a place to post frank lloyd wright thoughts
 

we done veered off the subject on another thread so i thought out of respect for plantman we could take our discussion of FLW architecture to another place.

i have visited his homes in a number of places. they are scattered around the country. i believe there are 400 or so buildings that he has done.

there is a louis sullivan bank in west lafayette with the fabulous terra cotta around the windows in the brick building. it is not very big and i would love to buy it some day. i have no idea if it could be bought though. it has been "modernized" with a dropped ceiling and the inside is pretty much devoid of details. i hope that they may exist above the grid.

the biggest concentration of wright buildings is in oak park illinois. there must be at least twelve buildings including his home and studio dating from around 1929 or so and the unity temple, a unitarian church with very striking, unique features. there are a good many homes near his home, all on a walking tour. if you are a fan it is worth a trip.

another place with a good group of buildings is Lakeland college in florida. there are at least six or eight buildings there including an administration building and a large chapel (or auditorium). there is also an extensive system of shaded walkways with concrete roof and collonade. that is worth a trip too if you are in the area. i have been there too. and a niece and nephew attended there, recently graduating.

for me, a visit to NY and the gugenheim and the empire state building and perhaps the statue of liberty. i probably will skip ground zero because i just think it would be too gut wrenching.

tom w

I enjoyed the Guggenheim. There's a FLW house in McCook NB.

Has anyone visited the roofless church in New Harmony IN? Done by the same architect who did the High Museum in Atlanta (I think) but I can't remember his name. It's one of my favorite churches, almost as powerful as Mont St. Michel and it is right across the street from Paul Tillich's grave.

I know, thread his already hijacked from FLW to architecture in general.

Tom, if you're going to head East, best to hit Fallingwater first.

One of the homes here is a small studio like set up, two other are $500,000 which is a tad above the median home for the neighborhood, the other which was originally built by the Dow's (dow chemical) is huge I am not sure how much it would sell for but it has the watch tower office and many other unique amenities. The community that they are in and where I went to school had a population of less than 5000 at the time so everyone knew about the FLW homes. There are a few (I think 10) more FLW homes but for some reason they don't get the nod from the FLW registry or something, I am not sure what the criteria is to get the official OK from the FLW guys.

A repost but would like to know what exactly makes an official FLW home.

i dont know, but perhaps they were done by his studio after he died. or by an admirer.

folks often arent to picky about such little details. (sarcasm)

tom w

I know the prints are his just like the four "official" flw homes but I think they needed to be built by a FLW apprentice or something to be "official".

i have been there. it is very very special. if he had done nothing else that home would have sealed his reputation. the drive there is very nice too. and the driveway back through the woods. when i did it i was pulling my 24' wilderness trailer. i thought.."great i am going to get back there and there will be no place to park my trailer" (based on the narrow gravel driveway)...of course when we got back there there was room to park at least 20 greyhounds!

the two most memorable details which i didnt remember seeing in any books prior to visiting were the rock in the floor in front of the fireplace and the bookended wood veneer on the doors of the continuously built in closet running along the back of the master bedroom area (i think that was where it was).

definately worth a trip. i have a picture of my entire family under the house at the waterfall. i guess it must have been fifteen years ago since my youngest was just a babe then. and she is a frosh in college now (studying architecture at bsu as i did).

tom w

i see one of them is for sale and it is a friends parents home.

http://www.savewright.org/wright_on_the_market/schaberg/schaberg.html

i dont mind. i will have to try to get down there and check it out.

another of my favorite places is thomas jefferson's monticello and his university of virginia campus cental space. very very special.

tom w

This is another that is a few doors down from the first house I purchased on my own.
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http://www.savewright.org/wright_on_the_market/goetsch-winkler/images/gw_kitchen.jpg

Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob are near each other. The only things that seem dated in FLW's designs are the small kitchens, and lack of a garage. Some of his furniture wasn't exactly built for comfort either. Kentuck Knob has nice grounds with sculpture gardens if you have the extra time.

If FLW was the superior engineer that everyone raves about Fallingwater would not have been falling down and had to have millions of dollars in repairs in the last few years. His designs, I am told, were strictly his creations and his customers needs came secondary. Since he was a short person, he designed the interors of his homes to accommodate smaller people. This was all stated in the tour we took through Fallingwater.

I am suprised to see a flw thread without Racine Wisconsin being mentioned. Johnson Wax, Wingspread conference center and several houses.

cool link. thanks for sharing.

tom w

well, first off, he attended architecture school not engineering. second he never graduated, dropping out late in the game to go to work. third, you are right in saying he was a little cavalier about his client's needs, if you believe what you read.

in my experience though, what is said between client and architect makes a big difference in how things go and we will never know what was said, only what we read. history is not always accurate. his buildings often contained groundbreaking ideas that stretched the engineering knowledge of the day. anytime you do this there will be things that fail sooner than what is normal.

i have done this on occasion. one time a lawsuit resulted, another time my client understood that part of the adventure included a bit of risk and worked with me to solve the problem and never complained. so today i tend, as most professionals do, to try to keep my pushing of the envelope in the area of forms and functions and use known and proven materials and methods as much as possilble. lawsuits are no fun.

i do think though if you never have had one or two you probably have not reached far enough.

he had a giant ego, and a creative urge to match. he tried big ideas and succeeded much more than anybody else. his body of work is not matched by any other architect that i know of.

i have maybe three hundred built projects but that number includes a fair number of bread and butter hobs where we just provided a service and no creativity was really on the table because the client simply wanted a pole barn or something very functional and so we did it to put bread on the table. i do have maybe 100 that i am proud of for their innovation and design. and the roofs dont leak. and we met the budget so the project was not abandoned. as far as i know flw didnt do any mundane jobs. or at least they arent in any books.

as far as him being short, that is true. i am 5' 8. his homes did contain some low spaces...maybe 7'. but they usually also contained tall spaces. he liked to contrast short compact spaces to tall spacious ones so that the impact of the difference was maximized. most architects do this. also remember that folks were shorter then than they are now. a 7' person was almost never seen then.

but we have fun and help folks get things built and if it is possible to do some good design in the mix that will be done too.

tom w