Frank Lllyod Wright designed and built the old Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo Japan. This building was built without a deep foundation, yet it survived the great earthquake of 1923 (the levelled most of Tokyo). How was the building made so resistant to shaking…could this technique be used today?
This paper, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel: A Seismic Re-evaluation by Robert King Reitherman of the California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering may be of interest to you.
Eh, he got lucky. He used a pile foundation and talked about “floating” on the seismic waves. In actuality, the building did suffer some damage and was eventually rendered unusable and destroyed because of the type of foundation used. He did try out a number of other innovations, some of which are used today. Here’s a comprehensive article.
FLW wasn’t a particularly good engineer despite being a visionary architect. When he designed Falling Water, he didn’t put in enough rebar to hold up the blaconies. The only reason the house is still standing (and it’s barely standing) is because the contractor snuck in extra bars. cite
FLW also advocated crushed stone bed foundations, even though most state building codes prohibited them. He wanted to show engineers just how well these would work, and pointed out that railroads ran on such beds without any problems. When he (Wright) designed the “mushroom” pillars that supported the roofof the Johnsons Wax building (Racine, WI), he had such a pillar built, and had bags of sand dumped on the top-they reached something like 6X the code-allowed load, and the thing still didn’t collapse! So Wright could be pretty good as a structural engineer.
It is worth noting that FLW’s Imperial Hotel no longer exists, having been torn down in the late 60’s…because of the foundation type that helped it resist the earthquake. (There is a modern high-rise Imperial Hotel near the site today.)
In addition to the interlocking structural members (which inspired his son to invent and market Lincoln Logs), FLW essentially “floated” the whole structure on a mud foundation. This succeeded in damping the waves of the earthquake very nicely…but the entire hotel also sank a foot or two into the mud during the earthquake. It continued to sink very gradually over the years and, by the mid-60’s, the ground floor had become totally unusable.
Mexico City has similar problems in that it is built on soft ground where a lake recently (1500’s) existed and the area is very prone to earthquakes. I believe there is at least one large building there that uses a “float”-type foundation–the U.S. Embassy, perhaps?–but perhaps the designers found a way to overcome the sinking problem.
How well have Wright’s buildings held up? There seem to be a lot of them around. I wonder if his “Usonian” houses have held up better that conventionally-built houses of the era.
It is too bad that this country is so conservarive…I’d much rather have a Wright-designed house than the faux-colonial dump I inhabit (house is designed to like like it is 300 years old)! 
A geographical guide to all 420+ Frank Lloyd Wright designs that were built (both existing and demolished).
Ya know, the railroad argument is pretty poor. Railroad ballast (the crushed rock) is designed to spread the load of the rails over a larger area. Ballast is even used over bridges for this purpose. It pretty much only helps with the vertical load and railroad companies still have to perform periodic mainainance to replace ballast. You want a building to resist settling uniformly across the foundation or else you’ll get cracking (a problem we’re really familiar with here on the Balcones fault where there’s a particualr type of expansive clay that makes foundations difficult) and crushed rock would be really poor at this.
And the pillar thing doesn’t really impress me either. The loads specified by the codes are usually pretty conservative with a factor of safety of 3 or more. Plus, the specified strength of building materials is usually conservative as well. For instance, you commonly see 4000 psi compressive strength concrete specified. The 4000 psi is a minimum; quite often the concrete is actually much stronger. I admire FLW as a designer but nothing I’ve seen by him has convinced me he was particularly skilled as an engineer.
(poorly informed post written and deleted by AskNott. Trust me, it was the right thing to do.) :smack: