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Samizdata quote of the day – Frank Lloyd Wright edition The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright was once summoned to testify in a lawsuit. When he took the witness stand, a lawyer asked what his occupation was. He answered, “I am the world’s greatest architect.” Afterwards, his embarrassed wife told him he should be more modest. “You forget,” he replied. “I was under oath.”
– Timothy Sandefur, from his article: Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect.
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I prefer Cass Gilbert – but Frank Lloyd Wright had a point.
He clearly loved what he built – he was not faking it as so many modern architects (and modern artists) do.
Heinrich Heine, the German poet, was once asked why men no longer build cathedrals. His answer was
Today, we have blocks piled on top of each other hailed as genius.
Steven R – some people still have convictions, and the ability to carry them out. But not enough.
And, as you know, the modern establishment hate embracers of the modern world such as Frank Lloyd Wright just as much they hate a traditionalists such as Cass Gilbert (or, in art, Frank Salisbury or Thomas Gotch) – that is because it is SINCERITY (sincere convictions) that the modern establishment hate, and Frank Lloyd Wright was sincere – he loved what he built.
What the modern establishment want is buildings (and art and music – indeed everything) that their own creators privately despise – so they can all wink at each other.
As Ayn Rand (who was inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and the work of Louis Sullivan) said – the modern establishment do not call what they know to be garbage “works of genius” to really praise the people who created them, no – both the people who create the garbage and the people who praise it are all engaged in “spitting on genius”.
Any of y’all ever, ya know… Lived in one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural monstrosities, or worked on them?
I don’t think you’d have quite the same opinion of the man or his works if you had. I once spent about four hours talking to a guy who had been hired to do restoration work on Falling Water and Taliesin. His take on the “genius” of Frank Lloyd Wright was considerably different from that of his adoring public.
Wright was the prototypical “too smart for his own good” architect. His designs bankrupted contractors and clients alike, and he kept going from triumph to triumph mostly on the force of his press. Reality? Many of his buildings were poorly constructed, badly designed, and more the triumph of appearances over actual, y’know… Utility.
I’ve friends of mine that worked around the man, back in the day. They weren’t too impressed; Wright was another one of those ne’erdowell types that made it big because everyone looked at his designs and didn’t see the flaws. Buckminster Fuller is another one along these lines… Very little of what either person built actually lasted, or was at all practical. Hype, marketing, and press releases got them where they wound up, and unless you go looking into the dark underpinnings of things like “How the f*ck are you supposed to waterproof this utterly flat roof…?”
News flash for you: Materials and techniques didn’t offer a good way to do it in the time frame when it was built, and we still don’t have absolutely perfect solutions. When they went to rebuild Falling Water, back in the day, they found copious amounts of water damage and rot once the pretty-pretty facade came off.
Most of Wright’s buildings were designed and constructed for appearance; never mind building something that actually has the capability of lasting. The majority of his work was very flower-like, highly-perishable.
Frankly, I’ve never understood the fascination with his stuff. It’s very much an “Emperor’s New Clothes” sort of situation, with the poor schmuck builder and maintainer stuck in the role of the little boy pointing out the fact that the Emperor is naked and waving his wing-wang in everyone’s faces.
The question you have to ask about all these “genius” architects would be this: Are their designs buildable, and do they last? Do they take advantage of the materials and site, to create a lasting building? Or, are they confections that delight the eye, and then drive the builders and owners into bankruptcy?
I remember reading some treatise in German, many many years ago. The outline of it was discussing the nature of things, and the author had taken a German linguistic thing as a key point in his arguments: In German, you take a test, it isn’t “True or False”, it’s “Falsch oder Richtig“, and the connotation/meaning of that is somewhat different in German than it is in English. In English, “True or False” is a trivial thing, a mere test question. This German author was making the assertion that the German meaning went beyond that, that the “Falsch oder Richtig” dichotomy was more a philosophical thing than a mere test question. If something is “Falsch“, then it is not just wrong on a trivial level, it is wrong on a metaphysical and moral one. Similarly, “Richtig” implies far more than the simplistic “True”; it is also a more metaphysical thing, a tag for something that is both philosophically true and undeniably correct.
