alt Hacker NewsThe house is a work of art: Frank Lloyd Wright
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Wright designed a gas station, with a control tower office from which the manager can look down on the gas jockeys.[1] It looks like it belongs in Southern California, but it's in Minnesota.
His Marin Civic Center is nicely integrated with the terrain. Gattica, the movie, was filmed there. Like the gas station, it includes a non-functional pointy tower. Wright went through a pointy object period.[2]
Wright emphasized materials and surface treatments, to complement the plain lines of his buildings. That tended to run up costs. But if you use Wright's lines without the materials, you get brutalism.
Having visited multiple Wright buildings, I must say this: no photograph or video will EVER do it justice. The man was a master of light. Wright buildings MUST be visited in person to experience this. You will FEEL it.
I studied graduate school in a building designed by William B. Fyfe, one of Wright's Praire School first apprentices. It was beautiful and serene. The same city where my school is located has a house designed by Wright himself in a special neighborhood known as Heritage Hill, also a great example of Wright's style.
I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.
Fallingwater is more than work of art, it is a religious experience. I visited it three times (each time my visit to Pittsburgh and the area surrounding the house was to specifically see it) and every damn time I stood weeping leaving the tour.
If you ever visit Taliesin in Wisconsin (which has a pretty bland), you should also visit the nearby House on the Rock which is a fascinating and very weird collection of esoteric and kitschy items.
The contrast in attitudes and aesthetics between the two is incredibly stark, and it's very interesting to see the reactions of visitors to each location.
I wouldn't want to live in it, though, because everything would be damp.
> “The house is a work of art”
I really disagree with this and think this sentiment lies at the heart of a lot of our current architectural and housing issues.
Yes, houses should be beautiful and inspiring. However, they should not be “art” they should not be trying to say something. They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place. Every traditional form in a region is there because of tradeoffs of housing design in the area. Trying to build modern blocky houses and violating these tradeoffs with tech and materials always feels bad. Theres a reason New England farm houses are the way they are and so sought after.
Houses as sculpture made by architects trying to impress other architects results in a disjoint aesthetic. Nobody wants to visit a hodge podge of houses in the style of whatever was in vogue when they were last remodeled. See all the blocky and angular, white, black with some wood tones built/remodel in the past 10 years that already look dated. They ruin beautiful traditional neighborhoods.
Buildings as art/fashion is inherently unsustainable as they have to be bulldozed whenever tastes change.
Architectsagainsthumanity has a lot about this.
If you'd like, you can still speak to the last living client (as of last year) of FLW; still living in the house the architect designed for him:
https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/reisley-wright-last-c...
Fallingwater has just gone through a series of renovations and all areas are now accessible. If you haven't seen it yet, now is a great time.
Surprised to see nothing about what he's done for S.C.Johnson, in and around Racine, WI.
As student I had privilege of visiting Taliesin West in Arizona. Easily my favorite architect, a true artist.
When someone mentioned that these were available for download, I printed them in high res tabloid, and had them enlarged 4x and put the best two on my wall.
It literally entered my though my pores... I became a better designer, a better illustrator, a better carpenter, a much better visualizer.
I used to live in San Rafael, and San Anselmo, a stones throw away from the Marin Civic Center, and two of his houses... I studied and sketched the Civic Center from many angles, and saw 'Gattica.'
If you haven't visited falling water, definitely go. It's American architecture at its finest.
I'm sad that we're coming up towards 100 years on from Fallingwater being built, and yet the American preference for new houses of a similar price (after inflation) is the sort of awful stuff that shows up on mcmansionhell.com.
About a decade ago, I got to spend a week at a residency centered on immersion and design, provided by the Fallingwater Institute. My group of about 12 people stayed at High Meadow, which is an educational complex the Institute operates and is also an award winning piece of architecture. My wife was insanely jealous. Visiting FLW works has been a minor travel hobby for us over the years.
