How do you read a house or a city? Why do we speak of ‘reading’ a house or ‘reading’ architecture, as if both the house and architecture could be a book? Why do we now read it, deconstruct it as some might say, in order to tease out the suggested meanings and associations? What is this ease with which we desire to leave true meaning behind? And whichever words we choose, what invites us to experience places we may never have the chance of visiting. In the future when people look at photographs of de Kooning’s House located high up in an old brewery on Giudecca most will utter the words: “in your dreams!” Not easily defined, not easily read or analysed, this house for de Kooning’s friend will be refuge, retreat and revelation. It will be a detective story where characters come and go, not in this case speaking of Michelangelo but of flight captains called Aldo Rossi or Carlo Scarpa. It will be a house of critical fictions designed by the unknown but most famous world architect; a house of rumours that become fact, a house of facts that become myths, and a house of myths that become theories, and all in a city that becomes all other cities. And it is a house of lives that become other lives, if but for a moment dreamt up by the scriptomaniac in us all.