The House
Where will you be when the wolf comes?
There is a warning that culture preserved in its simplest form and that architecture chose to forget: the tale of the three little pigs. It is not a tale about laziness. It is a tale about foresight, about the cost of building well and the price of building fast. Two brothers chose immediate comfort. One chose the slow work of stone. When the wolf came —and in the tale the wolf always comes— only one house remained standing. The question the tale poses to each generation is uncomfortable and concrete: where will you be when the wolf comes?
The contemporary wolf does not blow. It takes the form of a power grid that collapses in midwinter, as happened in Texas in 2021, when millions of homes were left without heating for days and people died of cold in their own houses. It takes the form of a supply chain that breaks and empties the shelves in seventy-two hours. It takes the form of a water system that becomes contaminated, of a blackout that lasts, of a price that soars, of a crisis that arrives without asking permission. The wolf is any interruption of the flow we depend on without ever having consciously decided to. And the contemporary house, the one we applaud for being transparent and connected, is exactly the house of straw: it falls with the first serious gust.