Roofing Beneath a Jagged Outline

The 1785 section cuts the Broken Column House open lengthwise. In the same drawing, the scale of a giant column is pressed against that of an ordinary dwelling: several stories of rooms are arranged around a central staircase, and the floor slabs extend horizontally, one after another, to the outer wall. Fireplaces sit against the walls, doorways connect adjacent rooms, and window openings face the garden floor by floor. Only at a height does the exterior wall begin to slope inward; the section steps back level by level, leaving an uneven upper edge. On paper, the rooms each have their own depth, and the stair rises continuously among them. The horizontal lines of each floor run parallel to one another and stop at the wall; the diagonal line that produces the form of a broken column passes higher above.

The section is easily read as an act of revelation: the column is only an outer casing, and inside it was a regular house all along. But one detail obstructs that reading. The horizontal floors do not shorten as the outer wall slopes inward; they still have to reach the wall. The rooms must obtain roofing, light, and access beneath a deliberately incomplete outline. Once the column skin has been peeled back, the problem immediately falls to how each floor is enclosed, and how it keeps out rain.

A visitor’s record from 1950 still makes out that staircase. The glass had already shattered. Ivy and wild vines obscured the garden outside the windows on every floor, their branches and leaves filling many of the positions that had originally looked outward. To call this scene the ruin completing itself would make for a beautiful story: the artificial broken column finally meeting real decay. The cost would be to compress into scenery the stair that still connected the floors, the window openings exposed to the weather, and the enclosure that the dwelling continued to require.

Later works dealt with the roof and the facilities that carried rainwater downward, and also repaired the woodwork of the ground floor and first floor. Placed back into the section, the roof lies beneath the inward-sloping exterior wall, while the floors still extend laterally from the stair to the wall. When it rains, the terms in the engineering notes become actions again. The roof receives the falling water. Rain falls onto the roofing beneath the jagged outline, enters the drainage facilities, and is discharged downward.