The fact that the structural issues of a house that originally cost $150 thousand to build was deemed to be worth $20 million to repair shows just how highly all of the other elements of this design are regarded.
As architectural design, as opposed to structural design, it was a masterpiece. And FLW was not a structural engineer.
But sometimes his structural engineering intuition greatly outperform the trained calculation of professional engineers. When he designed the lily pad columns of the Johnson wax building, structural engineers said the columns are too weak. He brazenly asked the testers to keep adding to the load on the test column long after the load had already surpassed the required level, and the column didn’t fail until the load was 8 times what the column was required to bear.
As architectural design, as opposed to structural design, it was a masterpiece. And FLW was not a structural engineer.
But sometimes his structural engineering intuition greatly outperform the trained calculation of professional engineers. When he designed the lily pad columns of the Johnson wax building, structural engineers said the columns are too weak. He brazenly asked the testers to keep adding to the load on the test column long after the load had already surpassed the required level, and the column didn’t fail until the load was 8 times what the column was required to bear.
