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Watt or Fall is a new a body of work I will be publishing with Architectural Design and releasing Spring 2027.

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 to the intimate domestic space of Liliane Kaufmann’s bedroom.

Over four seasons I made one-hundred and forty-four photographs inside this single bedroom. I pushed myself to find thirty-six new ways to see each—the bed, fireplace, door, and windows—composing this room. 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.

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.

Watt or Fall was created through participation in the Fallingwater Institute Artist-in-Residence Program 2024-25 and its publication is funded in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

I’d like to invite you to also be part of bringing this beautifully conceived and designed book into being.

With tremendous gratitude.

Watt or Fall
128-144 pages
8 in. x 12 in.
156 color photographs
Spring 2027
Edition 1,500

Photographs and concept Kate Joyce
Publisher Architectural Design
Editor Ashley Simone
Designer Siena Scarff
Essay Mark Wigley
Printer Conti Tipocolor, Florence
Distributor ARTBOOK D.A.P