BRICK BY BRICK

ON HOUSES THAT WENT ELSEWHERE

MARTINA WAYWARD

August 5, 2026

Architecture is supposed to stay put. Instead, houses cross oceans, temples climb mountains, monasteries are assembled from spare parts, and entire villages turn up somewhere they have never been before. Beginning with a Frank Lloyd Wright room stranded inside the Metropolitan Museum, we consider what happens when architecture survives by leaving home, and what, inevitably, gets left behind.

---

There is a room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that belongs to a house that no longer exists. It is a large, long room, low and horizontal, with oak furniture, leaded-glass windows, built-in shelves, and a ceiling that seems determined to keep everything close to the earth. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1912 and 1914 for Francis W. Little, a lawyer and businessman from Minnesota, and his wife, Mary. The Littles’ house stood on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, west of Minneapolis. The room now exists on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The Francis W. Little House living room in its original setting, Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota. Same room, considerably better view. 

One does not immediately experience this as strange. Museums are exceptionally good at making strange things seem normal. We accept an Egyptian temple overlooking Central Park, a Spanish choir screen a few galleries away from an American silver collection, a bedroom from eighteenth-century France adjoining a corridor filled with people carrying shopping bags. The museum has trained us to believe that anything can be moved, provided that it is moved carefully enough.

The living room of the Francis W. Little House is particularly convincing. You enter it rather than look at it. This distinction matters. Paintings hang before us; sculptures stand in front of us; the room receives us. Wright designed nearly everything—the windows, furniture, lighting, shelving, surfaces—and the result retains the peculiar authority of architecture. It does not quite feel like an exhibit. And yet almost everything that made it architecture has disappeared.

The house for which the room was designed was demolished in 1971. Parts were saved and distributed among museums. The Metropolitan Museum received the living room; other architectural elements went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Allentown Art Museum. The body was divided among institutions, rather like the relics of a saint. What survives in New York is therefore both extraordinarily complete and radically incomplete: an intact room amputated from its house.

More importantly, it has been amputated from Minnesota. Wright’s architecture insisted obsessively upon the relationship between building and site. The Little House stretched horizontally along its wooded property. Its windows did not simply admit light; they framed a particular landscape. Its terraces extended the building toward that landscape. Interior, exterior, furniture, architecture, and nature were conceived as parts of one organism. The Metropolitan Museum saved the room by violating precisely this idea. Perhaps this is why it is such a useful place from which to begin thinking about what happens when architecture moves.

The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. The paintings moved, the arrangements moved, even the dimensions moved. The building was asked to stay home.

Architecture is supposed to be an immovable art. Paintings have always traveled. Statues have traveled, willingly or otherwise, since antiquity. Furniture moves by definition. The museum itself depends upon the assumption that objects can be detached from the circumstances in which they were made and placed somewhere else without entirely losing their identities. A Titian remains a Titian whether it hangs in Venice, Madrid, or New York. A building would seem to present a different problem. Its location appears to be part of what it is. Notre-Dame without Paris is difficult to imagine, as is Fallingwater without the stream running underneath it. Architecture gives coordinates to other things while possessing coordinates of its own. Except that buildings move.

They move more frequently, and in stranger ways, than we tend to notice. Sometimes they travel whole. Sometimes they are cut into pieces, numbered, packed into crates, and assembled again thousands of miles away. Sometimes only a room survives. Sometimes pieces of many buildings are combined to manufacture a building that never existed. Sometimes an entire village is assembled from houses that previously stood hundreds of miles apart. Sometimes the original architecture has disappeared entirely and is reconstructed from archaeological evidence. And occasionally, when a monument is considered important enough, even the mountain around it is re-created. Each operation preserves something. Each also destroys something. Together they reveal that architecture is considerably less stable than it likes to pretend.

Albert C. Barnes among his ensembles. A man who arranged Cézannes, hinges, Renoirs, and African sculpture and expected posterity not to touch anything.

