alt Hacker NewsI'm sad that we're coming up towards 100 years on from Fallingwater being built, and yet the American preference for new houses of a similar price (after inflation) is the sort of awful stuff that shows up on mcmansionhell.com.
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The kind of bespoke construction in Wright's buildings couldn't be built today at an order of magnitude higher price, even considering inflation. A side effect of mass produced standard construction materials has been custom ones becoming astronomically expensive due to the skilled labor to build them having been replaced with mass production.
I suspect projects like fallingwater have siting considerations that wouldn't allow it to be built at all anywhere in the US... isn't it built basically on top of a WOTUS?
People want square footage and comfort, not design. Frank Lloyd Wright homes look stunning in an Architectural Digest spread, but living in them is not really up to par for modern standards.
Anyone downvoting you clearly doesn’t watch Arvin Haddads YouTube channel because it really is revolting how much subpar trash sells for $50 million+. Even at the highest end of the housing market you see a consistent demand for absolute garbage that is about as close to art as a pile of rancid shit.
The instinct to preserve and honor Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, where I live, has basically frozen the place in amber, which isn't something Wright would have wanted, and also worked synergistically with exclusive zoning to keep the Village ultra-expensive (it directly abuts the Austin neighborhood in Chicago, which is low-middle income) and white (unlike Austin, which is 90+% Black).
No idea what Wright would have thought about racial housing segregation, but it was certainly a knock-on effect of the preservationist cult he accidentally created.