Maybe a good analogy would be the John Handcock Tower in Boston (by I.M. Pei). It’s weirdly shaped (kind of a rhombus trapazoidal thing), excessively large, looks like a giant glass box that doesn’t fit with the old style Boston architecture, and the windows tend to fall off it.
I haven’t read The Fountainhead, but I’m about 1/4 into Atlas Shrugged. I suspect what the building actually looks like is irrelevant, so long as it is somehow new and revolutionary and controvertial and threatens the status quo. The typical Randian hero is super competant self-made man beseiged by beurocratic and corrupt “looters and moochers”. So I am guessing, whatever the building looks like, the glaringly incompetant establishment rejects it.
Rand clearly has a hard-on for engineers and industrialists. However, for all her talk of “objective reality”, it is interesting to note that her protagonists tend to be blind to political reality.
The key factor in Roarke’s buildings is that they were utilitarian. Form follows function. A building was beautiful if it perfectly met the needs of the people who built it, and flowed organically from the surroundings. Ornamentation just for the sake of conformity, or sacrificing function to the Gods of conventional wisdom, was the evil that Roarke would not stand for.
So his buildings didn’t have any kind of special ‘look’, and they weren’t avante-garde, or strange just for the sake of being strange.
Unfortunately, that sort of thinking is what can lead to the drab concrete-block apartments you find in Russia and China, where the state is only interested in efficiency. But Roarke’s buildings were described as beautiful, so clearly Roarke paid attention to aesthetics, such as designing a room so that the light it received complemented the use of the room.
In that sense, he seemed very similar to Frank Lloyd Wright. In the movie, the private residence that Roarke built looked very similar to Wright’s work.
I.M. Pei wouldn’t have been an influence, as he wasn’t well known at the time Rand wrote the book.
Yes, Roark’s designs were controversial and threatened the status quo. But that was never their intent. Roark would have had to take the status quo into consideration, which he never did. He never set out to challenge convention; he just ignored it.
And regarding Frank Lloyd Wright: Wright was notorious for designing buildings with low, leaking ceilings and furniture that gave people back aches. He was very sensitive to esthetic considerations, but oblivious to the people inhabiting the buildings. But people loved living and working in Roark’s buildings.
Esthetically, the only one of Wrights buildings Roark may have created was his plan for the mile-high skyscraper.