There is an almost perfect inverse of the Francis Little room in Philadelphia. When the Barnes Foundation left its original home in Merion for a new building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012, the old galleries did not move. Their dimensions did. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the new museum around a sequence of rooms reproducing the scale, proportions, and configuration of Paul Philippe Cret’s original galleries, while Albert C. Barnes’s famously idiosyncratic ensembles—the Renoirs and Cézannes, African sculpture, Pennsylvania German furniture, door hinges, wrought-iron implements—were reinstalled as he had arranged them. The original building still stands in Merion, emptied of the collection for which it was designed, while something uncannily like its interior now exists in Philadelphia. If the Metropolitan Museum moved Wright’s room by preserving its material and abandoning its site, the Barnes accomplished the opposite: The walls stayed behind while their measurements, contents, and relationships traveled. Nothing architectural was literally transported, and yet anyone who knew the old Barnes immediately recognizes the new one. It raises an even more unsettling possibility: Perhaps a room does not reside primarily in its walls. Perhaps its identity can lie in distances and proportions, in the position of one object beside another, in the choreography by which a body moves through space. The Barnes did not move a building. It moved a set of relationships.

Agecroft Hall, Richmond, Virginia. An English Tudor manor discovers that the New World is apparently within its delivery radius.

The simplest case would seem to be the house that changes address. In the 1920s, Agecroft Hall, a Tudor manor house near Manchester, found itself in surroundings that its builders could hardly have imagined. Industrial development had transformed the landscape around it, coal mining had damaged the property, and the house was sold at auction. An American businessman, Thomas C. Williams Jr., bought it and decided that Agecroft should continue its life in Virginia. The house was dismantled, and its components were transported across the Atlantic and reconstructed overlooking the James River in Richmond.

“Reconstructed” is important. Agecroft was not simply rebuilt stone for stone in precisely its previous form. Its Virginia incarnation was adapted, rearranged, and equipped for twentieth-century American life. What arrived in Richmond was simultaneously an old English house and a new American one.

There is something appealingly literal about such architectural migration. The building behaves like an enormous piece of furniture. Take it apart, pack it, ship it, put it together again. Frank Lloyd Wright himself has undergone this treatment. The Bachman-Wilson House, designed in 1954 and built in New Jersey, stood beside the Millstone River and was repeatedly threatened by flooding. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art acquired it in 2013. The house was dismantled, transported more than a thousand miles to Bentonville, Arkansas, and reconstructed on the museum grounds. The operation saved the building. But it introduces the question already encountered at the Met: What exactly was saved?

Agecroft Hall before emigration. Lancashire, back when the house still had a British address.

The Bachman-Wilson House still possesses its walls, windows, proportions, and materials. Unlike the Little living room, it even remains a house. What it no longer possesses is New Jersey. The river that threatened to destroy it was also part of the circumstances in which it existed. This is the first bargain architectural preservation makes with movement: The building may survive if the place is sacrificed.

There are grander examples. The most spectacular is Abu Simbel.

Abu Simbel, Egypt. Four colossal Ramesses IIs, apparently exactly where they have always been. They are not.

In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to submerge the ancient temples built by Ramesses II in the thirteenth century BCE. An international UNESCO campaign undertook an operation so extraordinary that it sounds like a fable. The temples were cut into enormous blocks, removed, and reconstructed on higher ground. But Abu Simbel presented a problem that Agecroft did not. The temples were carved into a mountainside. One could not simply move the facade and statues and place them on a concrete platform. The mountain was part of the architecture. So the landscape moved too—or, more precisely, another landscape was constructed to impersonate it.

The temples now occupy an artificial hill built above their original location. The colossal figures of Ramesses II appear to sit where they always have sat, looking toward a landscape that appears ancient and permanent. But the permanence is an illusion produced by one of the most ambitious acts of architectural relocation ever attempted. At Agecroft, the house moved. At Abu Simbel, reality moved.

The relocation of Abu Simbel, 1960s. When preservation requires cranes, concrete, and moving a pharaoh in pieces.

