1939: Frank Lloyd Wright Reinvents Office Building
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05.14.08
Modern Mechanix calls them "golf tees" - Wright called them lily pads. The building inspectors called them illegal under the codes because of tapered shape, and required a test where they were to be loaded with twelve tons. They piled on sixty tons before it broke, falling and cracking a watermain 30 feet underground. He got the building permit.
TreeHugger things we like: lots of natural light, radiant floors, fresh air from "snorkels." What we think was not a step forward: no front door (it was designed for cars and you entered through the parking garage), no windows.
But it is still in use by (TreeHugger advertiser) S.C. Johnson and still a demonstration of what happens when an enlightened client gives enough rope to a great architect. ::Modern Mechanix
I had a tour of this in the 1960's and still find it memorable. FLW was a great experimenter not only in design but also in use of materials and in ways of changing the culture of tenants/owners.
The idea of making a tenant practices fit a building is coming back indirectly: i.e. LEED
"Ways of changing the culture of tenants" -- like nailing all the desks to the floor so that the floor plan cannot be changed? God forbid anyone dare to mess up the perfectly rigid lines of desks he had in mind. He even insisted everyone use three-legged chairs of his own design that tipped easily: his response was that the chairs would eventually teach them good posture and balance. He only relented when he was made to actually sit in one of the chairs (for the first time ever, despite the fact that HE designed them). He promptly fell over.
Wright was great visually, but the man sucked ass at the details. He was completely unconcerned with how anyone would actually live in or use his buildings. I don't know if he ever designed a building that didn't leak like a sieve. The Johnson Wax building was famous for leaking like a sieve.
His type of architecture is exactly what we need less of: arrogant, self-centered, a monument to the ego of the creator and focused solely on visual appearance, performance be damned.
A building is not a piece of abstract sculpture; people have to live and work there!
If you ever have the chance to visit this building, it is spectacular. Makes you wonder why everything else is made so boring. FLW kept ART in ARchiTecture. Now it's just about building boxes as cheap as possible for maximum profit. Gag me with a spoon.
Umm. The SCJ office is still in use. The leaks obviously eliminated with modern materials.
I had friends who lived in one of his well known Usonian homes. Never leaked. Very comfortable. Not so say there weren't problems. But let's not exaggerate. Many of the issues of Wright's time are now easily overcome with technologies not available to him. Double pane low-E glass did not exist during his career. Silcone sealants not around either. Urethane rubber roof membranes either. Etc.Etc.
M.Anderson look up Usonian. He was a lot more than arrogant, self-centered, egoist not that he wasn't.
I was going to make the argument about how Architects need to be that way but that is a conversation for a another day
oh and as for performance I believe those columns were a tremendous engineering feat that is still relevant today. To say he was purely a sculpture is nonsense, what about his hotel in Japan that stood when everything else fell in a big earthquake.
John Laumer, you've got a good point. For all his technical genius, Frank Lloyd Wright was something of a social idiot. Unusable chairs are just the tip of the iceberg. He made architecture that was unresponsive to social needs. He was an important part of the interior-directed modern architectecture movement that threw away the knowledge of how to build buildings and cities accumulated over centuries and resulted in sheer facades, faceless office parks, and impoverishment of the public space. Grand ideas sometimes have unintended consequences. The grand ideas of modernist architecture resulted in howling quasi-urban wastelands.
This reminds me of the building where I work. They took a perfectly functional office building and over 4 years remodelled it completely from bare concrete. Does it look nicer now, like the building above? Yes. Lots of nice sunlight that streams down all 4 floors where there was none before. Lots of open space instead of row after row of cubes.
But, like M. Anderson said, the architects were "unconcerned with how anyone would actually live in or use [the] building". All those holes they cut in the floors to let the sunlight fall to the 1st floor? Now my employer has to rent thousands of square feet of off-campus space to house the thousand people that no longer fit on the floor space where all the holes now are. Now they have to use complicated fire safety systems (laser smoke detection, special automated doors, high-capacity blowers) to (supposedly) detect and suck out any smoke in a fire event. Yeah, and when the power/equipment/glass walls fails? We all die instead of containing the fire on one floor. Oh, and that sunlight? The managers used to have the window views with lots of sunlight, now they are in interior no-window caves and nobody gets to see sunlight from their desk.
They got lots of awards, we get to live with the mess for the next 50 years until the next remodel.