HOW DOES A HOUSE SPEAK? Le Corbusier’s famous declaration that a house is “a machine for living” may preclude any notion that a house—particularly an exemplar of austere postmodernism, such as Richard Meier’s Rachofsky House in Dallas—could say anything in the way of messiness or chaos or incongruity and subjectivity. The Rachofsky House sits moored to the ground, a tightly composed network of right angles, white planes, and plate-glass squares and rectangles. But of course, true to Meier’s ideals, the structure is not blind to its surroundings; it drinks them in and exposes the inside