Thirteen years ago, I visited Fallingwater for the first time. At the time, the iconic house was in the midst of a major reconstruction that cost $11.5 million and involved a complete re-engineering of the cantilevered first and second floors. Wright’s original design was compression-based; reinforced concrete terraces extended like diving boards from an anchored core, supported by the bending resistance of those terraces.
The way Fallingwater works now is different, and better: tensioned steel cables connect anchor blocks at the end of those terraces to the core. It’s so obviously superior, and the science behind it was already well understood at the time. After all, the Golden Gate Bridge was begun in 1933 and it was far from the first suspension bridge in the country. Why didn’t Wright build Fallingwater in tension, not compression? The answer is simple: he just didn’t think it through.
While Edgar Kaufmann, Sr.’s vacation home remains the most architecturally significant private residence in American history , I’d suggest that Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius was less in Fallingwater’s design than in his ability to sell that design to a client. Not only did Kaufmann agree to the ridiculous notion of building a home on his favorite waterfall and sign off on construction costs in excess of five times the original target, he secretly doubled the steel reinforcement in the cantilevers and worked hand-in-hand with Wright to make sure all but the most outrageous of the architect’s demands were met. (Yes, FLW wanted the concrete terraces to be plated in gold leaf — in the middle of the Depression!) As rare a talent as Wright was, Kaufmann was arguably an even more exceptional customer. It helped, of course, that his son was a Taliesin fanatic and aspiring architect himself, but the credit for Fallingwater has be at least partially given to the man who signed the check.
When he signed that check, Kaufmann bought at least three things. He bought the cover of TIME, no small feat for a Midwestern businessman:
He bought the most recognizable and admired home this side of Buckingham Palace, at an inflation-adjusted price that wouldn’t get you a top-floor suite at the EPIC Hotel in Miami nowadays. But he also bought a severely under-engineered and fundamentally flawed liability that required constant surveying and attention, from the moment the home was finished and the longest cantilever promptly dropped nearly two inches to the present day’s bare-concrete restoration of the guest bedroom. He didn’t sue FLW or even ask for part of his $8,000 (that’s nearly two hundred grand in today’s money) architect’s fee back. He recognized Fallingwater for what it was — a work of art that was thoroughly imperfect and problematic.
I wonder how many of today’s one-percenters would be willing to do the same? As previously noted on this blog, I spent some time last week admiring Mark Cuban’s massive Feadship yacht at its Miami dock. I wonder whether Mr. Cuban would have been willing to buy that boat knowing from the beginning that it leaked and would eventually require re-engineering at a cost of several times the original purchase price. Today’s wealthy customers have more money than ever but they also require a sort of bland perfection in everything they buy. Dwight D. Eisenhower had his Rolex “President” serviced, by mail, several times because the original Oyster Perpetual motion wasn’t able to handle the force of Ike’s golf swing. Would a sitting President put up with that nowadays?
Today we live in the era of the JD Power rating, the Amazon stars and comments next to every product, and the Equifax background check that includes a lifetime’s worth of medical history. Even prostitutes need favorable reviews from the Internet in order to make real money. For a while, it was possible for women to get a pre-game preview on their Tinder hookups. Who doesn’t check Urbanspoon or Yelp before making a dinner reservation? (The answer is: me, because I only eat at Wendy’s and Ruth’s Chris.) It’s not excellence that’s being sought out in this cultural obsession with track record and customer satisfaction; it’s safety.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Yelp! reviews would have been pretty poor. He couldn’t stay on budget or deliver on time. He hated tall people and punished them through his architecture. He made the doorways narrow so the furniture he imposed on his homes couldn’t be easily removed. He was, in short, a terrible human being. There were hundreds of very good architects available to the Kaufmanns in the nineteen-thirties, architects whose work probably came in on time, under budget, and with absolutely unobjectionable construction.
Can you name any of their designs?
Wright wouldn’t be able to get work nowadays. He’d have been drummed out of the business the tenth, or the fifth, or even the first time he did something typically Frank-Lloyd-Wright-ish. He’d have wound up a professor at a community college or a fast-food manager or a Wal-Mart greeter. His fate would be the modern fate of anybody who can’t produce good references and solid Yelp! ratings and, possibly, a meaningless certification from a mildly fraudulent quick-bake professional organization. This is no longer a world where genius trumps reliability. We even expect our sports heroes to behave nowadays.
Prior to visiting Fallingwater, I heard a story about a bus driver in the school district where I live. (Yes, I know, it’s an odd segue; bear with me.) This driver saw a tractor-trailer stalled at the side of the road, misjudged the available space, and brushed that tractor-trailer, making a rather terrifying noise and bursting one of the bus’s rear tires. After making sure that none of the children on the bus were hurt, he continued on to the school on five out of six tires.
“Well,” I said in response, “I guess that was his last day on the job.”