The Francis Little living room represents a more melancholy species of survival. Here the building did not travel. It died, and something was extracted from it. We call them period rooms. The phrase is wonderfully innocuous. It disguises an operation that, described differently, sounds almost barbaric. Paneling is removed. Ceilings are taken down. Fireplaces are extracted. Doors, windows, moldings, and floors are detached. Everything is numbered and transported. The components are then assembled inside another building, often on another continent, and furnished with objects of approximately the appropriate date. We walk through the resulting room and say: France, 1760.

But what exactly are we looking at? The room may contain genuine eighteenth-century paneling, a genuine fireplace, genuine furniture, and genuine paintings. Yet its windows no longer look onto the street or garden for which they were made. Its doors lead nowhere they originally led. Its ceiling covers a museum ventilation system. Beyond its walls may be medieval armor, or a cafeteria. The Francis Little room intensifies the problem because Wright’s architecture makes such dislocation especially perverse. A Rococo salon can perhaps more easily be treated as a decorative ensemble, whereas Wright wanted the room to be inseparable from the house, and the house inseparable from the land. The Met’s preservation therefore resembles an anatomical specimen: The organ remains astonishingly alive after the body has disappeared. There is an irony here. Had the museum refused to violate Wright’s principles, we might have nothing. Purity would have destroyed the room. Compromise saved it.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House, Crystal Bridges, Arkansas. Saved from a New Jersey river by moving to Arkansas. Architecture occasionally benefits from running away from its problems.

Perhaps this is why architectural preservation so often produces objects that hover uneasily between corpse and resurrection. We know that something has been lost, but we cannot deny that something remains.

A stranger operation occurs at the northern end of Manhattan. The Cloisters feels ancient. This is one of its great achievements. You enter courtyards surrounded by carved columns. You walk through Romanesque doorways, encounter Gothic windows, pass stone walls and chapels. The Hudson appears beyond the building and, with sufficient imagination, the George Washington Bridge can be temporarily ignored. Yet there was never a medieval monastery called the Cloisters. Its architectural elements came from different places: Capitals, columns, doorways, windows, and other fragments were transported from French monasteries to New York and incorporated into a twentieth-century museum building. Authentic pieces of medieval architecture assembled into an architectural totality that is not itself medieval. This produces a beautiful paradox: The parts are old, and the whole is new.

The Cloisters, New York. An authentic medieval monastery, apart from the minor detail that no such monastery ever existed.

George Grey Barnard had begun the process even more eccentrically with his earlier collection of medieval fragments. John D. Rockefeller Jr. subsequently acquired Barnard’s collection for the Metropolitan Museum, and the present Cloisters opened in 1938. The result raises a different question from Agecroft. We no longer ask whether a building remains itself after moving. There was no original building to remain itself. Instead, we ask whether authentic fragments can confer authenticity upon an invented whole.

Isabella Stewart Gardner supplied another answer in Boston. Fenway Court, the building now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was completed at the beginning of the twentieth century. It evokes a Venetian palace organized around a spectacular courtyard. Gardner filled it with paintings and sculptures and architectural fragments: columns, balustrades, windows, doorways, and pieces of European buildings absorbed into the fabric of her own. Nothing about this was archaeological reconstruction. Gardner was not trying to re-create a particular Venetian palazzo. She was constructing something more personal and more peculiar: a memory of Europe built in Boston out of pieces of Europe. Here the distinction between collection and architecture collapses. A column is simultaneously an object Gardner collected and a column holding up her building. A window is an artifact and a window. The museum itself becomes perhaps the largest object in the collection.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Venice, reconstructed from memory, money, architectural fragments, and an impressive refusal to exercise restraint.

The Cloisters and the Gardner suggest that architecture can travel not only by moving buildings but by moving fragments of buildings, and that these fragments can acquire second lives entirely unrelated to their first. There is something almost culinary about it. Old buildings become ingredients. Once individual buildings can move, there is no reason to stop at one.

