Reading about Frank Lloyd Wright is fun because articles about the man himself bang on about how he was a revolutionary genius and the quintessence of American architecture, but when you read up on individual projects, you keep running into anecdotes about how the contractor secretly modified the plans from Wright’s original designs in order to improve stability and/or the near-constant restoration efforts that have been required to prevent the thing from collapsing under its own weight – it’s like seeing a cautionary parable play out in tiny, tiny increments.
FLW was also notoriously an asshole to basically everyone he worked with, so those anecdotes are ABUNDANT. Not one solitary person hesitates for a second to spill the tea on Wright, and it’s fantastic.
I need to look into this. We briefly covered him in Art History but it was just like “oh he was a screaming genius. Next”
Yeah, no – it turns out that a lot of his best known works are self-indulgent bullshit that just flagrantly ignores the basic principles of structural engineering and are only still standing because he had the good fortune of working with builders who took one look at the blueprints and were like: “Yeah, this isn’t going to work – let’s just fix it without telling him.”
My grandmother was a leading expert on Frank Lloyd Wright and I think would largely agree with this summary. My favorite of her stories was that Wright was 5′7″ and thus didn’t see the point of making a ceilings and doorjams higher than six feet when it looked better that low. He was an artistic genius but his houses are unlivable for anyone over 6′ or so.
My favourite height-related allegation – which I see your source partly corroborates – is that Wright would get salty about people over six feet tall being allowed to walk around in his buildings because he felt it threw off the sense of scale. I’m not sure he ever really grasped that buildings are things people live in.
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