The flight of Lieb House is an extreme example of the possibilities of post-occupancy architecture.

We're waiting for Robert Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown in the borough of Barnegat Light, on the New Jersey shore. We're gathered outside Venturi's classic 1960s pop-art beach shack, Lieb House. There's quite a crowd: a film crew two cosmetic surgeons from New York (the new owners of Lieb House), their parents, me and Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. We're here to broker an amazing architectural project.

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Like much American post-war architecture, the shadow of demolition had fallen over Lieb House. But thanks to Jim Venturi, the architects' film-producer son, the building is plotting an ingenious escape plan. In the manner of a movie hero, the house will dodge the wrecking ball by upping sticks and making a run for it. And this drama will play out as a scene in Jim's Learning From Bob and Densie, a feature-length documentary on the Pritzker Prize winner and his partner in Venturi Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA). The plan is to lift the house from its foundations, put it on a truck and drive it to a nearby dock. Here it will be loaded on to a barge and floated up the coast. The house will sail up the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge to Glen Cove on Long Island Sound, where it will join another VSBA-designed house that the surgeons already own.

Lieb House, designed in 1967, is one of Venturi's earliest projects. It's a modest house that's both ordinary and completely extraordinary. Essentially it's a rectangular shingled structure that's been Gordon Matta-Clarked into high architecture. Its wooden structure seems to have been sawn up to create a complex and intricate arrangement. There's a large glazed circle cut into its flank, a staggered setback on its roof to form a sea-view terrace. The front elevation is simple yet equally striking. An oversized '9' is painted on to the blank front wall like a racing car decal, and a full-width staircase adds a sense of civic grandeur. Part shed, part villa, it's as though a beach house is dreaming of becoming Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye.

Earlier in the day, Scott Brown was working out where to put the house on its new site. As she explained, Lieb House was originally designed to take advantage of the sea view offered by its site. To this effect it was designed upside down, its bedrooms downstairs, its public rooms upstairs. But now, uprooted from its original context, she's wrestling with the problem of placing the house in relation to an entirely different view, a reverse architectural process. On the drive back to Philadelphia, there's much debate as to how visible the Manhattan skyline will be from the terrace. Scott Brown suggests that climbing a stepladder might be the best way to settle that argument.

In architectural culture, projects become fixed, as though time is somehow frozen. Photographs are taken and critical appraisals are written. In reality, architecture really only begins at the moment architects hand buildings over to their clients. The flight of Lieb House is an extreme example of the possibilities of this post-occupancy architecture.

As the cast and crew of this excursion are packing up to leave, the villain of the piece-the site's new developer-arrives. As long as the house is off the plot by Friday, all will be fine. It is, he says, 'no sweat off my back,' smiling the smile that chills the heart of architects. At least this time the hero escapes. And in doing so, perhaps sets a new precedent for the survival of America's mid-century architectural heritage.