There’s an essential truth behind something that is “Richtig“, one that merely “True” doesn’t quite capture. Say you’re building a house, and you want stone on the exterior, in order to make it look venerable and old. There are two ways of doing that, one that is “Falsch” and one that is “Richtig“: The “Falsch” path takes you down to the local lumberyard, and you buy fake stone veneers to put up on the OSB particle board you’ve slapped on the exterior of your house. You’ve got the “look”, but you don’t have the intrinsic truth of the stacked-stone structure. If you were to go for the “Richtig” path, then you go find yourself one of the few practicing stonemasons, and have him build you a stone wall or two on your new house… It’ll cost a fortune, but that would be “Richtig“. The use of real stone structure is absolutely correct; the use of faked-up veneers is just wrong. If you’re building with wood and OSB materials, be honest about it; use those materials the way they’re meant to be used, and don’t try to make it look like something else, something fake.
To my eye, there’s an inherent falsity to much of Wright’s work. He’s not constructing honestly for the environment; Falling Water should not have had flat roof design; you couldn’t then waterproof something like that, reliably. It did not last; the structure became compromised due to moisture intrusion.
One of our neighbors built themselves a little Cape Cod cottage. No roof overhangs at eaves or gables. Great design, when you have to worry about the winds on the Atlantic taking your roof off, but some 2000 feet up in the Cascade Mountains? That’s just… Stupid. No overhang means that the moisture isn’t kept away from the wall structures, and he’s already having trouble with wood rot. There’s a reason Alpine architecture looks the way it does, and if you’re going to build in that environment, you need to learn the vernacular and design to support that.
Wright’s work is mostly the triumph of “looks good” over “practical”, which is why I really don’t like it. At all.
Paul Marks wrote “He clearly loved what he built – he was not faking it as so many modern architects (and modern artists) do.”
What a pity, then, that he didn’t bother to take an interest in even the most basic engineering required for successful architecture, with the result that many of his most-iconic structures were so impractically built that they began falling down almost-as-soon as they were completed. Many of his remaining designs, especially the seminal ‘prairie’ designs, required extensive retrofits and better materials to keep them standing. And they are notorious for being designed with no apparent thought for the people who were to live in them.
The Detroit suburb of Livonia had a subdivision of ‘prairie’- style homes built in the 1950s and 1960s, all faithful to the original style and construction, and very sought-after. In those days, Livonia was still semi-rural. There’s only one or two left now – all the rest were demolished because the amount and expense of upkeep were absolutely intolerable, and the homes were uncomfortable and impractical to live in – too hot, too cold, plagued with damp and subsidence, and with floorplans that were driven entirely by external appearance. Apparently, in FLW’s world, it never rained or snowed, the wind never blew and the sun always shone at just the right angle.
You can build anything you like, as beautiful as you like, if you don’t have to care about the life of the building or the people who have to live in it. Why, it’s almost like a government housing program . . . .
llater,
llamas
Oh, I see Kirk beat me to it . . .
llater,
llamas
FWIW, there are a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around here and I’ve visited a few. TBH I think as a living space they generally kind of suck. Lots of tiny nooks and small rooms with uncomfortable furniture, indulgent in excesses of fussiness. I always thought of him as the triumph of artistic genius over utilitarian realities.
But what do I know? I think a chair being comfortable is rather more important than it being thought provoking. I can’t imagine what it is like having to dust and hoover those places.
Wright’s another one of same class of people plaguing our civilization, right now. He typifies the mentality of “Form over function” that so damages everything. And, he had the personal morals of an alley cat… Something I’ve learned to watch out for, from sad personal experience.
So many of these “great men” are scumbags, in their personal lives. Read about Wright’s personal life, where he had the wife of a client ensconced at Taliesen as his open live-in lover. Note how he behaved in the aftermath of her murder, and how he almost immediately found solace in the arms of another female admirer that wrote to him “after his loss”. Of another man’s wife…
Here’s the thing: You want to examine someone’s life, evaluate their legacy? You need to look at the indicators; Wright didn’t just go after one of his client’s wives, he himself was married at the time, and he did not bother to divorce his wife until well after his live-in lover was dead.
This isn’t a man worth admiring, I fear.
I’m not asking for sainthood, but little bit of integrity should be expected in the “great man”, along with just a smidgen of decency. If it ain’t there? Well, then you’ve got a “flawed genius”, not a “great man”.
One of the hallmarks of the decline in our civilization is just how many of these creatures that are held up for admiration and outright deification are actually utter scumbags. Wright is this god-like figure in architecture, but you almost never hear about his “feet of clay”, ‘cos that doesn’t “comport with the narrative”.
