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Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the worship, either. Fallingwater has required a lot of intervention to stay up. The much praised Johnson Wax complex has a tower that can't be occupied. The administration building has workers on the ground floor ("Great Workroom") where management can look down upon them from the second floor. He dictated how people who commissioned him were to live in their homes down to what they could and could not have in them. Many of those houses have required work as well. The guy was arrogant and constantly over budget. HN doesn't consider these good traits in other engineering fields.

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Context is a big part of it. He died in 1959 at 91, so everything he worked on is old at this point much of it well over 100. People have copied and improved on many of his ideas, but it’s a mistake to judge historic buildings based on modern practices.

Natural light is wonderful in a world with AC and modern windows, but the first residential AC was installed in 1931. Structures that could keep you cool where still a big deal when most of his buildings where constructed. Which fed into the idea of building a building for the location, prevailing wind and weather patterns mattered more.

I believe other engineers were concerned about the Fallingwater cantilevers at the time of construction and in the end they were correct.

Indeed, they recommended much more steel reinforcing than Wright’s design, and what got built was somewhere between the two.

AIA has a pretty detailed history of it here: https://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/1016/1016d_falli...

I dunno, it sounds like Wright had the concrete done in 1935 and it was 60 years later that "forensic evaluations revealed fatal developing conditions in the late 1990s.". Like after 60 years you can only detect a problem when you bring out tooling (but not an actual failure!)?

I might be no architect but I always hear the comment that "anybody can design a building that stands but it takes an engineer to design a building that just barely stands". It really sounds like Wright correctly designed a building that just barely stands and the rest of the people are too worried about his success.

The engineers of his day and his client both raised concerns. This is the first I've heard that engineers build to barely last. Maybe that's true in software. I hope to hell that it is not true for homes, cars, roads, bridges, aircraft, and spacecraft.

Durability isn’t free. No reason to build for 30,000 years when needs change over time.

Public infrastructure like bridges are designed to predictably decay over time so they can be maintained or replaced if they are still useful. Just look at the NYC subway system there’s tons of old tunnels that just aren’t useful today, they didn’t collapse but they still became obsolete and that’s inside a major city which kept it’s subway system.

Fallingwater had problems with water leaks from the start. He was essentially the Frank Gehry of his age.

It's called "beauty." If you don't have an eye for it, well, that's your taste. You aren't going to convince anyone with utilitarian arguments, any more than "those shoes are uncomfortable!" will convince anyone to wear sneakers instead of high heels or wingtips.

I've been to both Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building. They're both beautiful.

> Many of those houses have required work as well

and the owners were quite happy to do that work. I don't think anyone hired FLW expecting to get a regular old tract house.

> Many of those houses have required work as well.

He was constantly pushing the boundaries in materials and technique, so it's not terribly surprising that 100 years later there is a lot of repair needed.

But if you think you don't like his work, then I have something for you to check out. Next time you are in Chicago, walk into the lobby/atrium of the Rookery Building (in the Loop at the corner of LaSalle and Adams). He was hired to do the renovation, and it is magnificent.

I hate the arrogance as well… but, I’ve watched shows of homes built by renowned architects and some their clients have a special ability to accommodate the architects’s eccentricities. They’ll point out some odd and queer things with pride —and how they keep the oddities despite how impractical or inconvenient they prove. It’s like the clients get off on that themselves. It’s really weird.

The only profession more full of arrogance than architecture is orthopedic surgery.

Unlike the failed artists and engineers who build little dioramas out of cardboard and model railroad scenery, surgeons merit the arrogance.

To reach your maximum safe annual dose of arrogance-by-proxy, just watch a single documentary covering what all of the architects who decided to become "urban planners" did to the fabric of society in the 50s and 60s because they thought that poured concrete hellscapes were beneficial to mankind and that they knew better than the sum total of all of humanity.

The wealthy can be into that kind of ... abuse. Jay Leno explains why he doesn't own a Ferrari.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUPOvcolNZg

Highlight: https://youtu.be/VUPOvcolNZg?t=96

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