In Stockholm, Skansen perfected another form of architectural displacement. Founded by Artur Hazelius in 1891, it gathered houses, farmsteads, workshops, and other structures from different parts of Sweden and reassembled them on Djurgården. The result looks like a place. But it is a place assembled from other places. A farmhouse that once belonged to one landscape now stands near a workshop that belonged to another. Buildings separated by geography and sometimes chronology are now neighbors. Paths, fences, gardens, and human activities complete the illusion. Skansen became the model for open-air museums throughout Europe. The Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo assembled another extraordinary collection, including buildings from different regions of Norway and the medieval Gol Stave Church, likewise relocated from its original site.

In Yokohama, the collector and silk merchant Hara Sankei pursued something related but considerably more personal. Beginning in the early twentieth century, he brought historic buildings from different parts of Japan to Sankeien, the garden surrounding his residence. Teahouses, residences, and other structures from Kyoto, Kamakura, and elsewhere were dismantled and reconstructed within a landscape of ponds, paths, hills, and carefully composed views. Unlike Skansen, Sankeien does not quite present itself as a condensed representation of a nation. The displaced buildings instead become elements in a new composition. A seventeenth-century structure can acquire a new relationship to a pond, a path, or another building it never previously encountered. Among the later arrivals was the former Yanohara family residence, a large gassho-zukuri farmhouse from the Shirakawa region, moved to Sankeien in 1960 when dam construction threatened its original surroundings. Sankeien therefore occupies a curious position between museum, garden, and architectural collection. Buildings have both been saved there and have been made to belong to another landscape.

Sankeien, Yokohama. Historic Japanese buildings meet their new neighbors several centuries and hundreds of miles from home.

These museums perform a peculiar inversion. Normally, a place produces its architecture. Climate, materials, economy, custom, and history slowly generate buildings that accumulate into a town or landscape. At Skansen the architecture produces the place. At Sankeien something subtler happens: One place is composed out of memories of several others. The buildings arrive first. The landscape is then asked to make them belong together.

It is tempting to dismiss this as artificial, but all cities constantly perform less orderly versions of the same process. Buildings outlive their purposes. Streets change around them. Interiors are replaced. Facades survive while everything behind them disappears. Architecture is continually being asked to pretend that continuity exists where enormous changes have occurred. Skansen simply makes the fiction visible. Sankeien makes it beautiful.

Then there is Villa Kérylos. Standing above the Mediterranean at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a few kilometers east of Nice, it appears at first to belong to the same story. One imagines that perhaps some ancient villa was discovered, moved, or reconstructed there. Nothing of the kind happened. Villa Kérylos was built between 1902 and 1908 for Théodore Reinach, the French archaeologist, scholar, and politician, working with the architect Emmanuel Pontremoli. Reinach was fascinated by ancient Greece, and the house drew upon archaeological knowledge, particularly discoveries at Delos, to imagine what a sophisticated Greek domestic environment might have looked like. It is not an ancient Greek house. It is not precisely a copy of an ancient Greek house. It is a modern house imagining an ancient Greek house. That distinction makes Kérylos important to this story because here architecture learned to travel without moving any physical architecture at all. What traveled was knowledge. Measurements traveled. Archaeological drawings traveled. Decorative motifs traveled. Ideas about domestic life traveled. Ancient forms crossed more than two thousand years and arrived on the Côte d’Azur, where they encountered electricity, plumbing, and the requirements of a wealthy twentieth-century French household. (The Getty Villa in Malibu performs a related operation on a much larger institutional scale. Its architecture draws particularly upon the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The ancient villa remains where it was. Its archaeological ghost migrated to California.)

At Agecroft, material traveled. At the Met, a room traveled. At the Cloisters, fragments traveled. At Skansen, buildings traveled. At Kérylos, an idea of architecture traveled. Perhaps that is ultimately the easiest thing to move.

Architecture has always migrated this way. Greek columns reached Rome without requiring Greek temples to be dismantled. Palladio crossed the Atlantic in books. Japanese architecture entered European and American imaginations through photographs, prints, exhibitions, and descriptions. A building can reproduce without ever leaving home. Which makes the category of “moving architecture” increasingly difficult to contain. We tend to regard an original building as something obvious. It is that building over there. But these examples make that certainty increasingly difficult to maintain.

