays of a projected thirty — first-degree, foundations only, licensed for storage of the bays not built.

First-degree instances are inspected once per Spiral and, where no change is found, are re-stamped in place without further record. The stamp itself is applied to the foundation course, in the northwest corner, beneath the level of the floor.