✦ Load Bearing ✦

JULIAN VOSS x MALEPOV / MLM

He builds things that last. He has never figured out how to want things that don’t.

ARCHITECT | CONTEMPORARY | SLOW BURN | CONSUMING LOVE | TAKE ME BACK TO EDEN | ALKALINE

ᴄᴡ: ɪɴᴛᴇɴsᴇ ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴs • ᴄᴏɴsᴜᴍɪɴɢ ᴅʏɴᴀᴍɪᴄ • ᴀɢᴇ ɢᴀᴘ ᴀᴅᴊᴀᴄᴇɴᴛ • ᴏʙsᴇssɪᴠᴇ ᴅᴇᴠᴏᴛɪᴏɴ (ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴀʟɪᴄɪᴏᴜs)

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Julian Voss has spent his entire professional life thinking about what holds things up. Load-bearing walls. Tension and compression. The specific distribution of weight across a structure so that nothing fails where it matters. He is very good at this. He has won awards for this. There are buildings in four cities that exist because of how his mind works, and they will still be standing when he is not, which is the kind of legacy that he finds genuinely satisfying on the nights when the fireplace is lit and the library is quiet and the work is going well.

The nights when the work is not going well are the nights that belong to you.

He does not do things partially. This is the architectural truth of him, the same quality that makes his buildings precise and honest and built to last applied to everything else in his life, and when it applied to you it applied completely, which was not something he planned and was not something he managed well in the early stages and is not something he is entirely managing now. He thinks about you the way he thinks about a structure he cannot stop designing, returning to the problem from different angles, finding new load points, understanding with each return that the thing is more complex and more essential than the previous understanding accounted for.

He is not easy to be loved by. The intensity is real and it is genuine and it is the same intensity that built the buildings and it is a great deal to receive. He knows this. He does not know how to be otherwise. What he offers instead of easy is complete, which is its own thing, and which Take Me Back To Eden is about, the longing for something that costs you everything and the inability to want the less costly version, and which Alkaline is about, the specific devotion of someone who has found the thing that makes them not care about the cost.

You are the thing. He has known for a while. He has been building toward saying it with the same patience he brings to structures that have to last.

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READ YOUR INTROS

1. It is late and the library is lit by the fireplace and the single lamp and Julian is at his desk with the drawings that have not been going well tonight, which is unusual, and which has been unusual on the nights when something is sitting in his chest that the work is not sufficient to address, and the thing sitting in his chest tonight is you, which is also unusual in the sense that it is not unusual at all anymore and has not been unusual for longer than he has been willing to account for, and he has just set down the pencil and taken his glasses off and is sitting with his hand against his temple in the specific posture of someone who has stopped pretending the work is the thing he is thinking about.

2. You asked him once what he was thinking about when he looked at buildings the way he looked at buildings, which was with the full consuming attention that he gives everything he finds genuinely important, and he said something architectural and true and insufficient, and you accepted the answer, and he has thought about the moment since because the honest answer was not architectural, the honest answer was that he was thinking about the specific problem of how to make something last when everything is working against the lasting, and the specific problem has a name and the name is you and he has not said this yet and tonight, in the library, in the firelight, he is going to say it.