Posts Tagged ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’
“Function reforms form, perpetually”*…
Over the years I have given away many, many copies of many books in the hope that they might be of interest/use to the recipient. The book of which I’ve gifted the most copies is How Buildings Learn- What Happens After They’re Built, published in 1995 by my GBN partner and Long Now colleague Stewart Brand. While it has certainly earned its plaudits as a work of architectural criticism, I’ve handed it out because it’s the most thoughtful and evocative book on strategy I’ve come across; it’s p-o-v and principles, rooted in (often literally) concrete examples, amount to the best manifesto I’ve found for thinking and planning for the long term.
In 1997, The BBC released a six-part series based on the book (with music by GBN and Long Now colleague and friend Brian Eno). As Open Culture reports, Stewart has created a YouTube channel to make the series available to us all…
Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later launching the influential Whole Earth Catalog (something Steve Jobs described as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”). He also vigorously campaigned in 1966 to have NASA release a photograph showing the entirety of Earth from space—something we take for granted now, but fired humanity’s imagination back then.
During the 1970s and beyond, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly, a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog; the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”), “a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over;” and eventually The Long Now Foundation, whose work we’ve highlighted here before. When not creating new institutions, he has poured his creative energies into books and films…
… Based on [the book, How Buildings Learn], the TV series offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture (think Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier) and instead argues for “an organic kind of building, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ideal form of building.”
Brand made the series available on his YouTube channel, with these words: “Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like… Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.” And he added the noteworthy footnote: “this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital—shot digital, edited digital.”…
A wonderful series on architecture– and more broadly, on planning for the long term: “Watch Stewart Brand’s 6‑Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno,” from @openculture.bsky.social.
Watch the series here.
Further to yesterday’s post (and thanks to friend MK) an obituary of Don Michael, another GBN friend, and author of another book– Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn: The Social Psychology of Changing Toward Future-Responsive Societal Learning— that I’ve given away many, many times.
* Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that Frank Lloyd Wright’s self-designed home in Wisconsin, Taliesin, was the site of mass murder and arson. Julian Carlton, a servant of Wright, set fire to the home and brutally attacked the people there during lunch. He ultimately killed seven, including Wright’s partner, “Mamah” Borthwick.
Wright was among the architects that Brand criticized in How Buildings Learn. Brand argued that Wright designed rigid, static “magazine architecture” that prioritized photogenic style and artistic ego over practical function, durability, and the way buildings must adapt to weather and human use over time. That said, Stewart never even thought of reaching for the matches nor a hatchet.
“Of course I’d like to get beyond the concrete. But it’s really difficult. Very difficult.”*…
Felix Salmon is fascinated by concrete…
Greetings from my apartment in the most beautiful Brutalist tower in New York City (sorry not sorry, I.M. Pei.) My bookshelf contains such works as “Concrete,” “Concrete Concept” and “Toward a Concrete Utopia;” on my desk is “Concrete Planet.” Tl;dr: I’m a lover of concrete, not a hater. But… it’s still very problematic. And, as you’re about to find out, much more expensive than architects and contractors might have you believe…
He goes on, in his “Capital” column for Axios, to explain…
Concrete construction no longer lasts thousands of years, like the Pantheon in Rome. Instead, its lifespan is roughly 50-100 years, thanks to the way in which modern concrete is reinforced.
That means a multi-trillion-dollar bill is coming due right around now, in the form of concrete construction that needs noisy, dirty, expensive repair.
Why it matters: The collapse of a residential tower in Surfside, Florida is a stark reminder of how catastrophically concrete can fail. Just as the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa caused Italy to start paying much more attention to remedial infrastructure projects, the Surfside tragedy might help focus America on the urgent need to fix buildings that are nearing the end of their initial lifespan.
The big picture: As Robert Courland explains in “Concrete Planet,” modern concrete is poured around steel rebar, which gives it tensile strength. But tiny cracks — found in all concrete — cause water to start rusting the steel, which then expands, cracking the concrete.
Photos of the Surfside basement taken before the collapse show steel rebar breaking all the way through the concrete to the point at which it is fully exposed to the salty and humid Florida air.
By the numbers: One of the most famous concrete buildings in America, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, cost $155,000 to build in 1936 — about $2 million in 2001 dollars. The cost of repairs in 2001 came to $11.5 million.
Similarly, repairs to Wright’s concrete Unity Temple are estimated at roughly 20 times the original construction costs, even after adjusting for inflation.
How it works: Once rebar starts corroding, the standard fix involves jackhammering the concrete to expose the steel, brushing the steel to remove the rust, reinforcing the rebar as necessary, and then covering it all back up again with carefully color-matched new concrete.
That labor-intensive extreme noise and dust is actually the green, environmentally sensitive solution. The only alternative is demolition and replacement with an entirely new building — something that involves a much greater carbon footprint.
Between the lines: Because concrete fails from the inside out, damage can be hard to detect. And because concrete looksso solid and impregnable, necessary maintenance is often skipped, causing massive bills later on.
Local governments are in charge of ensuring building safety, but their willingness and ability to do so varies widely. The owners and residents of concrete buildings often try very hard not to think about corrosion, just because the costs of fixing it are so enormous.
The bottom line: The amount of money needed to fix existing infrastructure (nearly all of which is concrete, in one way or another) stands at roughly $6 trillion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That number does not include homes, offices and other private buildings.
If you live in a concrete building that’s more than 40 or 50 years old, it’s an extremely good idea to check carefully on just how well it’s been maintained, lest you find yourself with an unexpected seven-figure repair bill — or worse.