I’ve been many times to a FLW home in the Detroit area – to service the standby generator. It’s one of the ones that was built in his later styles, all wood-panelled and with much of the furniture built-in. The owner just lives in continual despair of the house. It has no storage, no closets, no basement, nothing. The hot-water heating system was built undersized, and replacing it will require the entire interior of the home to be gutted. The ‘understep’ detail of the exterior traps water, snow and debris, so the foundation requires constant repairs and keeping the ‘step’ clean and dry is a full-time occupation. The roof pitch is too low to clear snow (in Michigan!) and so he has to continually hire that done. The frameless windows have been caulked more times than HMS Victory, and they still leak. And the finished interior, so cool and avant-garde in the 50’s, is completely-impractical for modern life. Not enough outlets, not enough lights, and anything he wants to do to improve it means tearing out the custom interior. But at least he’s living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house! Lucky him.
My other experience comes from my buddy with a custom welding and fabrication shop. He’s working on one of the last Livonia ‘prairie’ houses – not built by FLW, but in his style. The original cantilevered roof overhangs began sagging alarmingly soon after the house was finished – since they were only wood-framed construction – and they were jacked up and retrofitted with steel I-beams, tied into the existing framing. The framing is now failing, since it was loaded in ways that wood framing was never intended to be loaded (the kitchen walls are subsiding upwards :-)) and the building department said ‘enough – you want to keep this building, you have to add supports to the cantilevers, or else we’ll condemn it’. And so my buddy is building custom stainless steel supports to go under the cantilevers and stop them from falling down.
Roman public works – built on goverment contracts by the lowest bidder – are still standing, 2000 years later. FLW buildings, built at vast expense and usually vastly-over-budget, can’t stand up for more than a few decades.
llater,
llamas
FLW was a designer for the gods. Sweeping heroic structures. 13 of them here in Minnesota. He could have designed Valhalla, but only because the gods don’t need toilets or plumbing or electric service or waterproof roofs or strong foundations or closets.
Kirk and llamas – I did say I prefer Cass Gilbert (or Lutyens here in Britain) and I do know that (unlike Gilbert) FLW tended to sometimes ignore traditional knowledge, built up over the centuries, on how to build things – I am a Conservative, I do not believe that ignoring practical experience is a good idea.
However, I stand by what I said – FLW was sincere, even when he made mistakes, he was not faking loving what he did he did – he was not a phony, as modern “experts” and “artists” normally are.
As for evidence of the insincerity of the establishment, I will be lazy, but accurate, and turn to the Economist magazine – which has been providing me with examples of establishment dishonesty for many years. Whenever I need to prove the establishment are lying scumbags – all I need to do is turn to their house journal, the Economist magazine, on any given week.
This week the Economist magazine, in its article on Chancellor Hunt’s “Autumn Statement”, informs us that Britain has suffered from a “decade of austerity” – in reality government spending has massively increased over the last decade (the Economist magazine knows this – they are not making an innocent error, they are lying), it then cites the National Health Service waiting lists as an example of these mythical government spending cuts – they are lying again, as NHS spending has exploded over years and decades – throwing money at it has not worked.
And then we are told that an “honest government” would tell people that taxes must be increased (taxes are already at a record high – to increase taxes further would smash the economy) to fund even more government spending – this is from a magazine that pretends to be “free market” “Classical Liberal” and so on, it does not just lie about specific matters, it lies about itself – about what it is, and this lying has been obvious (blatant) for many years – for example it endorsed John Kerry, then the most Collectivist member of the Senate to be President of the United States in 2004, and it endorsed Barack Obama, by then the most Collectivist member of the Senate, to be President of the United States in 2008. All whilst claiming to be a free market publication.
Their lying, their total insincerity, is what the establishment is about – and it was not what Frank Lloyd Wright was about.
Imagine that Frank Lloyd Wright was alive and working as an architecture critic for some establishment publication – he would be expected to praise buildings he hated, and to damn buildings he loved – he would not do that, he would not “fit in”. This is NOT because the Economist magazine types have different convictions – they have no real convictions, they lie because that-is-who-they-are.
