Your argument that moving the buiding destroys the art behind it is false. Landscape is an ever-changing environment and the land the building sits on today is not the land it sat on when it was constructed, so by your argument, the buiding has already failed in its purpose, therefore moving it should make no difference. You can only preserve things – buildings or parchment – by encasing them in a controlled environment.

Personally, I am not wholly against the removal of architecture to another site if it means that the building will be saved from complete cessation of existence! North America is fortunate in the sense that they, sometimes, might at least have the option to remove threatened structures and take them to another location; in Europe to have such an option is so much rarer.

Even for a building that was (supposedly) designed so site-specifically, there will surely exist a setting somewhere in the same region where it may be placed just as comfortably and appropriately – amongst topography and vegetation of the sort that would have originally informed FLW’s design. But to take it all the way to ITALY, on the other hand, I am simply not sure.

The question is more relative. Do we wish to save it TODAY? And if so, and if the resources are present, then do everything possible that you can.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, last Friday (1 March 2013) they tore down a contemporary (search “Paschal House”) of the Bachman Wilson House. Not because of weathering or being flood-prone, but because the children of the deceased clients now wish to subdivide the lot and allow three McMansions to be constructed. This was after years of the preservationist and architectural communities appealing to their good senses – of which there were none.

So here we have an interesting dilemma: are both equally wrong? Is it a matter of degree? Or, perhaps, in a world with less absolutes, we look to the do the best we can with that which is worth holding up as examples of mankind’s best work.