Frank Lloyd Wright, Haley Anderson

Structural Engineering

Although this entire book is about Frank Lloyd Wright and his architecture, this particular page has little to do with Frank Lloyd Wright and more to do with the engineering that was prevalent in his architecture.  Moreover, this page will briefly compare architects and engineers, as well as describe how they interact with one another.  


Wright and Engineering:
Though Wright was a master architect, and he had little experience in respects to engineering.  When Wright was younger, he attended the University of Wisconsin - Madison with the idea of pursuing engineering, though he dropped out after three semesters (Taliesin Preservation, Inc. 1).  The minor experiences Wright had with engineering must have had some influence on his architectural abilities though, because it was said that "He would envision how the load in his buildings was to be supported and formulate a clear concept of how to explain this to his engineers," (Taliesin Preservation, Inc. 1). Assuming this is true, Wright is "an intuitive engineer [as] ... he very seldom did the actual calculations himself," (Taliesin Preservation, Inc. 1).

Much of the mathematical work, at least in his later years, was done by William Wesley "Wes" Peters, a Fellowship member at Taliesin and Wright's son-in-law.  Peters, after graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to Taliesin in 1932 and worked diligently with the Taliesin Fellowship almost until his death in 1991.  Wes, as he was commonly called, worked on many commissions with Wright, three of which include Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Administration Building, and the Guggenheim Museum (Taliesin Preservation, Inc. 1).


Architect v. Engineer:
The fact that Wright required an engineer to calculate many of the values and properties that would make his structures possible brings up one of the discrepancies between architects and structural engineers.  Architects typically design buildings with the idea of 'function follows form', meaning that the visual appeal and aesthetics of a building are thought of first, while the actuality of the design is cast off to the side to be thought about later.  When later finally comes, the structural engineers step in and find ways for the idea to become reality.  In other words, architects typically design a building with the image in mind, while structural engineers typically take the design and discover how to translate the image off of the paper and into real life (NewSchool of Architecture and Design).


Common Conflict Between Architects and Engineers (Exemplified by F.L.W.'s Fallingwater):
Sometimes the aforementioned difference in the visualization of a building causes problems, as is evident from Wright's Fallingwater.  Wright visualized a house serenely placed over a waterfall with daring yet elegant balconies overhanging the building's base.  Though Wright originally designed four bolsters to support the structure, his final product only had three of the foundation bases.  With on less bolster and cracking cantilevers, Kaufmann, Fallingwater's commissioner, contacted an outside engineering firm which highly suggested placing in an increased amount of steel rods.  

The added steel rods, in some perspectives, may have saved Fallingwater and kept it from falling into the stream below until the restoration of 2001 to 2002, though others argue that the extra metal rods just added extra, unaccounted for weight, which is why the cantilevers were sagging in the first place.  This argument brings about another discrepancy between the two occupations.  In order to create architectural feats, architects and engineers must work together.  However, when there's miscommunication or discourse between the two, the building typically has flaws that create problems later on.  However, when architects and engineers work with one another to solve a problem, they come up with amazing solutions.  For example, when Fallingwater was literally falling, instead of taking away from the architectural integrity of the building by installing stilts, architects and engineers worked alongside one another and came up with post-tensioning, which is structurally sound but not visible, allowing the balconies to keep their daring architectural standing.


Commonly Used Techniques by Structural Engineers in Architecture:
All Definitions provided by Encyclopedia Britannica.

[A] beam supported at one end and carrying a load at the other end or distributed along the unsupported portion. The upper half of the thickness of such a beam is subjected to tensile stress, tending to elongate the fibres, the lower half to compressive stress, tending to crush them.

Concrete in which steel is embedded in such a manner that the two materials act together in resisting forces. The reinforcing steel—rods, bars, or mesh—absorbs the tensile, shear, and sometimes the compressive stresses in a concrete structure ...  [as] Plain concrete does not easily withstand tensile and shear stresses caused by wind, earthquakes, vibrations, and other forces ... 
The technique of cable spinning for suspension bridges ... [uses] a traveling wheel to carry the continuous cable strand from the anchorage on one side up over the tower, down on a predetermined sag (catenary) to the midpoint of the bridge, up and over the tower on the farther side to the farther anchorage, where a crew received the wheel, anchored the strand, and returned the wheel, laying a fresh strand. From these successive parallel strands a cable was built up.


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