By the way…
The main article in the Economist magazine (I look so you, gentle reader, do not have to) this week is on its C02 is evil thing – we are told that “there has been progress”, not true – as world CO2 emissions have continued to rise, but that “more needs to be done” – as if the Dictator of China (China produces far more C02 than any other country) respects the pathetic plans of bankers and elite corporations for “international governance” using the “Climate” scam as an excuse – the Rio 1992 conference and all that.
A real dictatorship, like that of the People’s Republic of China, would skin these Toy Town dictators alive – it is NOT going to take orders from the likes of George Soros or Klaus Schwab, or the Corporate suits who control the Economist magazine.
The dishonesty of the Western establishment is only matched by their delusions of grandeur, their delusion that they have a right to rule-the-world and make everyone dance to their whims.
Paul Marks said:
Sincerity is an irrelevant quality in an architect or any other designer. The real question is “Does his work-product actually work…”
If it does not, then you needn’t say another word about the man. I don’t care how “sincere” you are when making a mistake; if it is a mistake, that’s still a mistake.
The word “charlatan” comes to mind, when considering the numerous ways that Wrights various projects have fallen down and or been demolished.
By contrast? Whoever the unsung genius was that designed all the various Sears homes? Those suckers are still standing, still doing their jobs. I have no idea who it was that did that, but the fact is, those homes are still doing the job a century or more after they were constructed. As kits. Sold by Sears.
Wright is really over-valued, in my book. If the man was such a genius, why are so few of his homes and other projects affordable to maintain and live in? Why are so many excoriated by their owners and the people who actually have to live in them?
The facts are irrelevant to his “sincerity”. Jim Jones was “sincere”; is that a good marker to use, examining his slaughter of the innocents in Guyana…?
I have actually lived in a house he built. I don’t know about the maintenance or strength of materials, any of that. And it was pleasant to be in, the lines of the interior were shaped well and attractively. But it was no pleasure to live in- it didn’t flow, as someone above said no closets or storage. In six months I never got used to it.
The owners (who had inherited, not chosen, it) said it was built to be shown, sold, and owned as a status symbol. A fair description.
Built to be shown and not functional in the least is the hallmark of genius, or so I’m told.
But at least he meant well and that’s the most important thing in the modern world.
Did the designs last? They sure did. Albeit mostly in the buildings of others. The design concepts have lasted incredibly well.
Did the building start to fall apart? They did. But if we don’t start using modern designs and modern techniques, we will stay stuck in increasingly stale societies.
The first ones are never going to be well built of anything, because no-one knows how to build them, and no-one has tried to use them to find out the flaws. I don’t look at old televisions and complain that they were poorly designed and built because they weren’t very good compared to modern ones. I don’t look at the first laptops and laugh at the idiots who built such clunky and unreliable machines.
And then there’s a lot of people here looking at FLW and applying modern concepts. They don’t suit modern living. Why would they? Any building of that age is not going to suit modern living. Ideas of room sizes and arrangements have changed. Most buildings of that age have been totally renovated internally, whether architect built or not.
All the grand old buildings that people admire today that are still used have been gutted internally. Buckingham Palace, even renovated, is hopeless as a building. What revision are the Houses of Parliament going through to make them practical? Those buildings are actually now mere shells of the originals. Facades to keep people happy because it looks old. The number of genuinely old rooms is quite small — a few bits of Windsor Castle, not the bits lived in, etc.
The next time you admire some Georgian house and think “they really knew how to build them back then”, consider the actual building they built. By modern standards it would be unlivable. No electricity. Almost no plumbing. Ridiculously leaky, both to water and air. That stonework facade is lovely, but they built it in such expensive material because they had little choice. You have to be quite rich nowadays to pay twice as much to build your house as you need to, just because you like stonework and slate roofs.
That the big Georgian houses had large living areas makes them possible to renovate and pretend nothing has changed, but still crazy expensive to heat. The smaller rooms are a hot mess to live in.
Best opinion I’ve seen of FLW’s work was that he was an incredibly gifted artist with a sweeping vision, but he should have hired a mundane architect to help him.
@ Chester Draws – I won’t quibble with you regarding FLWs design concepts. But you wrote
“The first ones are never going to be well built of anything, because no-one knows how to build them, and no-one has tried to use them to find out the flaws. ”
and I’ll speak plainly and say that’s nonsense – on stilts. At the time that FLW was designing and building these homes, structural engineering was perfectly-well understood and was widely taught in engineering and architectural schools. At the same time, structures like the Empire State Building were being successfully designed and built with no issues whatever – you may have noticed that that’s still standing just fine. There’s nothing in a FLW home design that would present any sort of a challenge to a competent structural engineer, whether today or back then, and indeed, FLW was warned, many times, by engineers, architects and contractors, that his designs were significantly structurally-deficient, and these problems often manifested themselves clearly almost-immediately. He just decided that he knew better. History has proved him consistently-wrong.
