Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete Geither
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.
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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