ARTICLE - Houses In Motion

I was recently asked if I would give a reading at a family wedding. Either a text I thought appropriate, or something I might write. No particular reading came immediately to mind, but an idea did. And though that idea felt at first a bit eccentric. and I wondered how appropriate it would be. I stuck to its intuitive logic, faithfully following that to see where this would end up. And I was actually really pleased with the result, and so did many of those present, judging by the positive feedback I got from them. So here it is.

HOUSES IN MOTION

The American architect Buckminster Fuller had an idea for a portable house. Hexagonal shaped with a hole in the middle, it resembled a geometric doughnut. And this doughnut could be lifted on and off a central cylindrical pole that contained all the house's utilities. So should you want to move elsewhere, you disconnected the utilities, lifted the house onto a huge flatbed truck and took it with you. To another such cylindrical pole, in another county, in another town. Fuller’s ideas were often too revolutionary so rarely got developed beyond the trial mock up.

For a house in truth has no walls, it’s not bricks and mortar at all. An empty house is a sad building quickly declining into a ruin. A building is a house with a lack of meaning, until it contains a multiplicity of human ideas and desires within it. A place where living breathing loving people, through a shared closeness have, not just a history catalogued in possessions, documents and photographs, but a self sustaining evolving relationship. And without that reciprocity a house will feel to have no heart.

When you ‘house’ something you are providing a space within which it can thrive. A repository for ideas, aspirations and creativity for sure, but essentially it contains the people and things that we most love. Any house develops a particular ethos and distinctive reason for existing. So throughout history houses great or small embody a particular quality. Whether that be the House of Windsor, or the House of the Medici. In recent eras there have been fashion houses - The House of Chanel, Lagerfeld or McQueen. These embody one person's style and approach beyond even their living presence. In architecture there’s been The Bauhaus, in music the Haus of Gaga, plus innumerable publishing houses. Houses cluster around the happy serendipity of individuals sharing their particular genius, woven into a design displaying the pattern of a family. Whether that be a biological family, a chosen family, or a creative family, the intentions remain the same.

To make a house frequently requires some marrying In its broadest meaning ‘To marry’ means to bring two things together and to conjoin them. A new house is then molded out of two seemingly disparate individuals that chose to marry themselves to one combined sense of purpose. In this it is similar to the grafting of roses or trees in horticulture. Where you consciously bind two separate species of tree together. Over time individual qualities become married. If the winds of circumstance are favourable, and the graft holds, this creates an entirely new tree that embodies the leaf colouring of one, with the root stock of another. They share their individual strengths, durabilities and energies, support each other, compensate for failings and embellish the best of both individual elements throughout each aspect of the tree.

Whilst marrying does have its practical and utilitarian aspects, it is fundamentally a wildly impractical muse that motivates it - one of love. When it is so beloved, it can readily forge a more wide ranging vision, for what this new house’s foundation could accomplish. And this is as light, ephemeral and as portable as Buckminster Fuller’s dream house. You can take it everywhere with you, apply it to everything you do, now or in the far off hills of the future. Beyond what even the horizon and our imaginations presently envisage can be reached..

Written by Stephen Lumb 2025