Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It also leaked and sagged until a major restoration in 2002. Wright designed beautiful buildings, but the structural designs on some of them had problems.

Wright's most grandiose building is the Marin Civic Center, sometimes called the Martian Embassy.[1] It's very '50s futuristic, and several SF films were made there.

[1] http://inhabitat.com/frank-lloyd-wright-designed-marin-civic...

View on HN

The Marin County Civic Center is Wright's last building, although very good definitely not the most grandiose. That honor probably goes to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo that unfortunately was demolished. For still extant buildings, the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine would also rank as more "grandiose".

As another poster mentioned, the structural issues on Fallingwater were a combination of contractor error and doing something that had never been done before. The contractor was so convinced that the house would fall down that he refused to remove the scaffolding. Wright ended up personally knocking out the last temporary support because no one else dared. He used the incredible weight of the building on the backspan to increase the length of the cantilever. In all respects, Falling Water is truly a masterpiece in 3 dimensional integration of all aspects of the building, aesthetics, systems, etc.

Of course at the time it was necessary for modern architecture to use new/different construction techniques. Although now the former is loved and the latter is loathed for leaking and sagging at the time you basically couldnt have one without the other.

Its like someone today complaining that ruby on rails (or whatever popular software you like really) was monolithic and buggy when first written. Sure - but that misses the entire achievement of it. Its impossible to do something so radically new perfect for all future needs the first time.

To be completely fair, the design wasn't flawed so much as the execution. The steel reinforcing rods in the reinforced concrete cantilevers were placed on the bottom, as if they were beams, instead of the top. The current cable reinforcements are like miniature "suspension bridges" to compensate for this mistake.

Reminds me of the performing arts center Frank Gehry designed for Bard College [1]. When it was first built, snow and ice would slide off the roof with such velocity that they coned off the area.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Fisher_Center_for_th...

Wow I didn't know two Gehry buildings had serious problems. The Stata Center leaked and cracked when it first opened [1]. Weirdly, that Tech article says the arts center at Bard was alright at the time: Bard President Leon Botstein told the Chronicle that the building “came in on budget and has worked beautifully.” Perhaps there's a story behind every Gehry.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N53/lawsuit.html

He's also been sued for a building which, in the mid-afternoon, would focus the sun's rays into the eyes of incoming motorists on a nearby highway.

Gehry buildings are striking and inspiring, but he does have a history of surprising practical harms.

Just want to add that despite the amusing anecdote, it's a lovely building with wonderful acoustics.

Wow, I saw this from the air recently and had no idea what it was. I forgot to look it up until it popped up here; thanks!

That's the least of the problems: there's a reason this "building" ended up open to the public. It was supposed to be a house, a private place for people to live in. But no one ever could, because a crashing waterfall 30 feet from the bedroom turned out to be fundamentally incompatible with human physiology.

The family it was built for used it as a weekend house for 25 years. Where did you get the idea no one could live in it?

Talking to architects. That must be folklore; sorry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com