> So his buildings tend to require a lot of repairs, and many have structural problems, leaks, as well as general safety issues.
The Fallingwater House has some (really fancy) cantilever balconies, and even though the contractor building them silently doubled the cross section of the reinforcing steel -- in disagreement with FLW -- they were still too weak.
Fallingwater is aesthetically pleasing but belies FLW's poor understanding of structural engineering of the very materials he liked to use.
It was the client, Edgar J. Kaufmann (1885-1955) and his wife Lillian Sarah Kaufmann (?-1952) who started to second-guess some of Wright's decisions early on to the benefit of the house [1]; when Mr. Kaufmann shared some of his concerns with Wright he took them as a personal attack [2]. Mr. Kaufmann proceeded to hire structural engineers after the construction finished to get a second opinion, and continued to personally measure the deflection of the balcony as the years progressed. In my opinion the house is as much of credit to Kaufmann as it is to FLW, as without his informed skepticism the house would have been more famously remembered as a disaster than as a crowning achievement.
The Kaufmann's had great taste. They commissioned the two greatest (IMO) modern american residences, Falling Water w/Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs w/Richard Neutra.
There was a famous incident with the Johnson Wax building, where Wright had designed Some concrete support columns which the building code authority was reluctant to approve, so Wright tested one by loading it up with 60 tons of sand, 5 times the structural load it was required to bear.
The Fallingwater House has some (really fancy) cantilever balconies, and even though the contractor building them silently doubled the cross section of the reinforcing steel -- in disagreement with FLW -- they were still too weak.