Out of plumb

On site there's a gesture I make without thinking. I lay the spirit level against a wall, watch the bubble, and if the bubble drifts off centre I already know how it ends: a photo, an argument with the contractor, and the wall comes down and goes up again. On a building site a wall out of plumb is a mistake, and mistakes are not allowed to stay standing.

And yet every so often, watching that crooked bubble, I remember the only room I know that was built out of plumb on purpose.

It was 2018, one of my first weekends on the motorbike. The day before, Kat and I had done Lake Bracciano, Nepi and Caprarola — the Caprarola where I parked in front of the palace and skipped Vignola's climb; I told you about it. That evening we stopped for the night at San Martino al Cimino, on the piazza, facing the church where a friend of mine had got married a few years before. I'd left the bike in the square opposite, and I must have looked at it ten, fifteen times. Every time I told myself: tomorrow morning it won't be there.

The next morning it was there, of course. And we went to Bomarzo out of curiosity, and to find some cool: it was April, but it was already as hot as another month.

I remember the smell of the undergrowth before anything else. And the disbelief on our faces, Kat's and mine, every time something appeared round a bend that couldn't possibly be there. An immersion in a world very far away. And then the leaning house. We went in. It's tiny — you understand at once that it isn't a house but an installation in a garden, almost a game. And yet it's unsettling: your body objects before your mind does. The floor pulls you one way, your eyes the other, and the balance you take for granted stops working. No spirit level in the world would have passed that house.

Which is exactly the point. Vicino Orsini had lost almost everything — his freedom, twice, and then his wife — and in his wood he corrected nothing. He didn't level the ground, didn't move the boulders, didn't draw an axis. He built a crooked house, and he left it crooked. In a world that demanded order, he put the mistake at the centre of the design.

That morning I had come from a night spent checking on a motorbike. Inside that house, for a few minutes, there was nothing to check. There was only standing up as best you could.

I go back to the site, and I still have the walls that are out of plumb rebuilt. That's as it should be: a house has to stand straight, because someone has to live in it. But now, before I say it has to come down, I watch the bubble one second longer. To remind myself that there is another way of building, too. The one where a mistake isn't corrected — it's lived in.

Giulio Romano — The Slow Architect

P.S. The wood of Bomarzo — why it has no axis, who carved it, what was really written in the mouth of the Orcus — I've told in full on the blog: BOMARZO — THE GARDEN THAT DOESN'T EXPLAIN ITSELF