May 29, 2009
In the late 1930s, Edgar Kaufman asked starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home near a waterfall in Pennsylvania -- and an architectural icon was born. This summer, the Guggenheim Museum in New York is presenting a retrospective of Wright's work. As part of our American Icons series, Studio 360's Peter Crimmins finds out why Fallingwater was named the best building of the 20th century.
(Originally aired: August 25, 2006)
While I appreciate the beauty of Falling Water and many of Wright's other brilliant designs, I feel I must comment on his Achilles' Heel;
I have been a theatre professional for 43 years, and in my long career, two theatres stand out as ABSOLUTELY THE WORST-DESIGNED THEATRES IN THE WORLD!
One is on the University of Arizona campus in Tempe.
The other is in Northern California, (near Concord, as I recall, but the memory is 30 years ex post facto.)
They were both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who thought that the loading dock should be subterranean, the seating should be continental, and that acoustics were unnecessary in the era of amplification.
While I appreciate that he is our greatest visionary of 20th century design, as regards the theatre, I would say to him that before one decides to build a better mousetrap, it is prudent to examine the old mousetrap first to evaluate what made it successful for so long.
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