There was a house, and there may be

The title's tense shift—past tense yoked to a conditional future—frames the print as a meditation on dwelling held between memory and possibility. Worked across multiple lithographic plates, the image is built up through sequential registrations rather than declared in a single pull, so faint passages and overprinted areas accumulate the way recollection itself accrues. The Spring association ties the conditional clause to a seasonal logic of renewal: houses that were, houses that may yet stand. Within Yokoo's 2017 output the print belongs to a sustained inquiry into domestic architecture as a vessel for bodily memory, a preoccupation that emerges from his Melbourne years at the Victorian College of the Arts. The multi-plate method, which allows him to align separate stones or aluminum plates in close registration, rewards the quiet, ruminative register that characterizes his practice. The image operates as trace rather than depiction—an architecture half-remembered, set down in lithographic ink as something between record and afterimage.