Art And Leaky Roofs

Apropos this post, a reader writes,

I think I understand your point, but it seems to me that any architecture (in your terms) which fails to meet the (again in your terms) lesser standards of mere building is still a failure. Architecture may indeed be art but if the roof leaks you haven't got a building but a sculpture - and I don't want to live or work in a sculpture.

And some time ago a weblogger wrote,

Would you want to live in one of [Frank Lloyd Wright's] houses? I wouldn't, for two main reasons. Most important is the way a Frank Lloyd Wright house never becomes your home; instead, you move in and become the curator of one branch of the Frank Lloyd Wright museum. You're just the custodian in a monument to his genius. For the other, I wouldn't want to be in charge of (let alone pay for) the upkeep. Wright couldn't resist trying out innovative building techniques — which has meant in practice that many of his houses are in semi-constant need of expensive repair.

[...]

The buildings work as they're supposed to only if you first submit to FLW — and submit totally. Give over to his genius, and then you'll have earned the right to experience the full, transcendent FLW experience. What if, on the other hand, you prefer to live by your own rules and you expect your house to play along?

So, to address the question in terms of a house specifically, what's wrong with these sentiments? I mean, it all sounds perfectly reasonable, does it not?

It does indeed — if you're talking about a tract house, or a stand-alone designed and built by one of those so-called New Urbanist or New Traditionalist architects, or by a builder along more or less conventional commercial lines. Such bourgeois concerns, however, are inappropriate when what's under consideration is a house designed by an architect of real aesthetic gift, and entirely out of place when what's under consideration is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect of genuinely transcendent aesthetic gift.

Wright's houses are notorious for their leaky roofs. As a house is the most elemental and paradigmatic instance of a shelter, a leaky roof would seem a most damning and fundamental fault. And so it would be were the house merely a building. With the possible exception of his very earliest work, none of Wright's houses qualifies as a mere building. They're all, as is all genuine architecture of any sort whatsoever, first and principally works of art. That's to say, a concern with the aesthetic trumped all else in their design, and that's only as it should be as that concern is architecture's principal defining characteristic. Such has it been from architecture's earliest beginnings, and such shall it always be.

Should Wright have taken more care in working out the nuts-and-bolts engineering details of his house designs? Perhaps. But it's not as if his houses were ever dangers to, posed undue difficulties for, or were even experienced as inconvenient by, their original owners; not even the structurally problem-plagued, cutting-edge-innovative, and justly aesthetically world-famous Kaufmann house, "Fallingwater", which only today, some 65 years after its building, is (was) in danger of collapsing without extensive (and wildly expensive) correction of its fundamental engineering faults. Like Kaufmann, Wright's clients were invariably thrilled by, and felt privileged to own and occupy, what Wright gave them.

I'm perfectly willing to confess freely that Wright played fast and loose with the nuts-and-bolts engineering details of all his buildings. After establishing that a design he envisioned could be built without subsequently falling down or otherwise causing harm to his client, he considered attention to that sort of detail to be merely a nuisance, most especially if closer attention to such engineering details might have indicated that an aesthetic detail(s) would have to be altered in consequence. Wright's attitude to his buildings, and to his clients and their use of those buildings, is best summed up in his (in)famous retort to a client who, at first, bitched to Wright about the leaks in the roof of his new house. Said Wright, "That's what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain."

Glib, arrogant, cavalier, and the effusion of a monstrous ego most certainly, but in Wright's case, essentially true nevertheless. And only an architect of Wright's transcendent genius could (or should) get away with saying — and brag about saying — such a thing.

And what about the whine of, "...a Frank Lloyd Wright house never becomes your home.... [...] You're just the custodian [of] a monument to his genius. [...] What if....you prefer to live by your own rules and you expect your house to play along?"

In short, and straightaway to the point, the answer is you let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, and from there select a good, solid, bourgeois builder to build your house for you, and leave the all-too-rare Wrights of this world free to serve those worthy of their genius.

See how that works?