‘All about the valley and here and there on the mountains were the chalets or dark wooden houses of the peasants. Some were built on piles… When Tony was very little, and before he had seen the builders at work, he thought that the piles were wooden legs on which the chalets had walked up in the darkness and stillness of the night, and that the two little windows in most of their fronts were eyes with which they had looked out to guide themselves. He often wished that he could see them staggering step by step upward along the zig-zag pathways. When he grew older it was almost a grief to know that human hands had built them on the mountain and in the valley, and that they would stay where they first rose till the winds and rains had done their worst.’

• Lucy Lane Clifford, ‘Wooden Tony’

‘[A]lmost a grief’. Quite. That’s familiar. 

‘Almost’ qua ‘not quite’, but still it’s ‘not‘ as much as ‘quite’. Relief as much as grief: thank god that in fact we sort-of did build those fucking things. That’s not news. Wooden Tony’s insight is about the staggering.

Of course. How else do they walk? What else would be houses’ way? 

What we see when the buildings move in whatever fashion they do is a misprision. That motion wholly theirs - houses’ in motion - can only seem to us wrong, stiltwalking, grotesquely comic, broken, unwalking. It isn’t. Even if we know that, our eyes still analogise it, make it like the terrible crawl of a dying soldier. It isn’t. 

It’s the crawl of a bat. 

Not pathology, not injury. That predatory ungainly sticklike horizontal clutching is as much, as intrinsically how a bat moves, as much battish quiddity, as thoroughly and essentially vespertilian a gait as is flight. 

Similarly, no matter how our minds want to interpret the ambulations of architecture as bespeaking something terribly wrong, that is its healthy advance.