As to his ‘sincerity’, and the purity of, and his devotion to, his craft, Kirk has drawn attention to his somewhat – how shall I say? – disordered personal life. I’m not so sure what to think about that as it relates to his craft – I think there’s plenty of examples of other highly-skilled and -inventive types who also had unconventional personal lives.
I set more store in my judgement of his sincerity in the details of a story that is recounted in one of his biographies about the construction of Fallingwater. He never really produced detailed structural drawings for the construction, and when he told the contractor what he wanted for the construction of the reinforced concrete cantilevered balconies which are the defining design element, he was told bluntly that, if built as specified, they would sag immediately and would likely fall down. The owner retained a structural engineer, who demanded that they be made thicker and with more rebar in the concrete. FLW – who, it should be remembered, never graduated college and had no qualifications of any kind in architecture or structural engineering – refused, on grounds of cost (the added rebar) and appearance (he wanted the slim sections of the cantilevers) and he persuaded Mr Kaufmann, the owner, to compel the contractor to pour them as specified.
The contractor, no doubt fearing the worst, secretly added significant rebar anyway (as was discovered during the later remediations), but he also added a bearing wall inside the home, not shown on the plans, to reduce the cantilever and so the stresses on the beams. When FLW learned of this, he was so incensed that he had his representatives on site surreptitiously remove the masonry at the top of the added wall, so removing the added support, and cover up what they had done, thus ‘proving’ that FLW had been right all along!
Of course, within a year or two, the outer ends of the cantilevers had sagged about 7 inches out of true (this can clearly be seen in early images of the structure) and the cantilevers were left in this compromised state for years, until major remediation work (tearing them out, steel beams, much more rebar and much-stronger engineered concrete) was carried out. The engineers who assessed the structure in order to carry out this work reported that the cantilevers had been on the point of collapsing for years, and water entry into the cracked concrete rusting the rebar made this only a matter of time. If they had been built as specified, without the secretly-added extra rebar, they would have fallen down long before.
Is that ‘sincerity’ in one’s efforts? Refusing to heed those who self-evidently know more about the subject than you do, and insisting on your way, or the highway?
Then, when one reads of his well-documented habit of ‘juicing’ classic Japanese prints to increase their sale price (he was a major dealer in this type of art) , or of his regular habit of quoting a low price at the beginning of a job, then increasing it steadily the more committed the customer was to the project (Fallingwater went 400% over original budget), one no longer thinks ‘sincere’. One thinks ‘relentless self-promoter, of negotiable virtue, of negligible skills in the nuts-and-bolts of his chosen profession, but with a wildly-overdeveloped idea of his own skills and abilities.’
llater,
llamas
See, here’s the thing: Any time someone starts building up a “cult of personality” the way Wright did? That’s a warning sign that something ain’t quite right on the old homestead.
The moment someone starts getting mysterious acclaim and approbation, then begins “playing to the crowd”? There’s something else going on, and that something else is generally inimical to the actual things that should be behind the curtains with these types.
You look at the long line of jackass types who’ve developed these crazed personas, and you have to start questioning the wisdom of what we do to encourage them. Once they’re surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, their egos balloon to the point where they’re insufferable and their work-product suffers commensurately.
I’ve met the type in person, numerous times. They’re all “bigger than life” projections, with no real underpinning, no actual accomplishment. They’re mostly glib con artists with a line in flim-flammery like you would not believe… Start looking under all the table-skirting, and you’ll begin to find dozens of little fiddles like that deal with Wright’s Japanese wood block prints, or Hitler’s little deal with the German Post Office for the use of his image…
If you run into this sort of person, start doing a little looking around, and try to do some basic forensic accounting on all their doings. Like as not, you’ll be educated fairly quickly.
Falsch oder Richtig. Or, the Latin phrase falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus…
What does ‘juicing’ mean here, sorry?
Basically, unjustified hype. He would buy mediocre woodcut prints, put them on display, show them around, hype the value and then sell them. After the hype went away, so too did a lot of the value.
