[twright]

It never ceases to amaze me how Wright's style was so ahead of the times. A lot of people immediately think the houses are mid-50's but they're in fact 20 to 30 years earlier! If you happen to be driving through somewhere near one of the houses that are under conservancy[1] they are well worth a stop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Frank_Lloyd_Wright_wor...

[phlakaton]

45 years earlier in some cases. I found the Robie House in Chicago (built in 1910!) to be a total head-trip.

[frantathefranta]

It's really amusing when you tour something like Casa Loma[0] in Toronto (a gothic revival house) and then compare it to the Darwin Martin house[1] in Buffalo, which was built basically 10 years before. I can't imagine visiting a FLW house in the early 1900s and then building a super kitschy castle.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Loma

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_D._Martin_House

[allknowingfrog]

Isn't Wright sort of famous for designing structures that leak when it rains? My understanding is that Falling Water House is a beautiful money pit.

[twright]

Money pit indeed! At Graycliff, the one he designed before Falling Water, there are no gutters or downspouts. The tour guide told us that Wright didn’t want them disrupting the horizontal lines of the house. The roof is cedar shake and there’s some wonderful moulding just below the roofline that gutters would normally protect. It must be astronomic to maintain it.

[BobbyTables2]

I read that as “molding” just below the roofline …

[Aurornis]

Falling Water was an engineering disaster, but it was a unique project for him. Most of his houses are not like that.

[chasil]

I thought the "move your chair" story concerned the Kauffmans of Falling Water, but it did not.

https://bpsfuelforthought.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/move-your...

[bmitc]

His architecture was generally very, very progressive for the time and pushed the bounds of construction and structural engineering.

As someone else mentioned, he was designing houses that look newer than they actually are.

[TremendousJudge]

well, it's often said that all good architecture leaks [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0j0d2ymixY

[leoc]

Things like the Dessau Bauhaus and the German Pavilion in Barcelona were built in the 1920s. Post-war Modernism was a bit of a second wind.

[CGMthrowaway]

FLW created the times

[UncleOxidant]

There's something similar in cinema. For example, I was watching Terrance Malick's Badlands for the first time a couple of years ago and I could swear it felt like a film from the 90s or maybe early 2000s. But it was from 1973.

[bookofjoe]

I think you would enjoy "The Sugarland Express," directed by 26-year-old Steven Spielberg and released in 1974.

https://youtu.be/JLSQBAXIKtk?si=Q8FP4c8v72PiZU93

Available here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=trailer+sugarla...

[foota]

Wow he was born a _lot_ earlier than I would have thought!