Maggie's Farm

Mendel Glickman is the structural engineer responsible for the engineering of the cantilevers at Fallingwater as designed. In the analysis of the stresses on the structure that proceeded the 2002 renovations, both compression on the concrete and tension on the reinforcing steel were determined to be near (but not exceeding) their limits. This in spite of rather extensive hidden structural damage that they suspect is from a massive falling oak that struck the end of the cantilever some years ago. This is damage that was only discovered once the renovations had begun. Conventional engineering would have more of a safety factor -- "it must support 50 units, so design it for 100" or "design it for 250", so I suspect that there was an error in Glickman's calculations. It didn't fall down, however.

Yes, no pre-camber was built into the thing, so any inevitable sag was evident instead of being masked.
Yes, the formwork and shoring was removed before the concrete had reached full structural strength, and then the cantilevers were used to support the pouring of the heavy wet concrete of the cantilevers above. So the sag is rather more substantial than it should have been. I suppose much of the blame for that must be allocated to the architectural firm, who in theory had someone supervising the construction the whole time.

An interesting discussion here, with many viewpoints.

I think Wright like many of us defaults to the opinion that everyone else would like the world arranged to his idea of perfection. He was very the man-about-town/life of the party sort, and his houses are all just about ideal for music evenings and cocktail parties, but would be awful for family life with children. Many of his houses are by today's US standards "small", yet the public rooms seem open airy and spacious.

Several have noted the small kitchen at Fallingwater - the kitchen at the Walter Gropius house in Lincoln, Massachusetts is even smaller. I think 12x15 is actually pretty OK for a kitchen in a vacation home, but we must remember that the Kaufmanns had a full-time chef -- employees may complain about the size of their workspace but in the end will cope. I suspect the family and guests only ever entered the space in order to pass through to the back stairs or to confer with Elsie about meals. We have friends who have never used their oven or cooktop because (when they don't eat out) they eat "ready meals", food from the supermarket hot-buffet, or phone-in take-out from popular chain restaurants. Yet they all seem to put in a gourmet kitchen when they build a house, because the "market expects it", even if they will never use it themselves.

Another mentioned that FLW houses are so bad in livability and construction that many have been torn down. Or perhaps the fact that they have been torn down is evidence that they were bad design and execution. But the expectation of the market actually does have a lot to do with this, because the neighborhoods where FLW houses exist tend to be either "top end" where a single bathroom on the hall doesn't cut it, or else "urban decay" where a flat-roofed residential structure is not going to survive a few decades of rental tenants and absentee-landlord. The residential houses that have been torn-down have mostly succumbed to fire, hurricane, road-widening, and what in the UK is called "bungalow gobbling" -- where someone buys a house for the land and location in order to replace it with a McMansion. Unlike more traditional houses, FLW homes don't tend to lend themselves to vinyl-sided shed dormer additions, closing in of porches, and the other typical re-muddle-ings that grow on most older houses. The business and retail buildings have generally not survived long past a change in tenancy or a corporate bankruptcy, as the land has been repurposed to other uses.

Others said "inhospitable". That contrasts with the cocktail party atmosphere, which I suppose itself would be inhospitable to introverts. I think some are drawn to the low-ceilinged cubby-like bedrooms and office-nooks, which all have a sense of safety but also look out to a vista of indoor our outdoor entertaining space.

Architects vs engineers indeed - or artist vs builder or whatever combination. I have vivid memory of the GC on a big museum building taking me into the trailer, showing me the $1 brick that the architect "picked out of some fancy catalogue", and showing me a 20¢ common brick that to me was completely indistinguishable from the first. He assured me that they were in fact alike, and that after a few frosts there would be severe spalling with bricks of the quality they were using, and they were paying 5 times too much for them to boot -- but no-one would listen to him. It is now 20 years later, and I've looked very closely for spalling on that building and cannot detect any. I do seem to daily travel past construction sites with Tyvek going up where the builders seem to have no conception of which direction gravity will carry water, or how to detail the water-shield around a window. Any design with brick, stonework, or structural members passing through a roof or exterior wall is an invitation for water ingress and is therefore a compromise. FLW houses seem to have a lot of this for artistic reasons, so the detail on the flashing and roofing is very important. Wright houses are not the only buildings with leaks. My point is that builders have trouble with details that differ from the local vernacular, and "cutting edge" building techniques of the 1930's suffered from that as much as "cutting edge" building techniques do today. I kind of suspect that the roofing problems at Wingspread and other unique designs were largely because Wright expected local professional roofers to know their materials and innovate solutions, whereas the roofers expected Wright in some cases to tell them how to do the unusual yet in others cases got upset when Wright or his on-site minions became directive and started "telling them how to do their job".

I find it interesting that comments say he had no grasp of practical building techniques. He and his students built his Talesian West school campus themselves -- not just the design, but the construction also. If a design or construction detail didn't work, they worked out why and changed it.

I find it interesting that he is accused of ignorance about materials science and engineering, yet he was a pioneer in the use of several materials, including use of plywood structurally in furniture, and concrete in both block and poured&reinforced forms. It looks to me like many of the early critics of the Fallingwater cantilevers looked only at the capacity of the formed beams in the floor and ignored that the walls around the perimeter of the level also created a large structural beam.