When Architects Goof

My favorite building in the entire world is Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water” (1936), a weekend place he designed outside Pittsburgh for department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann. He cantilevers the main structure over a waterfall. Kaufmann was understandably thrilled by its unique look, but being a successful businessman, he politely asked the architect if he shouldn’t have his building engineers check out the math of the cantilevers. Wright, a quintessentially unhumble man, flared that you don’t send men with a slide rule to judge a genius’s creation.

You don’t? For a Pennsylvania taxpayer like myself, that turned out to be a question with ominous answers. For recent engineers discovered that “Falling Water” was about to fall into those falling waters! And it would cost us taxpayers $23 million dollars to keep the building from architectural euthanasia. I started collecting architectural goofs, in the interests of consumers of architecture like myself. (Although the two houses I have owned in fifty years of residence: a $6000 National Homes prefab in Dewitt, MI designed by the neglected genius Charles Goodman and a $23000 modern two story in Philadelphia designed by Louis Kahn were error free.

Alas, the more I studied the history of modern architecture for a book I am writing on the Bauhaus experiment, the more goofs I have gathered. Take the first modern house in Houston, TX (1950) that Philip Johnson “designed” for Dominique deMenil and her family. (She was one of the most distinguished collectors of twentieth century art, now deliciously deployed in an error free building designed by Renzo Piano.)

The roof leaked, and leaked, and leaked. So much so that the deMenil children thought the unsuccessful roofers were the architects, so often did they appear to try to repair their work! Johnson was also at the time a Mies van der Rohe freak. He demanded that they use only Mies furniture in their new house, arranged as the Master wanted. “Get lost,” these hyperesthetes told PJ. Allegedly they never exchanged another word! I don’t blame them!

And speaking of Mies, he had a girl friend in Chicago named Dr. Farnsworth. He built her a love nest in Plano, IL for weekends. Except that Mies was sadly bedazzled by his own first success, the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition (1928).

Unfortunately, he tried to use the same great expanses of glass in Plano, in no way a Mediterranean city. Result: freezing in the winter, suffocating in the summer. And doubly expensive in energy costs. When their romance cooled, she hotly took him to court. She lost! But eventually people gave up trying to live in an uninhabitable house, turning it into a Visitors Center, where the architectural genius of Mies is now perennially celebrated. (Incidentally, that’s also what Falling Water has become. Hazard’s Law: Failed modernist icons become Visitors Centers.)

Which leads me to Mies’ great experiment outside Stuttgart, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927). There he assembled a cadre of over two dozen leading world architects to show how the future should look. Somehow Mies’ apartments didn’t “look right” to Dr.Marie-Elisabeth Lüders. She critted them from the point of view of a woman and mother. No room for wet clothes. Too much glass so that the living room floor was a infant pneumonia generator from the cold winds that blew there. Open the kitchen, and the same blasts blew out the gas stove! And outside, the steps had such huge gaps that children could fall through them! In short, she wrote in “Form” magazine that Mies had created a “Work of Art” not a dwelling fit for mom and kids.

Dr.Lüders was a formidable feminist presence in formerly patriarchal Germany. The first woman to get a Ph.D. in politics in Berlin (1910), she became the director of women’s work during the First World War, when the men were off at the front. She was a member of the Weimar Parliament, until Hitler put her in jail twice for mouthing off! She entitled her memoirs “Never Fear!” The Bundestag just got around to giving her the honor she had long ago earned by naming its new library after her.

Getting back to Weissenhof, Mies most wanted Corbusier to design some dwellings there. He did. And they too were last year decreed uninhabitable. Turned one of them into a Weissenhof Museum for visitors agog at that great breakthrough in modern design. Huh? Meanwhile nobody even hears of Ernst May, who in the 1920’s built 10,000 still inhabitable workers apartments in Frankfurt, with its famous Frankfurt kitchens designed by the Viennese architect Margarete Tuholtsky. She studied the careful design of train and ship kitchens to figure out how to make it easier for busy working women to feed their families! No goofs there. Except in the grossly distorted history of architecture we all still suffer from.

Which brings me to a solution: Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish architect. In 1998,the centennial of his birth, I made a pious odyssey to savor once more his greatest buildings, like Finlandia in Helsinki. When I overnight there, I always take a hike around the concert hall before breakfast. To my dismay, Finlandia was now completely bereft of its travertine cladding.

I tracked down a man in a hard hat to see what gave. He explained that Alvar’s favorite material, Italian travertine, couldn’t take Finnish winters.And shards were dropping off, endangering tourists as well as concert goers. But this being his centennial and Finns being sentimental, the question was: Shall we clad it with winterproofed granite, or try thicker slices of travertine with better adhesives, even though the latter would involved more millions shortly down the road. Which did the Finns choose? The thicker travertine!

After breakfast at my downtown hotel (the one across the square from Eliel Saarinen’s gorgeous main train station (1914)), I walked to the Aalto centennial exposition at the Finnish Museum of Architecture. Its epigraph was pure Alvar: “Don’t forget that architects make mistakes”. That motto should be inscribed over the main door of every architecture school. I got this interested in architecture, by the way, through assigning term papers on “A Great American Building” in my America Lit classes at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia.

I primed my classes by visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Shalom Synagogue in nearby Jenkintown-- to get the idea of what a masterpiece was like. One year, an older woman who had raised her kids before taking a degree, took me aside after our visit and agreed it was a great building, “except when your daughter got married during a rainstorm. The roof leaked on us!”

Heh, architecture consumers of the world unite, it is time to stop giving thoughtless architects a “pass” on their goofs.