There was also some intimations that he’d commissioned some of the prints he had supposedly “discovered” and then had them shipped to the US, where he’d sell them at high profit after shilling for them.
I can’t find it now, but there was, once upon a time, a very illuminating and highly critical discussion of what all Wright did with regards to Japanese art and its popularization.
It was basically just another fiddle, something to make money. And, at least a few people felt swindled by it. I know one Japanese art person who I’d consider something of an auto-didact on the subject, and they’ve got nothing at all good to say about anything Wright or Andy Warhol did in Japan.
I’ve heard that “juicing” thing before, and it either meant someone was hyping something up for sale, or they’d done something to “enhance” the value of the artwork. Obfuscating some of the marks indicating the number of prints made, and so forth was what my informant said that both Wright and Warhol were guilty of, so as to get more money for the prints here in the US. Supposedly, the way they explained it to me, the earlier in the run that the prints were made, the sharper and clearer the prints would be, and by the time you got down to the point where the woodblock was worn out, those prints were worth a lot less. What the two “great Americans” were supposedly doing was concealing the markings that showed where along the print run the print came from, and selling later iterations for more money than they should have gotten due to the woodblock being worn…
Your mileage may vary, you may find other information out there, but that’s what I remember. We used to have a pretty sharp Japanese art guy here in town that would talk to you for hours, if you let him, whenever he set up his booth in the park. Educational, that…
Thanks, Kirk. I thought it might be something like that.
This depends upon the definition of “first one”. I’ve done a lot of projects, and my first attempt is almost always better than my second. On the first, I do a lot of preliminary planning and am careful about details. The second one, I think I know what I’m doing, and get cocky.
Very little is completely new. There is prior art, and if Wright had been smart, he would have listened to his contractor about rebar and reinforcement, thickness and support. But Wright thought he knew better. Wright may have been an artist of housing, but he sure as hell wasn’t an architect. If he were, each successive house would have been increasingly livable.
“How the f*ck are you supposed to waterproof this utterly flat roof…?”
In a village near me there are some council houses that originally had flat rooves, they really did look like boxes. The solution to leaks in this case was to build a conventional tiled roof on top of them. My thought on flat rooves was always, there is a reason why people have built sloping rooves for thousands of years and it’s a really good one.
Regarding ‘juicing’ of Japanese prints, I think the article Kirk refers to is in the May 2001 issue of the ‘New Yorker’, which is unfortunately now behind a paywall. I read it at the time. It’s pretty damning about FLW’s habit of inflating the prices of desirable prints, but rather falls-down (IMHO) in describing the most-flagrant examples of ‘juicing’ (retouching prints to add colour and ‘crispen’ lines and shading) as being somehow the result of a fraudulent dealer who tricked FLW into marketing his frauds. We’re supposed to believe that FLW, who was at the time one of the world’s leading dealers in this type of art, and who had written the seminal work on the subject by a Western writer, was completely taken-in by a dealer who sold him wholesale quantities of ‘juiced’ prints – some of which may have been actual forgeries. See Ockham, Thomas of. Apparently, suggestions that a sacred icon of modern architecture, a virtual saint to the progressive elites, could not be portrayed (at the time) as a money-grubbing hustler.
llater,
llamas
Waterproofing flat rooves is easy. Modern cities are filled with all kinds of commercial buildings with vast flat rooves. Just look up, the next time you’re in a Costco, or an Amazon distribution center. Flat rooves are far-and-away the easiest and fastest way to cover vast open-span structures, using engineered steel rafters and metal or composite roofing. As to waterproofing the roof once it’s done – it’s easy. You just have to want to. Classically, a membrane roof with abundant hot tar – the classic New York flat roof –
has been around for well-over 100 years and, done right, would be good for 30 years at least. These days, a whole range of synthetic and engineered sheet goods are available. But even back in the day, all over Europe and the Near and Middle East, flat rooves that don’t leak have been built for centuries. Again, you just have to want to.
llater,
llamas
According to FLW:
Why would you want to when it shows you haven’t been “creative”!
