And He Built a Crooked House...
2010-02-04 14:50:27.548024+01 by petronius 0 comments
Slate has a nice slide show of architectural near misses. The problem is often some designer pushing the design to the limits of the technology, and then a foot farther. Frank Lloyd Wright is in here, with his fabulously cool but troubled Fallingwater House, to say nothing of his notorious leaky roofs. There was also a design at the Art Institute School in Chicago, where the visionary architect made a stairwell that was 10 feet wide at the top and the bottom, but only 5 feet wide at the middle landing. thus, he created a bottleneck on a fire exit. How the city inspector let him get away with it I don't know, but they eventually corrected the problem.