Stepping into the living room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little House from 1912, a permanent display at the Met, I thought to myself how ridiculous it was to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum. And then, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that it made a great deal of sense to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum if it was a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Wright built hundreds of single-family houses throughout the country during his lifetime, and they’re famously difficult to maintain. Over decades they’ve been plundered for their Wright-designed furnishings, renovated by owners, and punished by the elements. When I visited the Robie House in Chicago ten years ago it was badly peeling and patched, in need of a serious structural and interior overhaul. It was raining heavily that day, and while standing inside the iconic living room, with its dazzling horizontal proportions, I felt incredibly vulnerable, as if the roof and windows might collapse in on me and the other visitors at any moment.

Frank Lloyd Wright did not build his houses to last; it simply was not a priority. In a marvelous essay about Wright’s Jacobs House in his book Strange Details, architectural historian Michael Caldwell outlines Wright’s complicated, cavalier attitude toward construction. Wright wasn’t governed by the same tangle of national and local building and safety codes that architects today are. And he was highly inventive, often incorporating untested building and mechanical systems, driven by overall spatial and sculptural effects rather than soundness.  The Little House, built in Wayzata, Minnesota, was ready to be razed when the Met purchased it in 1972. The house’s library is now on display at the Allentown Art Museum, a hallway at Minneapolis Institute for the Arts, and its remaining furnishings were sold off like parts from a junkyard car. (In 2009 two pairs of windows from the house were resold at Christie’s for $45,00 each, which might be about what the house originally cost to build.) Wright houses are magnificent structures. So if one can’t be maintained properly in situ it makes good sense to move it inside a larger building, or even build a super-structure right over it.