IANAA either, but I’ve always loved FLW’s work. Fallingwater is a masterpiece, of course, and I’m also very fond of the Guggenheim, his Oak Park and Usonian houses generally, his The Illinois mile-high skyscraper design (probably a joke), and his 1950s proposals for rebuilding Baghdad (about which there was a recent SDMB thread).
IMHO, he was a great architect with a compelling and original vision which remains fresh and exciting still, but he wasn’t all that much of a practical engineer. As Stranger and Ravenman mentioned, the contractor on Fallingwater warned him that the awesome swept porch would eventually fall into the creek below unless there was more structural steel. Wright pooh-poohed his concern, so the contractor snuck more steel in - doubling it, by some accounts - while Wright was away from the worksite. 70+ years later, the cantilevered porch was falling into the creek anyway and had to be fixed at the cost of millions (I’m a member of the Western Pa. Conservancy, which now owns and manages Fallingwater, so I read a lot about it). The classic story of Wright’s poor grasp of the limits and proper uses of materials was the wealthy businessman who called Wright to say that, although he was enjoying the awesome office Wright had designed for him, rainwater was now pouring onto his desk. Wright’s characteristic response: “Move your desk!”
It must be said, he was a prima donna and often a real jerk in his personal life. He left his wife and kids for his mistress without any apparent qualms. He backstabbed/discarded some early tutors. He borrowed lots of money and unapologetically never paid it back, ruining some of his backers. He encouraged a weird personality cult among his Taliesin students. He was preternaturally gifted, but he had the arrogance to match.
Love his work; don’t particularly care for the individual.
“Utilitas, Venustas, Firmitas”
or utility, attractiveness, stability.
They taught us in first year architectural design that great successful architecture encompasses all of these.
Unfortunately Wright got only one of these right. But he did it right in a big way.
I’ve toured many Wright buildings and homes throughout Illinois and Wisconsin and while his stuff was beautiful sculpture of space it was rarely functional or structurally sound. And from reading about him it seemed like he didn’t care if it was or not due to his enlarged ego.
Taliesin West is still the official Frank Lloyd Wright school of design in Arizona and they do have summer sessions at Taliesin West in Wisconsin.
There was an architecture firm up until recently (2003) located in Madison (Taliesin Architects) that desinged in his style.
I live a block away from the Hollyhock House. The house is part of a park that is a favorite place of mine to hang out. So I’ve taken a tour of the house a couple of times. Not far from there is another house of his, the Ennis. They are both completely falling apart, but the designs are incredible.
My thoughts echo those of others here - FLW cared about the designs, but not about execution, at least to the extent of building things to last. The amount of money required to restore these houses is remarkable, but it pleases me that they’re actually doing it.
I live in Oak Park and every one of his houses has had to undergo major reconstruction and renovation to keep it standing. It seems that at any given time one of them is always being practically rebuilt.
Unity Temple needs major restoration work and will probably require a large continued effort to keep it standing for the rest of it’s life.
I love these questions…was Arnold Schoenberg a great composer, was Jackson Pollock a great painter, etc. It all comes down to choosing a definition of greatness.
Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius have probably exerted a more lasting influence over urban architecture, and especially in the case of Mies their structures themselves have held up better than Wright’s too.
But I can walk by a Mies skyscraper without thinking twice, and as far as I’m concerned Gropius’ ideas are responsible for the blight of cheap, leaky apartment blocks that glut the college town-scape where I live.
The half dozen Wright houses I’ve visited have all transfixed me, especially Fallingwater and the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield. I admire Wright’s attempt to create integral, functional beauty within a self-contained aesthetic scheme. I like the humanity of his buildings, and I simply like looking at them and being in them.
I agree his structural engineering was for crap, but I do think hindsight makes him look worse than he was. After all, building with reinforced concrete was pretty new back then, and he was guessing sometimes (probably most of the time.)
If memory serves, a documentary I saw about him said that after designing a house for someone, he actually designed the furniture for it and told them exactly where it was to be placed in the rooms. He got pretty pissy when they disagreed, in fact.
In case anybody is totally jonesing for a little FLW mdse in his/her life:
Well I am an Architect as some of you know from previous threads about Architecture and I enjoy FLW work, but I wouldn’t say I share the same enthusiasm that our OP has about all of his work. I love many of his smaller projects, but his ego and ambition gets in the way on many of his larger project in my opinion. I like aspects of all of the following projects, but I also think they all suffer from much of the criticism I have read on these boards about other examples of Modern Architecture.
I am not a particular fan of his Gammage Auditorium in Tempe:
The criticisms noted above in this thread about his work, his ego, etc. are all valid and need to be taken into consideration when viewing his work. Taliesien West his home and school in the deserts of Arizona still functions as a school, but to my knowledge the school is not a large influence in the Architectural community.
