Issue 13 ·
Move Your Chair
Rain dripped on the client's head at dinner. Wright told him to move his chair.
Living on a building site is a special kind of misery, and this week a client of mine is doing it in paradise. There's a leak in the existing balcony of a house I'm extending, dripping off the soffit beneath, and the only way to find it is to rip up the decking above. Water never shows up where it gets in; it travels, then announces itself somewhere nobody thought to look. So the deck comes up. Remedial work, the trade calls it. It doesn't photograph well. It might be the truest work in architecture.
On paper this month is a brag: a tropical house, a set of additions I care about, photographs arriving every morning. In practice the house has been reduced to a building site with a family living inside it. Dust sheets decide where breakfast happens. Every flat surface holds somebody else's tools. The decking they want to be sitting on with a coffee is the decking coming up in the morning. Paradise, under repair.
Frank Lloyd Wright chose this misery, for forty-eight years. Taliesin, the house he built for himself in Wisconsin in 1911, burned down twice, was rebuilt twice, and he kept altering it for the rest of his life, sleeping in it the whole time, never once calling it finished. His roofs leaked too. All of them, more or less. Fallingwater leaked so reliably that Edgar Kaufmann is said to have called it a seven-bucket building. And when Herbert Johnson rang mid dinner party to say water was dripping on his head at the table, Wright's answer survived seventy years: "Well, Hib, why don't you move your chair?"
It reads as arrogance. I've started reading it as the only sane response of a man who spent five decades living in his own building site: the leak is real, dinner is also real, and both can be true until morning. The finished photograph is a lie every project tells about itself. The lived version has dust sheets, a drip you can hear from the bedroom, and decking coming up at eight tomorrow. Sometimes that's the job. You live in the unfinished thing, because the unfinished thing is where the work gets done.
And when the rain finds its way in, move your chair.
See you next week,
Danny