What would Howard Roark say about this?

[nancylebov]

The Frank Lloyd Wright doghouse.

tl, dr-- the dogs didn't like it.

The Fountainhead thrashes back and forth between Roark designing wonderful buildings for people to use and/or live in, but at the same time, if people don't like the buildings, it's because there's something wrong with the people.

Link thanks to The Agitator.

Comments

[kore]

No, see, if your soul is true and pure and noble and clean, you APPRECIATE Roark! And if you don't, well, you are down there with the architectural critics and handicapped kids and social workers and whoever all else is in her 10th circle of hell, so.

Hilariously, I think FLW backed out of designing buildings for the movie, so in the movie they're AWFUL, which makes the viewer (OK me) keep thinking "Well, no wonder nobody wants to build your buildings, they SUCK."

[madfilkentist]

If I recall that part correctly, one person in the family loved the house and the rest hated it and refused to live there.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Actually, the father as well as the son loved the house, but the mother detested it, so the father didn't hold out for living in it. Rand sets this up as self-betrayal, partly by portraying the mother as shallow and manipulative, but I have to say I could see valid reasons for a man to chose his wife over his house.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture seems to have been an expression of a profound hatred of human beings. He wasn't as bad as Le Corbusier, though, who doesn't seem to have had any awareness of human beings or indeed physical matter at all.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Not a hatred of humans, I think; rather a profound disdain for personal taste, mistaking his preferences to be Absolute Measures of Value, so any variance that a mere peasant would have with it would be Wrong.

I also think that Wright valued form a bit too much over function...

-- Steve is reminded of a waggish comment circulating about that Frank never designed a roof that didn't leak.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

He at least hated anyone taller than he was, and wanted them to die by blunt trauma to the head, judging from his doorways.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

This is the origin of Klingons — wrong-shaped doors with sharp sheet metal across the top, uncorrected for centuries.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Is that icon by Edward Gorey?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

No, though it has the right texture and feeling to it. It's actually a very small part of Plate 489 from what's known in modern reprints as The Complete Encyclopedia of Illustration, a book I found on the sale table at some bookstore in Savannah, years ago, which would appear to be the visual component of a German book called Iconic Encyclopedia, dating from the mid-19th century.

I fell in love with the thing, and I scanned it a few years back. I've mined it for pix and inspiration any number of times. An investment I've never regretted, though I now wish I'd scanned it at a higher res. I might do something about that one day.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Iirc, the people who lived in Roark's buildings liked them fine, it was just outsiders who didn't. But I've always thought the balconies were a good idea.