To sum up, in my opinion he was a good (if not the best) Architect for his time, if he were alive today I doubt many of his buildings could/would be built. He is indeed the beginings of the ‘starchitect’ that we see today in Gehry and others. But I do share the OP’s excitement about much of his work, but it suffers as functional work, but is wonderful as sculptural work in my opinion.
Check out some of the work by E. Fay Jones. He was arguably one of Wright’s most successful students, and actually surpassed Wright in many ways. Frank Lloyd Wright was a pompous, arrogant, jerk.
I am not an architect but I have posted rants about him a few times before. I hate-hate-hate him. I would never be so kind to give him some of the medium praise in this thread. He was an egotistical, egomaniacal, semi-midget who used other people’s money to fund his own impractical and irresponsible art projects. I have visited Oak Park, IL and there are some beautiful houses there. They just don’t happen to be his. Falling Water seems attractive enough but the structural engineering thing is a real deal killer.
Frank Lloyd Wright is the person I use in my head if I am bored and I want to get mad. It always works instantly. The only way I have learned to deal with it was that he was inspiring Brady Bunch houses and ranch houses back when horse drawn carriages would gave to be parked in the driveway, I can appreciate the foresight but, other than that, he was an absolutely misguided and despicable figure that shouldn’t be discussed in polite company.
I hate all of the FLW knockoffs I had to see as a child of the 70s. How many ugly square buildings can you build? Overlapping the rectangles IS NOT DECORATION. This is not the sort of thing that mankind grew up with as background, and I do not see it as beautiful. This extends to Ikea.
I’ve hated at least almost everything I’ve ever seen from him, and I detest his influence on other architects. I sincerely rejoiced when I realized that municipal buildings were not being built with him in mind.
And as it regards the Johnson Wax Building, I HATE it. It looks like something from the alien planet from Half Life. Apparently architects are not artists (and I reserve the right to hate art).
OK, in view of having viewed the links above, I think that FLW tried to reinvent the human aesthetic, and it just failed. I hate everything I’ve ever seen from him. He sucks. His shapes are unpleasing. I get a cold feeling from everything I’ve ever seen from him. I hope his influence dies and is hit by a wrecking ball.
It may be cool looking, but according to a friend who works in building maintenance there, it’s a real pain to keep up.
All the glass windows make it look neat, but they leak. They leaked soon after the building was opened, they leaked after they were adjusted & caulked, they leaked after many were replaced with more modern materials, they still leak today.
Because of the lily pad columns from floor to ceiling of the main room, it’s really hard to run cables to workers’ desks. (And modern offices need phone cables, network cables, etc. – lots of cables.) There’s no easy place to do that without messing up the looks of the room. Heck, they’ve even had problems getting enough electrical outlets for the workers.
He had other complaints, but I don’t remember details. Th gist of them was that the building was nice to look at or tour, but not very nice to work in or to maintain. That seems to be the general assessment of Wright’s work.
If I recall correctly the main tower that you can see in that photo has been unused for years and years because it is unsafe for occupation. I heard they use it for storage of random junk they have around the plant.
With a relatively untried central core construction and a build date in the middle of WW2 (= chancey supplies & materials), I don’t wonder. Plus, hey, FLW…
Just realized I never actually answered the question you posed in your OP. Why don’t people ‘imitate’ FLW? isn’t this a bit like asking why other authors don’t just imitate say John Steinbeck? Variety is what makes this world enjoyable and gives it depth.
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t feel my work imitates anyone! I may draw upon the thoughts of another Architect, but I don’t feel my work is imitative, and I think I would speak for the majority of Architects out there. Personally I love the variety of Architectural expressions we have in this old world of ours, I may dislike much of it, but it provokes thought and discussion and either inspires one or causes a person to actively loath it–all human emotions and part of our culture.
As for his school, it isn’t practical nor does it cover the depth of education I believe a young Architect needs, and I don’t even believe it is accredited (I may be incorrect on this one). The school trains a very miniscule number of the young Architects out there, and is really not an influence on any scale in the field.
Again, not an architect but an admirer of the beauty of Wright’s work. Having known some people who lived in one of his houses in Oak Park, I too have to say that as an architect Frank was a great artist. The rooms were small and not very comfortable, but definitely beautiful to view.
That word—artist—seems like the key. Architecture blends engineering with art. It seems FLW sacrificed the engineering aspect to achieve the artistic, e.g. designing beautiful windows that leak.
This newspaper feature says the Research Tower was closed due to updated fire codes, which would have meant adding exterior stairs and spoiling the design. Nothing about structural integrity, although for some unspecified reason the writer was allowed only one hour inside the building.
Also: it was designed during WW2 but not started until afterwards.
