The Physics of Least Resistance

We woke at dawn on Sunday to a glorious sound no house should make: falling water.

Liquid power. Water naturally finds the path of least resistance. It traveled from the third floor through the second-floor den, soaked its way through floor and ceiling, trying to hit bottom like any downward spiral. From the low points of the plaster, it poured into the first-floor living room, slipped through the old Victorian floorboards, and settled in the basement where it pooled, then slowly drained. That was one way out.

The other way out was outside. Water burst through an eave and froze mid-motion, a glacier sliding down the façade of our three-story house. The abstract cartography of its pathways looked like a Zaha Hadid blown-glass concept model. Fluid. Improbable. Inevitable.

As an architect, water is your arch-nemesis. It is the single most destructive threat to a building’s longevity and structural integrity. We design endless details to keep it out. Flashing. Membranes. Slopes. Joints. All in quiet deference to its persistence.

And yet water is life. It sustains bodies. It extinguishes fire. It nourishes roots.

Nemesis and necessity.

As a curly-haired girl in the early 80s, water antagonized me personally. I would stretch my thick hair straight with arm gymnastics, blasting it into submission with a Conair dryer and sealing it with Finesse aerosol hairspray. A dip in the ocean, a humid gym class, a sudden rainstorm, and my defiant curls snapped back into their own irreverent geometry. When Zaha was my teacher, she once said my hair would make a good concept model. I was flattered.

Water is a shape-shifting paradox. The physics of it feels instructive.

When your house becomes a waterfall, action is immediate. Michael and I moved without much conversation. He isolated the breached zone, shut off the water, cut the electricity. I called an emergency plumber, phoned our friend Chris, who has worked on this house for years, and ran to the basement for my maple sap buckets. We scattered buckets and Tupperware across the living room, catching rivulets. Furniture was hauled out. My computer was rescued. Baseboards were opened. I wielded a heat gun, thawing exposed PVC like triage.

From the start, the scale of disruption was clear. This was not cosmetic. It was invasive. Expansive. Undermining. It required division of labor, trust, teamwork. Getting to the other side together.

In the last days of the Year of the Snake, I have been brazenly confronted with lessons from water about life.

1. Water finds the path of least resistance.

Not the best path. Not the most noble one. The available one.

This is not laziness. It is reality. Energy moves where it can. When you are exhausted, grieving, constrained, your life force will flow through the channels that exist. The work is not forcing heroics. The work is designing better channels.

When water destroys, it is often because the structure did not anticipate where it would go.

2. Containment creates power.

A river without banks is a swamp. Pressure without containment is chaos.

Narrow the channel and the same water carves stone, generates electricity, reshapes terrain. Boundaries, schedules, rituals, constraints do not diminish power. They concentrate it.

Uncontained emotion floods. Contained emotion moves mountains.

3. Water is patient, not weak.

It does not argue with rock. It outlasts it.

Erosion is not dramatic. It is consistent. Life-changing work rarely feels heroic day to day. It feels repetitive. If you are showing up again and again, especially when nothing seems to be happening, you are doing the work.

4. Phase changes are sudden, but only after conditions are met.

Water heats quietly from 0°C to 211°F. Then it boils. It cools quietly until it freezes.

Transformation often looks invisible until it is irreversible. Do not confuse stillness with stagnation.

Water is destructive when ignored, not because it is spiteful, but because it is relentless.

Maintenance is wisdom.

Water is not malicious and neither is life. They follow the physics of least resistance. Energy, matter and force move along the paths available to them.

Life reflects physics.

Water and life are honest. Predictable. They go where they can go.

The rest is design.