My father built many flat-roofed houses… in the SoCal desert. Tar on tar paper. Dry climate. I’m now living in North Carolina, and designing my own modest home. Roof: standard peaked and metal covered. And in agreement with Kirk and Llamas, the types of errors FLW made were not made by anyone of his era with a decent education in the appropriate “arts”. If he had wanted to, he could have learned, but he was a Great Man. As a graduate of Stanford, I was invited to a showing of a not previously built FLW design constructed on the Big Island of Hawaii where I lived, in hopes that other Stanford grads would want to invest in a development of such never before built FLW designs. One tour was enough to convince even the unwary to invest elsewhere.
llamas, most of Wright’s roof systems actually were totally flat, at least as they were described to me–That was one of the things that the guy doing the work on them went nuts trying to correct. Modern commercial roof systems all have at least a slight angle and, more importantly, drains.
You really cannot totally waterproof a roof system; you have to have at least a means of shedding the water; if you let it stand and pool, it will infiltrate, no matter how carefully you think you’ve created the waterproof membrane. We had a project awhile back, designed by someone who was apparently a fan of Wright, and the extensive use of the roof systems as part of the outdoor decks…? Yeah. Nothing but headaches; the general contractor on that job lost his ass on call-backs. I’ve yet to have any of those “Let’s put a deck over a roof…” deals work out, despite all the happy-dappy literature the various roof membrane salespeople come up with. Homeowners aren’t too damn bright, either… We had one job where they drilled through the membrane in order to install an antenna of some sort, and then it was “Why is my roof leaking!!! Come back here and fix this!!!!”
It’s my contention that in construction, these days, there are two sorts of people: The ones who write the instructions for new products, thinking people will follow those, and then there are the people who are actually doing the construction in the field, who never read squat. Then, there are also the homeowners, who’ve no idea at all about how their building that they’ve paid so much money for is actually supposed to work, mechanically and so forth.
Had another one of those flat-roof monstrosities, designed by an award-winning architect. We built the thing doing the framing and trim on it, and the whole project was supposed to be overseen by the architect, but there was a falling-out, and the homeowner took that over. He made some changes, one of which was that the open ceiling on the upper floor got a dropped ceiling instead. Which would have been fine, except that he didn’t consider that there would be serious implications from that for moisture control, which eventually caused some serious mold and wood rot problems. The architect was taken to court, but as he rightfully pointed out, the changes made to his plans made the lawsuit moot.
End of the day, if you look around at the houses where you are, and the one you’re building or buying doesn’t look like the ones that have been around for a few decades or so…? You might want to rethink what you’re doing. There is a sort of reverse evolution effect with architecture and construction, in that what doesn’t work, doesn’t last. All the old houses you see? If you go back and look at their “peers” which were built at the same time, the ones that have survived are the ones which were built in keeping with the local environment. You should take those surviving buildings as your models…
No Kirk.
Sincerity is not irrelevant in an architect or anyone else.
A sincere architect may make mistakes – but at least they are trying to get things right.
The present establishment “experts” are not sincere – they are not even trying to get things right, they want to get things wrong.
They hate truth as much as they hate beauty.
And that is very relevant.
I’m sure Jeffrey Dahmer was “sincere”, as well.
Sincerity is orthogonal to things like competence or truth. You can be completely sincere, and an utter monster, or totally incompetent. All sincerity requires is that you be 100% all-in on your ideas and how you present them.
In other words, it’s a null concept when evaluating the competence of anyone. Elizabeth Holmes was “sincere”; so too was Sam Bankman-Fried. Ya really want to invest money with either one of them?
I fear that a major reason these incompetent cretins like Wright, Holmes, and Bankman-Fried get away with the things they do is because people like you look at their “sincerity”, and use that as a criteria for evaluating them. Frankly, the more “sincere” someone is, the more you ought to look into them, because the projection of this “sincerity” that you so appreciate is often a talent of the sociopath or psychopath.
Pretty sure that many women got into Ted Bundy’s car because they thought he was “sincere” when he asked for their help with his cat or his injury… Remember where they wound up.
@ Kirk – regarding FLW’s ‘flat’ rooves being truly, water-level ‘flat’, you have been misinformed. All of his ‘flat’ rooves were specified with an absolutely-minimum pitch, with the slope of the roof – typically 1 in 50 or less – being concealed by a slightly-raised edge. For example, the rooves of the balconies at Fallingwater shown at the foundation website here
https://fallingwater.org/worldheritagepreserved/
clearly show by water level that they are pitched. The issue was not the very-low pitches per-se – the roof pitches he used were typically greater than what is customary for ‘flat’ rooves today without issues – but more that the design and construction of his roof structures typically failed quickly in ways that exceeded or negated the design pitch. For example, at Fallingwater, a design roof pitch of 1 in 50 for drainage becomes academic when the entire roof has sagged by 7″ in about 20 feet of span, or a pitch of about 1 in 18. He also specified pitches too small to be reliably achieved in the materials he was using, and the design and sizing of drains were often very sub-optimal indeed. But his rooves were not specified to be water-level flat.