“No,” I was told, “he was driving the bus the next day. I guess they gave him a second chance.” I thought about this for a few minutes. My first thought: I hope that guy quits before my son has to ride that bus. My second thought: I hope that bus driver winds up doing something brilliant, like keeping the speed of his schoolbus above 50mph until Keanu Reeves has the chance to defuse a bomb or something. I hope he gets a Richard Jewell’s worth of vindication. I hope that my school district’s decision to keep this guy on the job despite one mistake turns out to be the right decision.
Not that we’ll get another Fallingwater out of it, but think of it as Edgar Kaufmann putting extra steel into the cantilevers. If you’re willing to give someone a chance to do something great, you never know — they might do it.
Jack, FLW was *right* in designing that by compression. Concrete works better at compression and is not very good in tension. From seeing your picture I could guess the upper terrace had more chance to fail, followed by the second. It has to do on how the stresses are distributed on a cantilever. And in this case, you cannot ignore the weight of the concrete. I would love to see the same structure ran through a modern FEA analysis to solve that problem.
Regarding the rest, one of the development mechanics in one of my previous jobs told me in very few words: “nothing has character anymore”. People have little patience for “imperfections” nowadays.
And you’re right, FLW wouldn’t be able to work nowadays, but so wouldn’t Bill Mitchell, Harley Earl, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill… to name just a few.
“Jack, FLW was *right* in designing that by compression. Concrete works better at compression and is not very good in tension.”
Yes, but… the way Fallingwater works now, the terraces are held up by the steel cables, which exert a static pressure of 195 tons, thus putting the terrace into compression but resisting additional weight (like, from thirty tourists all out there at once) with the tension of the cable.
http://www.vsl.net/Article/tabid/157/contentid/296/Default.aspx
It could have been done that way from the beginning and the technology the contractor used to fix the problem was all available in 1935.
Responding to myself: Neutra built the Lovell house using tension cables in 1927:
http://www.archdaily.com/104713/ad-classics-lovell-house-richard-neutra/
I read the whole Fallinwater article. Thanks for supporting my argument. And… not buts.
Firstly, you need to understand how a cantilever beam works when loaded. In the situation pictured above, the beam would be loaded at compression below the centreline of the beam and at tension above that. With concrete, I guess it would fail first under tension than compression. Steel reinforcement is added to aid in that. The beam had to be calculated to hold its own weight and the terraces it was going to support. I have no idea how they did that.
What the cables are doing is helping the upper part of the beams by reducing the tension stresses, transferring the load to other part of the structure. You add the resulting stresses and it works, beautifully. I don’t know is this kind of stuff was available during the 30’s. However, I don’t think it was needed when they built the house.
The repair they did is brave, and those guys go in the same folder as the ones that tried to stabilise the Viaducto 1 in Venezuela.
Your second link sent me to a LeCorbusier house. From reading that, the cables seem to be used differently. Also the vertical bars would have ruined FLW concept.
FLW was right. He probably needed some more structural engineering to back up his design.
It’s a Neutra, not a LeC, but as with the re-engineering of Fallingwater, the cables were attached to the rock and tensioned.
“Firstly, you need to understand how a cantilever beam works when loaded. In the situation pictured above, the beam would be loaded at compression below the centreline of the beam and at tension above that. ”
No problem, I understand that fine, that’s why the terraces cracked from the top down most of the time.
“With concrete, I guess it would fail first under tension than compression. Steel reinforcement is added to aid in that.”
That’s the magic of rebar; the steel resists tension, the concrete resists compression, it’s like a Reese’s cup.
” The beam had to be calculated to hold its own weight and the terraces it was going to support. I have no idea how they did that.”
The flip answer: not very well.
But what I was getting at was that the technology to engineer Fallingwater the way it was “saved” was available when the home was built. And the way it works is simple: you tension the hell out of a cable in the top of the terrace and it prevents it from drooping/rotating around the point at the bottom where it contacts the supports. Yes, the bottom of the terrace is still in compression but in theory it’s now under compression from the cables more than from its own weight sagging around the pivot point.
I’m a longtime reader at TTAC and more recently here … I have to say thanks to Jack for driving an interesting discussion on this topic and chip in a few (hopefully interesting) comments since the subject is literally close to home …
My family is from that area of PA originally; nearest town to Fallingwater, Ohiopyle, is where my grandparents walked down out of the mountains everyday to attend grade school. There is another FLW house on the opposite side of Ohiopyle from Fallingwater, typically called Kentuck Knob after the hilltop on which it stands but locally known as the Hagan House after the Pittsburgh family for whom it was built. The contrast of the two houses is quite interesting, both in setting and construction; both can easily be visited in one day. The tour guides at the Hagan house are refreshingly less fawning about FLW than the Fallingwater crew, and the house itself, while absolutely a hexagon-based design statement, is a place in which a small family could comfortably live. Apparently the idea for the Hagan house was the look of a boulder nestled on a scenic hilltop, and it does seem to fit.
My father enjoys telling a few stories about the Hagans, mostly involving Mr. Hagan’s bemused interactions with the local farm boys he caught riding horses or scouting deer on his land.
Incidentally, Jack, the Fallingwater repair is similar in concept to the ‘tension band’ constructs we routinely use in orthopedics for certain fractures.
