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Comment by tylerrobinson | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to see 0 results for “leak” on this article. Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses were famous for having flat roofs and leaking. Anyone know whether these flat roofs suffered the same fate?

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I've actually been in the Johnson Wax FLW building in Racine. They are still using it, but I believe it had problems to overcome, like most FLW buildings.

I don't remember if it had a flat roof, but probably most office buildings did.

I live a couple blocks away from there. The roofs are flat in that whole complex aside from the Golden Rondelle Theater. I don't know if they've since fixed it since I see they've done some redecorating on the upper floors in recent years and I haven't thought to ask anybody who works there, but for a long time they couldn't have people working in a large portion of the central tower due to inadequate fire exits.

> some redecorating on the upper floors

are we talking about the same building? The one I'm talking about was a high-ceilinged single room:

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/14/frank-lloyd-wright-johnson...

knowing nothing about construction, architecture or engineering, i've still heard enough anecdotes of that + common sense would seem to dictate that if your roof isn't sloping (even a little bit) you're gonna have more problems with rain (which can freeze and open cracks), let alone snow (which can be deceivingly heavy even in small amounts) or even other precipitate like dust, sand, leaves, what have you

i would be perfectly fine with regulators enforcing sloping roofs by default and only allowing flat ones if you explicitly and deliberately apply for an exception

it would save lots of unknowing homeowners easily preventable problems stemming from flat-roof McArchitect homes that look modern but aren't practical, and allow the ardent individual flat-roofers (lol) to get what they want if they absolutely must

I mean, most commercial and industrial buildings are approximately flat on top. There's some pitch, but its pretty minor. Its basically a solved problem, and a qualified building inspector would know how to inspect for the requirements of that particular roof style. Its unambiguously a higher-maintenance style, but it's no worse than having wood siding in terms of annual maintenance labor. Just that the consequences of failing to keep up with the labor is a lot worse.

That said, when people start throwing gardens onto their roofs, or otherwise doing things that the roof was not originally designed for, things get iffy.

Our 800k sq ft factory has a "flat" roof. It has drains all over it that feed straight down into the building and below the concrete to a massive storm water drain.

"flat" roofs also slope, but the slope is measured more in fractions of inch per foot instead of inches per inch.

yeah, so not enough to get rid of snow, ice and other precipitate, or even water if there's even a small obstacle of some kind

at best it gets rid of running water under perfect conditions

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