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["WF Smith" <WarrenSmith AT PalmettoBuilders.net>]

>
> >The trouble with modern materials and techniques is that they are
> >expensive to develop.  Few of us have the reputation of Bucky Fuller.  I
> >would like to see someone of that stature delve into the field again but
> >housing is so dominated by single point suppliers and innovation
> stifling
> >building codes that I suspect it will have to be someone more
> the stature
> >the builders in the "Home Work" book.  A perfect task for a
> homesteader in
> >a no building code area.

Good post Don, you are right. It will take someone using something outside
of the system to make a break-through.

Gene, your post is useless in this discussion unless you are just bragging
of your ability to find a FLW quote. Wright was a genius and as such, he was
wrong about as many things as he was right. The beauty of being a genius is
that people tend to follow you when you're wrong, too.

Luckily you nor I are geniuses.

Warren
>
> The challenges of developing low-cost, widely available housing
> are beyond
> building codes, materials and techniques, and the stature of the
> innovator.
> Such a dream has been pursued by many, including men of substantial
> stature. No less than Frank Lloyd Wright attempted such a task.
> His Usonian
> houses were the best he could do. They were the inspiration for Joseph
> Eichler's simple, flat-topped houses that were the bottom of the
> price line
> when I entered real estate in 1969.
>
> "This would lead him in the early 1930s to dream up Broadacre City, his
> utopian plan for a landscape crisscrossed by highways—a low-rise and
> low-density community, with a few odd high-rise apartment towers for
> unreconstructed urbanites, a formula, some complained, for
> suburban sprawl,
> and Wright's response to Corbusier's city plans. Misplaced in its
> practical
> concept of urbanism or not, this same socializing spirit inspired his
> L-shaped Usonian house for less affluent suburbanites (Wright made up the
> word, deriving it from the "United States of North America"; he
> claimed the
> houses could be built for $5,000 to $10,000), a humane vision that became
> popular.
> "Hundreds of these houses were built and they made an impact on
> progressive
> American modernist architects while also anticipating the ranch house
> developments of postwar America, with their cookie-cutter planned
> communities. Wright's houses called for connected dining and living
> quarters, a workspace instead of a conventional kitchen,
> overhanging roofs,
> wood siding, strip windows, concrete foundations, and a modern carport.
> They were efficient, spare, and light. They recognized an increasing
> informality in society and a desire for homes that were easy to
> use. Wright
> hated the banality of Levittowns, but Levitt himself rightly credited
> Wright for having set a standard for what low-cost housing might be."
>
>  From a review of:
> The Dreams of Frank Lloyd Wright
> By Michael Kimmelman
> Frank Lloyd Wright
> by Ada Louise Huxtable
> Lipper/Viking, 251 pp., $19.95
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18174
>
>
>
>
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