Go deeper: WLRN’s Danny Rivero clearly explains the collective action problems involved in persuading condo owners to pay for expensive repairs.
The tragedy in Surfside is just one indication that “America’s trillion-dollar concrete bill is coming due,” as @felixsalmon explains.
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As we muse on maintenance, we might spare a thought for Angelo Mangiarotti; he died on this date in 2012. An architect and designer, he made an early career stop in Chicago as a visiting professor for the Illinois Institute of Technology, during which met Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Konrad Wachsmann. While Mangiarotti learned from them an appreciation of materials (perhaps especially concrete) and industrial process for buildings and design production– on both of which he built– he is perhaps best remembered for his insistence, borne out in his work, on “never forgetting the real needs of users.”
“Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines.”*…
In the 1890s, empire building was in the air in New York, and magazine editors succumbed to the craze. As President Theodore Roosevelt sent troops to Cuba and the Philippines, the magazine men—they were nearly all men—had quieter plans to extend their influence. They used their brands to sell model homes, universities, and other offerings of middle-class life. It was, after all, the Progressive Era, when technological innovations and post-Victorian values were supposed to hasten the arrival of a more enlightened, egalitarian social order. Before the concept of branding even existed, these new magazine ventures represented an exercise in branding. But woven into this phenomenon lay a stealth traditionalism, a new way of packaging the often conservative, sometimes quixotic visions of a few titans of the press.
Editors Edward Bok (Ladies’ Home Journal), John Brisben Walker (Cosmopolitan), and S.S. McClure (McClure’s) saw a way to directly shape their readers’ class aspirations. In 1895 Ladies’ Home Journal began to offer unfrilly, family-friendly architectural plans in its pages. They were mainly colonial, Craftsman, or modern ranch-style houses, and many still stand today. The Cosmopolitan, as it was then known, advertised the Cosmopolitan University, a custom-designed college degree—for free!—by correspondence course. McClure’s magazine, the juggernaut of investigative journalism—home to Ida Tarbell’s landmark investigation of Standard Oil, among many other muckraking articles of the Gilded Age—began to plot an array of ventures, including a model town called McClure’s Ideal Settlement.
Cannily noting the trend for smaller, servantless suburban homes, Journal editor Bok [the grandfather of Harvard President Derek Bok] was selling more than home design. Every house should be occupied by a female homemaker, he decided, and every family should aspire to a simpler, more frugal way of life. The campaign rapidly succeeded. By 1916 the editors of the Journal claimed that thirty thousand of their homes had been built. Part of this was due to the Journal’s wide circulation—it was the first American magazine to surpass a million subscribers. Its sister publication, the weekly Saturday Evening Post, was a fixture of nearly every household…
“A Fireproof House for $5,000,” illustration by Frank Lloyd Wright in Ladies’ Home Journal, 1907
When the (male) proprietors of women’s magazines believed that their publications could change lives on a grand scale: “Editorial Visions.”
* C.S. Lewis
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As we shape society, we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion premiered in London, featuring Mrs Patrick Campbell (for whom Shaw had written the role) as Eliza Doolittle.
The Greek myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with one of his sculptures, was a popular subject for Victorian English playwrights, including one of Shaw’s influences, W. S. Gilbert, who had written a successful play based on the story, Pygmalion and Galatea, that was first presented in 1871. Shaw’s play in turn has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and its film version.
A Sketch Magazine illustration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle from April, 1914
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone…
The great men and women of history… and the modern pop song lyrics they might have spoken.
Many more muse-worthy mash-ups at Ms. Attribution.
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As we slip on our headphones, we might send elegantly-ordered birthday greetings to Daniel H. Burnham; he was born on this date in 1846. America’s preeminent architect at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, Burnham collaborated with Frederick Law Olmsted on the design of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, became the country’s leading city planner (Chicago, Cleveland, Washington DC, San Francisco, among others), designed such iconic buildings as New York’s Flatiron and Washington’s Union Station, and served as President of the American Institute of Architects.
Even fellow-architects impatient with Burnham’s resolute classicism– e.g., Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright– were admirers of the man and his efforts. (Robert Moses, Burhham’s successor as Master Planner through the midst of the Twentieth Century, might be a reminder to Sullivan and Wright that one should be careful what one wishes for…)
“A screaming comes across the sky”…
Long time readers know of your correspondent’s abiding affection for the works of Thomas Pynchon. So readers can imagine his delight at discovering The Thomas Pynchon Fake Book, an online collaboration among 37 people (and three animals) that yielded 29 songs, all with lyrics appearing in Gravity’s Rainbow (a positively ditty-packed volume).
Readers can listen to streaming renditions of “Loonies on Leave,” “Byron the Bulb,” “The Penis He Thought Was His Own,” “Herman the German,” and over a score more.
Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
– Thomas Pynchon
UPDATE to yesterday’s XXL: MK reminds your correspondent that all readers might enjoy the exhibit, a collaboration between London’s Serpentine Gallery and EDGE, in which Kai Krause’s “Africa to Scale” features. It can be found here or here.
As we stay alert to Inherent Vice, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York. Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned and designed the building in 1937; but construction was delayed until 1957. The resulting gallery, which features a spiraling six-story ramp encircling an open center space lit by a glass dome, is home to a powerful contemporary art collection, strong in Klee, Kandinsky, Calder, Chagall, and Brancusi.
The Guggenheim (source)
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