I don’t know how anyone couldn’t think the Marin Co. Civic Center, and the Price Tower are not beautiful. In the case of the MCC, Wright sited it perfectly-on an otherwise unbuildable site-it looks like it grew out of the rock. I haven’t heard any complaints about it.
Price Tower-the same thing-it is still distinctivem 50 years later!
Compare that with an abortion like the Boston City hall-40 years later, it leaks, its inhabitants hate it, and it looks like an upended air conditioner!
I believe both the MCCC and the Price Tower both suffer from slavish delight in geometry, as almost all of FLW’s work did. If geometry is forcing a design into something that isn’t natural or functional that is a valid criticism. And his work suffers from that geometry love. The choice of colors on both are also valid criticisms in my opinion.
The following photos do NOT imply warm and cozy to me–do they to you?
http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/gbi.cgi/Marin_Civic_Center.html/cid_1838190.html
http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/gbi.cgi/Marin_Civic_Center.html/cid_1129839589_MarinCC_005.gbi
This could that be why this building has been selected as a backdrop to a couple of futuristic movies? This work is NOT his best work, it isn’t terrible and I never claimed that, but it certainly in my opinion is not his best work. In general he was much more successful on smaller scaled projects.
I know you like his work, I also enjoy his work, but I don’t for a minute believe he is the architectural messiah as you seem to imply in this thread. He was a good Architect for his time period, but we don’t live in the past. There are lots of excellent Architects designing today, and I doubt that you have done a critical analysis of current design thoughts if you are implying that we (as Architects) should imitate FLW.
I think many of the compalints in this thread derive from the point of view that FLW was a good architect but a lousy structural engineer. Where’s the suprise in that? Architecture and structural engineering are two very different fields that generally attract very dfferent personality types, and in my experience the two groups tend to get along as well as artist and engineers generally do, which is not very well.
I used to work in my FIL’s enginering firm (in an administrative role), and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve head things like: “So that goddamn *artiste * wants to build a room that size without any support columns, *and * he wants to take away my load-bearing wall? We’ll see about THAT!” It’s the structural engineer’s job to slap the architect down from his filghts of fancy. I think the problem with FLW is that he was too big for any engineer to slap down.
Alessan, a lot of people (myself included) certainly think an architect needs to have at least some awareness of what can, cannot, and should be done. Too many of them seem to pretty through reality out the window if it lets them draw pretty pictures.
Any six-year old can draw pretty pictures. Any half-baked wannabe can make a “striking” building. It takes a real artist to communicate sheer beauty, one who has to know the ins and outs of the craft. Now, an architect should definitely have an understanding of engineering. He’s in the business of designing buildings! Ignoring engineering is like declaring gravity is inconvenient and your latest work will not feature it.
Architecture is probably the hardest form of art, or maybe the oddest form of engineering. Leaving off one or the other entirely isn’t architecture. I understand the difficulties. It’s still not an excuse.
I am curious-most of the FLW Oak Park houses are pushing a century-so one would expect that some repairs would be needed. Has the Robie House needed repair? It looked pretty substantial to me! Anyway, is Oak Park still an upper-class suburrb? Have the owners of these houses kept them up?
The thread I mentioned earlier, with some info and links on Wright’s big plans for Baghdad in the Fifties: the Round City of Baghdad - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
There’s always his Usonian Homes . Not doghouses, of course, but designed to be within a middle-class budget, more or less (Ok, probably less). My interest in these were piqued when I was going over design ideas for my cabin (not a doghouse either, but an argument can be made…) and to pull something like that off wouldn’t have been realistic given the building codes, budget, and ultimate impracticality (for me, anyway).
I didn’t scrutinize the rest of the thread, but I’m surprised people haven’t been mentioning a juxtaposition with Frank Lloyd Wright and another Frank - Frank Gehry. As someone who studies human’s relationships to their environment I have studied a lot of the “Artist Architects” and Gehry and Wright would in my opinion fit that bill. Now Wright was an artist, and he loved looking at a plot of land and seeing how he could add to it with a structure, instead of making the land fit the structure, he made the structure fit the land. I always admired him for that.
I recently heard a structural engineer talking about an accident in Sydney. The balcony of a Heritage Listed Building had fallen off injuring some partygoers. He made the point that the designers and builders of these buildings would have thought you were drunk if you had suggested to them that their buildings would still be standing today and in fact are under preservation orders. As he pointed out, people routinely buy 30 year old residential buildings to tear them down and builsd a newer, bigger home.
I know plenty of people working in office blocks built since the 1970s that are basically crumbling ruins to various degrees.
I don’t know about places overseas but whole precincts in Australia disappear and get rebuilt in another incarnation seemingly as often as 10 to 20 years later.
So I wonder how realistic claims of FLW’s engineering incompetence are. For instance the conservators at Fallingwater required computer models to predict the eventual outcome of the cantilever system.
Plenty of his buildings are still standing and I don’t recall any being subject to catastrophic failure and engineering failure is so common that one of the more readable books about engineering is titled *To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design * by Henry Petroski. *Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail * by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori is also terrific and sobering reading. Actually it was the book that had explained the plane hitting the Empire State Building that led me to confidently tell a friend that the plane hitting the Twin Towers would prove to be “no big deal”.
I actually like FLW’s early prairie style works. I also like some FLW interior design like this lamp. But in a much wider sense I loath FLW because of the direction that his influence (although he isn’t the only one) took architecture in the second half of the 20th century.
Were these houses built with standard ballon construction? Or did Wright invent any radical new construction techniques? I wonder how much these houses would cost to built today?