As with many architectural projects, there was a competition first.

There was a jury. There were finalists — 11 in all.

The jury chose not one but two designs, and asked if they could be combined.

All this thinking, planning and drawing-board time was not for a big new skyscraper. It was for a home for three peacocks.

The three, Jim, Phil and Harry, live on the 13-acre grounds of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. They take the world on their terms. They do not like to be touched but they like to be watched, so much so that they have been known to station themselves in a doorway of the adjacent Cathedral School. Such showoffishness takes longer than the animated peacocks took in the “brought to you in living color” promos on television, back when living color was still a novelty.

Peacocks have lived on the cathedral grounds since the 1980s, ever since the Bronx Zoo donated some chicks. Jim, Phil and Harry arrived about 15 years ago.