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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
FALLINGWATER: FALLING DOWN?
Engineers and architects labor to save Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece
NATURE CANTILEVERED those boulders out over the fall,” said Frank Lloyd Wright about the site of his most famous house, Fallingwater. “I can cantilever the house over the boulders.” As it turned out, however, Wright did not entirely meet the challenge set by nature. From the very beginning, Fallingwater has been falling down. At the 2002 annual conference of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, held in September in White Plains, New York, speakers addressed the twin issues of water damage and structural deficiency that threaten the building.
Wright was far ahead of his time in his use of materials and methods—so far, in fact, that the demands he placed on the new technology of monolithic concrete construction exceeded the capabilities of building techniques at that point. As a result, water has had more than 60 years to seep into the structure. “The environment is extremely damp,” said Norman Weiss, a consultant for Wank Adams Slavin Associates, the firm engaged to design the waterproofing of the structure. “Let’s just call it wet.” Tiny cracks in the concrete and inadequate flashing—the use of metal to protect vulnerable connections—have allowed water to permeate the walls and parapets. Wright’s ultraclean design stymied a waterproof membrane installed on the roofs in the 1980s; there was simply nowhere to fasten the edges down. The dampness inside and outside the building forced the valiant maintenance staff at the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which runs Fallingwater, to repaint the entire exterior every other year. It could have been worse: Wright originally ordered the buildins covered in sold leaf.
An even more dangerous problem has plagued the building from the outset. Fallingwater lore claims that on the day the wooden construction scaffolding was removed from the second-story terrace, a crack appeared. Those present called the building’s engineer, who is supposed to have exclaimed, “My god, I forgot the negative reinforcement!” By then it was too late to insert the stabilizing metal bars that are usually set along the top of a concrete span, and Fallingwater has done without ever since. Structural analysis begun by a student at the University of Virginia and carried on by the engineering firm Robert Silman Associates indicates that the building was dangerously unstable, even though its contractor secretly used far more reinforcement than Wright called for. Over the life of the building, cracks have continued to develop and widen. The terraces at the east and west ends of the living room droop visibly.
Determined to save Fallingwater, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has been aggressively refurbishing the house for almost a decade. The first step was to brace it with support scaffolding anchored to the stream bed below. Since the stream is a protected area, the rock cores removed to grout the anchors in place had to be saved. They’ll be glued back in place when construction is complete, probably in the next few months.
To stop the slow collapse of Fallingwater’s cantilevered terraces, the engineers devised a surprisingly simple arrangement. First, they removed the flooring from the main level of the house, a task that required Wank Adams Slavin Associates to number and document each flagstone. Then engineers fastened a steel cable to the underside of one end of each structural floor support, strung the cable across a concrete anchor point positioned atop each support over the edge of the cliff, and attached the cable to the other end of the support. Using jacks to tighten the cables, engineers pulled up the drooping ends, essentially hanging the floor from itself like a suspension bridge.
A new waterproofing plan promises to make the building leakproof for the first time ever. In addition to applying membranes of rubberized asphalt and polyethylene to the concrete, restorers have recently installed an improved system of flashing and drains. Paint technology has finally caught up with Wright’s ideas, and high-tech paints are being tested for application over the newly repaired parapets on each of the terraces. It’s not gold leaf, but it just might secure the rest of Wright’s vision.
—Benjamin T. Oderwald (For an update on the Fallingwater restoration, see www.wpconline.org/fallingwater/restoration.)
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STRETCHING THE TRUTH
Two recent books assess the life and hard times of Charles Goodyear
BEHIND EVERY GREAT INVENTION LIES a great crime. Or so it can appear from reading today’s technological historians, who sometimes make it seem that no important idea has ever enriched its actual originator. Morse, Bell, and Edison are just a few of the famous inventors who have been accused of stealing or duplicating others’ work or trampling on the rights of earlier discoverers. The pattern continues in this century with disputes over the invention of television, computers, and the laser. In keeping with this tradition, a pair of historians have recently re-evaluated the case of Charles Goodyear, who in 1844 patented his revolutionary process for vulcanizing rubber. Their books are the first full-length biographies of Goodyear in more than 60 years, and after going over much of the same ground, they arrive at very different conclusions.
The basics of Goodyear’s story are familiar: The penniless inventor spends years experimenting haphazardly and living hand to mouth with his faithful and long-suffering wife and children. One day in 1839 he accidentally heats a mixture of rubber, sulfur, and white lead on a stove and is amazed when it hardens but does not melt. After several more years of painstaking work to perfect the process, he takes out a patent and at last is rewarded for his dogged faith and determination.
In Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century (Hyperion, 288 pages, $24.95), Charles Slack stays close to this traditional story. In Slack’s view, the villains of the drama are Hancock, an English industrialist who pirated the vulcanization process (legally, for Goodyear had been too poor to patent it in Britain), and Horace Day, an American businessman who spent nearly two decades in repeated and unsuccessful attempts to cheat Goodyear of his patent rights. Without overlooking Goodyear’s flaws, Slack portrays him as a patient, innovative genius who was deprived of the full financial rewards he deserved by parasitic infringers.
A less admiring account can be found in The Goodyear Story: An Inventor’s Obsession and the Struggle for a Rubber Monopoly, by Richard Korman (Encounter Books, 230 pages, $25.95). In Korman’s view, Goodyear was a feckless charlatan who stole other people’s work and tried to crush legitimate competitors. Moreover, he never should have been granted his patent in the first place, because vulcanization was actually discovered by William Ely, one of many victims that Goodyear fleeced for cash and then abandoned.
Korman has uncovered more detail on the Goodyear-Ely relationship than any previous biographer. Yet by trying too hard to knock a revered figure off his pedestal, Korman ends up sounding like a prosecuting attorney, to the point where Day’s blatantly illegal industrial espionage, with the admitted purpose of infringing one of Goodyear’s patents, is described as an altruistic attempt “to re-balance the scales of injustice” on behalf of a disgruntled former Goodyear employee.
The author’s most important assertion, that Ely and not Goodyear discovered vulcanization, is casually presented as a fact with no hint that it might be open to question. The source? A deposition submitted by Day in 1858 to challenge the extension of Goodyear’s patent. And the deponent? Not Ely himself, who was dead by then. Instead it was one of Day’s business partners, who purported to recall witnessing the event two decades earlier.
Like most old-fashioned biographers and too many modern ones, Korman makes no distinction between verifiable events and scenes that he has invented and dramatized on his own. Sometimes the effect is merely silly, as when he somehow divines across a century and a half that Goodyear’s wife, Clarissa, about whom almost no information survives, felt “selfconscious about her graying hair and thickening waist.” In other places, though, this practice undermines the author’s argument. Korman describes an angry Ely threatening to “break down Goodyear’s claim to patent” by revealing “who was the true inventor of heated India rubber.” Did this actually happen, or is it just his imagination? The author gives no source.
Goodyear had his flaws, to be sure. And anybody, inventors included, can be made to look like a saint by accentuating the positive or like a devil by emphasizing the negative. Yet no one can deny the ceaseless toil that Goodyear put into making rubber work, especially the grueling years he spent converting vulcanization from a chance discovery to a consistent, reproducible industrial process. Others made their contributions, financial and inventive, but Goodyear’s persistence and indefatigability have justly earned him the title of Father of the Rubber Industry.
—Frederic D. Schwarz
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