Villa Kérylos, Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Ancient Greece relocates to the Côte d’Azur two thousand years late and with considerably better plumbing.

Where is Agecroft Hall? In Virginia, presumably. Yet the Virginia building differs from the Lancashire building. If location formed part of Agecroft’s identity, then something called Agecroft disappeared in England while something else called Agecroft appeared in America. Where is the Francis Little House? Nowhere, and in three museums. Where is the medieval building represented by the Cloisters? There isn’t one.

Where is the ancient house represented by Kérylos? There never was one. And yet all of these places possess an extraordinary physical authority. One can stand inside them. Touch their walls. Walk through their doors. Moving architecture seems to survive its own logical impossibility surprisingly well. Perhaps we have been asking buildings to satisfy a standard of authenticity that we do not demand of ourselves.

People move constantly. We leave cities, countries, houses, and languages behind and continue to regard ourselves as ourselves. We accumulate new circumstances while retaining fragments of old ones. Memory rearranges the rest. Nobody expects a person who has moved from Vienna to New York to reproduce Vienna around himself in order to remain authentic. Buildings are granted less freedom. We imagine that their authenticity resides in a particular conjunction of material, design, location, and history. Disturb that conjunction, and anxiety begins.

But buildings have histories precisely because they change. They are extended, damaged, repaired, redecorated, bombed, rebuilt, neglected, modernized, and restored. A perfectly preserved building may be as artificial as a relocated one. Perhaps movement simply makes the instability impossible to ignore. Eventually one returns to the room at the Metropolitan Museum. It is still there, astonishingly calm.

The Francis Little House has disappeared. Lake Minnetonka is more than a thousand miles away. Visitors enter from a museum corridor. Guards watch from nearby. The controlled atmosphere protects materials that once endured Minnesota winters. And there are Wright’s windows. A window is a peculiar architectural object because half of its function belongs to something the architect does not make. An architect designs the frame, but the world supplies the view. Wright designed these windows for a particular place. Their glass, proportions, and rhythms belonged to an architectural composition extending outward toward trees, sky, and water. The museum could move the windows. It could not move what was outside them. That may be the limit around which all these stories circle. Architecture can be astonishingly portable. Stones can cross oceans. Houses can travel by truck. Rooms can survive their buildings. Monasteries can be assembled from fragments of other monasteries. Villages can be manufactured from displaced houses. Mountains can be reconstructed. Ancient Greece can arrive on the Riviera without moving a single ancient wall. Almost everything can be moved. But not everything arrives.

This does not make the effort futile. Quite the opposite. The Francis Little room is worth having precisely because it allows us to experience something that would otherwise have vanished. Abu Simbel’s artificial mountain is infinitely preferable to temples beneath a reservoir. Agecroft’s strange second life in Virginia is richer than demolition. The Cloisters may be a historical fiction, but it is an exceptionally productive one.

Preservation has never really meant stopping time. It means deciding what may be lost so that something else can remain. Museums understand this better than they sometimes admit. They are machines for displacement. Their collections consist overwhelmingly of things separated from the circumstances that once gave them meaning. The museum promises that meaning can survive the journey. Architecture merely makes the bargain harder to conceal. Perhaps that is why the Wright room remains so affecting. It does not pretend that the bargain was perfect. It is simultaneously a triumph of preservation and evidence of catastrophe. The room survived because the house did not.

Somewhere in Minnesota, there was once a moment when someone sitting inside that room could look through those windows and see Lake Minnetonka. The room is in New York now. The windows are there too. Only the view stayed behind.

Martina Wayward (born in Gibraltar in 1997) studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London. From 2007 to 2011, she worked on an unrealized proposal to relocate the Pyramid of Khafre from Giza to a traffic island in South London. The project was abandoned after concluding that the pyramid’s relationship to gravity had been fixed by the pharaohs and could no longer be renegotiated.

Cover image: Frank Lloyd Wright, Francis W. Little House living room, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The room made it to Fifth Avenue. Minnesota did not.