I haven’t visited any other FLW houses, but as Nate noted, it seems like a fair number of them turned out to be reasonably functional. I find myself wondering if those are just ‘lucky accidents’ of FLW’s design muse, or if the architect intentionally made Fallingwater an art piece with minimal regard to function.
I cannot thank you enough for posting this — I’m in the middle of doing a piece for R&T about the roads surrounding the area, as well, feel free to chime in with opnions!
“But what I was getting at was that the technology to engineer Fallingwater the way it was “saved” was available when the home was built.”
And would probably have not been even needed ;). That structure would be a walk in the park with today’s knowledge and tools. Maybe could have been done light and cheap if you factor in the newer materials & techniques.
I cannot see into the limitations they had at the time. It is like I pretended the Dodge brothers to cough up a Hellcat engine back then.
“Yes, the bottom of the terrace is still in compression but in theory it’s now under compression from the cables more than from its own weight sagging around the pivot point.”
The bottom of the terrace was, is and will be forever working in compression. It cannot be any different as it is still a cantilever. Firstly because of the weight they had to carry and now even more so because of the cables. The objective was achieved in relieving the upper part of them of the tension stresses, which may be now either within *spec*, zero or compression, depending on how they ran their numbers.
And BTW, Happy 2015 🙂
Same to you, friend! I appreciate your contributions here — although I took a few architecture classes I don’ t consider myself anything but a dilettante.
Interesting thought process Jack .
FLW made some very nice homes in Southern California , not penalty boxes for tall people nor furniture .
-Nate
Style uber alles.
Jack - I’ve got a long format story I’d like to submit for TTAC. Can I show it to you?
Thanks.
Ashamed to admit: I only know who he is because of Simon & Garfunkel
Although I think Dave Brubeck also owned one of his homes?
AFAIK it was up in a tree…but I bet he didn’t call it “falling tree” 😉
Saw an interview from the fifties on late night/early morning tv about a week ago. FLW was quite old, very urbane, and a real jerk. There was a time when we accepted that genius did not have to be socially adept. . .or want to
be. Now, we put our social media restrictions on those whom we cannot hope to truly understand. Sad.
No, I think we’ve decided that youre not entitled to treat other people like shit just because you can sing or draw or play a game really well.
Like Jamais Winston, or Ben Rothlisberger, or Roman Polanski, or Michael Jackson, or Gerry Sandusky (until recently), the list goes on. Probably not rapists but definitely “House” style assholes: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Larry Ellison, possible rapist and definite Bond villian Henry Nichols, etc. etc.
There is a lot one can say about FLW, I am sure.
However, what perhaps should be noted is that in 1914 pretty much Wright’s whole family (and others) were murdered by an insane household employee.
If I recall correctly, Wright’s legal wife was elsewhere, and so the woman who was killed was the then-current love of Wright’s life, who, I believe, was the former wife of a former client of Wright’s.
So, yes, one glimpses a free-flowing sense of entitlement, but, his life was not all beer and skittles.
jp
Frank Lloyd Wright was a car guy. The Auburn Cord Duesenberg museum in Auburn has his Cord L-29 and Crosley roadster, both of them in “Taliesin orange” Wright’s favorite color, really a shade of orange.
http://www.coachbuilt.com/des/w/wright_f_l/wright_f_l.htm
Come to think of it, my next door neighbor’s mother, who lives with them, used to live in South Bend in a subdivision that has a Wright home.
There is an Italian guy from New York that has commissioned a couple of the fastest yachts in the world.
http://www.superyachts.com/largest-yachts/fastest-yacht.htm
Apparently with this one they learned the hard way what sport boat enthusiasts have known for a long time about stepped hulls.
They can get the boat riding on a center of pressure that is ahead of the boats center of mass. Turning it into a giant sea going version of an early Porsche turbo. This one supposedly snapped around and spun out! Imagine that in a 140′ boat!
No other yacht owner in their right mind would buy this boat or build another one. But god bless him for pushing the envelope at least.
Pingback: dustbury.com » Count every star
This is in reply to the post about the other nearby FLW house that is a hexagon shape… .
I would find it hard to believe if FLW had not been aware of the mid-19th century fad of building octagonal houses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octagon_house
There is a much-modified Octagon House on Elmwood Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island, and I know of a well-preserved example on Route 112 in Richmond, RI.
The theoretical advantage of an octagonal floor plan is that compared with a square, an octagon encloses approximately 20% additional space with the same perimeter (and in theory the same amount of building expense). However, the theoretical advantage did not always translate to practical advantages, even though housebuilders of the time knew how to build 135-degree corners, because that is a common bay-window angle.
So, I cannot help but wonder whether Wright wanted to “improve” on the octagon, or just could not bring himself to use a discredited design from the era of his youth and the decades before.
jp
” dilettante ” .
I doubt this but in any case you clearly understand the concepts and are able to explain them to Laymen in general terms , this makes this entire thread so interesting .
-Nate
Fallingwater is only about an hour from my house, yet I’ve never been there. As a mechanical engineer, I suppose I owe it to myself to visit.