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Wright wasn’t much on character, but what a story and the guy could produce in a pinch it seems. Ken Burns never disappoints.

Absolutely nothing like a deadline to focus your efforts…

This story has been hotly debated as to how true it really is. Wright was as much a reality distortion master as Steve Jobs is today, and his wife ruthlessly promoted a messiah image of him – to the public, his clients and his staff (sorry, his apprentices). As an architect myself I would say that it is certainly possible but I am sure that the ideas had been working their way around his brain in all the time that he supposedly ‘did nothing’. For me the amazing thing about this building is how three dimensional and sited it is. The 2D plans do not even begin to convey what he achieved there. The building is a real enigma. Wright obviously had VERY strong feelings about the site, and with all of his creative gifts and experience behind him (he was 67!) translated those feelings into something sublime. An incredible home!

Totally proves the point that you should NEVER bill by the hour!

And Ken Burns tells the story in only 16 hours!

He definitely had the 10,000 hours of experience under his belt.

To quote Paula Scher:

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

Maybe he was able to do that in three hours because of conscious/unconscious three month processing.

Yes Petros, you are absolutely right. Without the 3 months time of processing and his all experience he wouldn’t of have been able to do this. This should be a lesson to all of those “corporates” who force staff to do 9 to 5 and to always look busy. :)

From just looking busy one would never come up with great ideas :) Better see a youtube movie like the one above. Hell, I am going to forward it to all the people I work with.

Unfortunately, Fallingwater had some major structural/engineering defects, which had to be repaired around 2001 (there’s articles aplenty about it) and there’s an essay, which I read a while back, about how there was a terribly, terribly underestimated load in one spot, the contractors building Fallingwater were concerned, and Lloyd Wright basically browbeat the owner along the line of “do you want to listen to the contractors, or ever have me talk to you again”. The contractors secretly doubled the structuring, and it turned out later it should have been four times as much.

Actually the contractors changing the amount of steel placed in the slabs was a major error, on the contractors part. It increased the weight of the cantilevered slab and with so much steel the concrete was not able to completely permeate the slab. That created a weakened structure. Wright was a very good engineer, in addition to being a great artist.