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The Project

Most buildings are experienced through their two-dimensional representations rather than in person, if at all. Emerging from a year-long residency at Fallingwater (designed 1935, built 1936–39) I embraced the unreasonable task of photographing a building that defies its visual representation. Informed by the writing of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)—whose entire oeuvre presents meditations on the defeat of reason—I limited my subject within the house exclusively to the intimate domestic space of Liliane Kaufmann’s bedroom.

Watt or Fall contributes to discussions about the photographic voice of architectural space. Bridging architecture and literature, interiority and exteriority—with Wright's insistence on living in nature and Beckett's insistence on living in language—I explore how nature, architecture, and language live in photography.

Concentrated into contiguous photographs, Beckett’s permutational language becomes a time-lapse of the infra-ordinary within Wright’s extraordinary creation. All rooms are witness to endless repetitions which language and photograph concentrate into unexpected patterns.