Being only a short walk from Fallingwater, we spent some time there every day, including one day when we had the whole house to ourselves and had dinner on the terrace. We each tried to gain a sense of what it was like to live there, rather than just be a museum tourist. A couple of folks played card games sitting at the kitchen table all night. One person curled up with a book in one of the tall, narrow bay windows. I laid out on the floor of the living room and stared at the ceiling, something I do at home sometimes. I thought laying on the floor would give me a feeling of ownership, of doing whatever I wanted with a place, because you couldn't do that as a regular tourist.
It... kinda worked. Not really. It was too surreal. I don't know if I'd ever be able to feel like Fallingwater was home.
My wife and kids and I visited Taliesin West last summer as part of a Grand Canyon trip. I had much the same feeling there, while listening to the tour talk about FLW and his apprentices living there, that I couldn't imagine it as a real living space. Also, I started getting real cultish vibes from the stories of some of the stuff the apprentices went through. Of course, Scottsdale, AZ wasn't any cooler back then than it is today and they built the place themselves, by hand, without any air conditioning. More than one apprentice's marriage ended in divorce over the place because their wives couldn't stand living in tents in the desert without power and running water during the construction years. I was also struck by how I would not expect anyone to even be allowed to bring a spouse on any similar apprenticeship in the modern day, but that's a different issue.
Between all of those experiences and also hearing the stories of how much the wives of FLW's clients would fight with him over kitchens, my own career as a consultant, not being able to imagine telling a client they couldn't have the kitchen they want, and other issues, in recent times I've lost some respect for FLW.
I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society. For one thing, most people don't even know Usonian is a word, as evidenced when I see them try to come up with a word for a North American who isn't Canadian or Mexican (USian has to win a prize for finding an even more awkward term than Usonian).
That leaves all of his contract work, which was frequently deeply flawed in construction. Some of that defectiveness was due to him experimenting with new construction techniques that eventually got perfected and are no longer so flawed, but there are still many core issues. I would come home from visiting his works and I would wrack my brain over how to employ his ideas of incorporating nature into living spaces before I finally remembered I live in Virginia: nature here is primarily composed of mosquitoes a this breathable water we call "air".
His designs are all-or-nothing, it must be employed as a unified whole. It doesn't look right if it's a single piece of furniture or a window treatment in an otherwise normal house. Putting a 50" flat screen in Fallingwater would ruin the place. Got walls at 90 degree angles to each other? Sorry about your luck! It ends up looking like wearing cargo shorts and a Fedora. If you have a regular ass house like every other "impoverished" slob with a quarter acre lot in suburbia, FLW-style design does not work. I say "impoverished" because FLW-style designs are exclusively the purvue of the ultra rich. To have a house that coordinated, that put together, takes "I make people work overtime for me and I don't even know their names" kind of money.
In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962. Less than a decade before that, Kentuck Knob had been completed for about $96,000. My house may not be as pretty, but at least the roof doesn't leak and the stove can fit a cake.
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For the northeastern US folks and anyone willing to travel: the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH has not one but two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection[0]. I’ve seen the Zimmerman House a couple of times, and it hews pretty close to the familiar aesthetic of Fallingwater: warm tones, lovely space, furniture to match.
The Kalil House I got to see recently, it’s the newer acquisition. It’s a Usonian Automatic, meaning the owner was meant to buy the plans and the molds for the concrete blocks, and the build it themselves. Long story short: it didn’t go exactly as planned.
The house is fascinating though: much of it is a concrete gray rather than the warmer tones we usually associate wiry Wright’s work. It feels less tied to the place it’s built than either the Zimmerman House or Fallingwater. It feels much less starkly architectural, and more connected to the way regular people live, more attainable, insofar as you can use that word with Wright. They also both have ceilings that work with taller people. Fallingwater is downright claustrophobic in places.
Highly worth the trip if you’re in the area.
And if you’re in the area of Fallingwater, Kentucky Knob is basically right there. If you’ve travelled more than a few hours to see Fallingwater, you’d be nuts to miss it.
[0] https://www.currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright