We Dutchies got so much history, we tore down LOADS of beautiful places.

But today I found out the stoopid people of Buffalo, NY tore down THIS;





This used to be The Larkin Co.'s Administrative Building of 1903. I love the starkness of it. This is how I picture a Howard Roark building.

Actually this is a Frank Lloyd Wright building. And I don't know exactly, but I think his buildings are what Ayn Rand had in mind, writing The Fountainhead.
[Edited 7/31/06 3:59am]

HamsterHuey said:

It's Frank Lloyd Wright by the way.

I'm from Buffalo and it makes me sick all the beautiful archetecture that we lost when they tore down some of those old buildings in the 1950's to the 1970's. Buffalo was called the Queen City of America because it was such a wealthy city and had such wonderful archetecture at the turn of the last century. It was THE gateway to the west. A lot was lost in the 1950's to 60's. That scouge of the Northeast, Robert Moses was instrumental in destroying the heart of the northeast cities in the name of progress. We have a preservation society now, but too late for some of the real gems that were here.

We still have Wright's Darwin Martin house and Graycliff is just down the road in Derby NY.

Frank Loyd Write designed one of the buildings in a college here in Central Florida.

There is a major project underway to try an retro-fit- his design with additional support and "fixes" to his design. The entire building leaks, and is expensive for the school to maintain.

Write was often guilty of form over functionality, and this building is one of the casualties of that. I'll try to find a picture of it when I get home.

I like his work, but I think he was more of a clever conceptionist with an eye for asethetics than a genius.

shellyevon said:

Not his birth name, it ain't.

Imago said:

True. Loads of architects go for form over funcionality, but I stull love those forms, you know.

Actually, the interior pics of the Larkin building look like a noise place to work...

HamsterHuey said:

But I edited just the same.

The Larkin building was the first modern office building in the world.
It had glass office doors, steel furniture, air conditioning, radiant heat and wall hung toilets. All new innovations at the time.
All that's left is a pier from the building and an outline of it on the parking lot that is there now.
[Edited 7/31/06 4:14am]

HamsterHuey said:

Found this info on the demolition:

http://freenet.buffalo.ed...index.html

Thanks, it still saddens me.

I really love the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but I'm glad I don't have to live in one of his buildings.

We're lucky to have so much of his work here in Wisconsin

There are no Frank Lloyd Wright structures here in Cleveland. I've got to travel into more rural areas of Ohio to see some small residential buildings or off to Pittsburgh to see Falling Water.

His designs are often impractical to how we live today, but it's still sad to see how locales lucky enough to have them so disrespect them. I mean, the Parthenon ain't exactly suited to office space or high-end luxury condo units.

Buffalo and Cleveland are in many ways quite alike, having spiraled from their boon days to economic and cultural underdevelopment through the mid- to late 20th Century. It's sad to see stuff like this, but I'm really glad something is still being done with Buffalo's Darwin Martin House. It'd be awful to see that go.

Lammastide said:

The great pity about the Larkin building is that it could have easily lasted for hundreds of years as a usable building with very little renovation. It wasn't just the city of Buffalo's fault, no one in the entire country cared about it.
These buildings were built when Buffalo was one of the great cities of the world.Now , after years of mismanagement and crooked politicians, there's a hard control board in place and things are looking up again. A large segment of downtown was sold to the Seneca Nation who are going to develop beautiful retail and office space as well as a Seneca Casino. The city is renovating the Buffalo terminus of the Erie Canal and the infamous Canal Street. Things that should have been taken care of long ago.
The strange thing is Buffalo has always been a cultural center for the Arts, world class galleries, museums and theaters, but they neglected the architectural wealth that is so abundant here.

HamsterHuey said:

Yeah, me too. I go by that parking lot all the time and feel the emptiness in the pit of my stomach even though I never saw the building. It's like there's a ghost building there. It should have survived.

Imago said:

House of Falling Waters is the same way, leaks all through the place. All the ceilings and furniture are abnormally low to the ground, as are the walls on the balconies (he was short and designed everything to what suited himself, not the average person). There's a large iron pot in the fireplace he designed that couldn't even be used because the metal was too thick. And a pull out dining room table that blocked off the kitchen entrance.

Visually his designs are beautiful, and some of them had clever engineering like the cantilevered roofing and balconies, but there were also alot of quirks and mistakes that are probabbly expensive to repair or correct nowdays. Also, there may be people who own various buildings and houses he designed, and are not even aware of it because they don't know about him or his work.

Tom said:

yup.
To me a great arhitech should take into consideration the user of the space that he is designing and who it is being used for, amongst other considerations. Write didn't do that very well.

Now the dude who designed the Osaka International Airport. That dude did a great job. He started with Functionality in mind and created something beautiful out of it, right down to the rounded design of the building(s). One of my favorite buildings in the world, actually.

shellyevon said:

I kinda wanna hug you now, Michelle...

We went to his center in Wisconsin and it was oddly claustrophobic inside. Maybe it was altered after his death to be a gift shop, but it had very short ceilings and was kind of stuffy.

Nice on the outside, but that's the opposite of what Ayn Rand was getting at, describing "form following function."

The Marin (near San Francisco) City Hall is cool, though I've never been inside. It's huge.

I read how he designed "tract homes" that sold for $5000 way back when.

HamsterHuey said:

right back at ya

HamsterHuey said:

I always imagined Mies van der Rohe as the more of the inspiration for the Fountainhead--although it's been several years since I read it.

I work a block from the Guggenheim (also designed by FL Wright), the facade is sort of falling apart so they have scaffolding up and are restoring it. I think Frank's visions were often grander than the way the actual buildings turned out--a lot of them seem to have structural problems. (Maybe it's indicative of the materials or the construction techniques of the time--I don't know that much about architecture.)

jone70 said:

These days I would chose Rem Koolhaas myself. It was my teen self that pictured Wright.

HamsterHuey said:

Those architects may have achieved what Howard Roark did more than Wright did, but I'm pretty sure Ayn Rand said it was inspired by F.L.W.

HamsterHuey said:

I haven't read that book.

We have a couple of Wright houses in the Detroit area.

NDRU said:

Dunno for sure. Never read that. I just pictured them FLW buildings into the story myself.