Likewise, modern ‘flat’ rooves are not truly, water-level flat – it’s a term of art, not a description of actual geometry.
As to whether a ‘flat’ roof can ever be made truly waterproof – of course it can. A zillion commercial buildings that don’t leak prove that it can. For every example you mention of a flat roof that leaked (and I’m sure that they are all entirely true) there are just-as-many examples of other types of roof which leaked just-as-bad. All roof constructions have issues when it comes to preventing leaks, none are much better or worse than any other, just different.
llater,
llamas
I will defer to your apparent deeper insight; my informant is no longer among the living, so I can’t go back and ask him. What he described to me wasn’t what you are saying, and I don’t know if he was talking about the original design or what he encountered in the field. He wasn’t the engineer or general contractor on that, just one of skilled craftsmen engaged.
I still don’t like the Wright designs, at all.
Imagine being the GC who is handed blueprints drawn by Maurits Escher.
(My Captchas are being particularly bothersome today. Is it just me?)
You would be surprised at what gets delivered to the builder by some architects… I’ve seen some plan sets that look as though they were straight out of one of Escher’s more fevered dreams.
The captcha thing? Yeah, they’re seriously annoying, of late. I feel like there’s a self-driving car out there, somewhere, that is seriously puzzled by what its sensors are telling it, and it’s doing the “Are you sure this is a bicycle…?” thing with me.
Out here in California we have the Eichler Homes. Flat roofs with no attic, interior courtyards, and plenty of glass. In the 50s and 60s suburbs of no air conditioning and one car garages they were a thing of beauty. But large amounts of single pane glass to let in that California sun results in faded carpets. The central atrium and lack of insulation means you “live in harmony with the environment”, whether you want to or not. Ok for the San Francisco Bay Area, or maybe LA if your lot has a lot trees, but not acceptable in the Central Valley of 116°F (47°C) summers without any wind. But in defense of Eichler he never put them in the Coastal or Sierra Nevada Mountains, or on the Lost Coast (Eureka CA, etc.).
And when central Heat and AC is installed, the big ductwork is exposed on your roof in all it’s ugly utility – like a scene from Terry Gilliam’s movie “Brazil”. I still like them, but what was once a working man’s design-for-living is now a rich man’s hobby.
But even with the problems, I still like the Eichler homes and Mid-Century Modern – for California, that is. Inverted parabolic roofs and donut shaped donut shops don’t make as much sense in London or in North Sunderland.
Now British Islanders, explain to me why a country with so much rain uses so much porous brick? Cavity walls mitigate it, but oh so much damp.
It seems my SQOTD has triggered quite a lot of you.
FLW’s buildings had flaws. Leaks seem to be the most common complaint I read on the internet, plus some structural issues. That said, a few changes here and there in the early stages of his designs would, I should have thought, dealt with 99 per cent of them. The rest of the criticisms here it seems are aesthetic. For what it is worth I am glad we have such masterpieces as Falling Water, or the various Prairie Houses, and the Guggenheim. The faults and flaws can be fixed. But the style and flair is forever.
I strongly recommend the essay from Timothy Sandefur to which I linked, because it sheds light on how Wright, and a few others, affected the very image and aesthetic of 20th Century America, and mostly for the better. And when you see a FLW building, you know that it is an American one. There’s not much else like it around the world.
A problem in the the UK today, and other places, is that much resistance to house-building (the NIMBY problem) is not because of a mule-headed hatred of building as such, but a dread that much contemporary architecture is horrible, either twee, or cheap and plain butt-ugly. But it can be so much better.
I am fan of the Californian ranch-house design, and in its modern, well-built forms I think it is one of my favourite styles. I am partly biased because my Dad built the family home here in Suffolk, UK, based on a blend of this style and the “Alpine” look of homes one finds in rural Switzerland.
Wright homes are unlivable (pretty much nobody actually wants to live in glass cage) and have leaky roofs.
No.
(I’ll grant the Guggenheim, but it’s not a dwelling.)