Houses in my neighborhood were all built in the mid-late 1950's right at the peak of the Frank Lloyd Wright craze and copying by just about every architect in Chicago. While they are aesthetically pleasing, they are a maintenance and repair nightmare. As mechanical engineer friend of mine said, "The nicer they look, the harder they are to build." So my neighbors that have flat roofs practically live in waterfall when it rains. They've patched, repaired and/or replaced several times in the last decade or so. They building's useful life is about 60 years, whereas "regular" homes are 150-200.
I'm soooooo glad I just have a "regular" ranch.
Yep, many of FLW's designs have had long-term issues, some of them VERY significant.
You should read sometime what they've had to do to Falling Water to keep it from, well, falling into the water.
Wright also was an early proponent of in-floor radiant heating. In and of itself not a bad thing, but his original steam radiant systems were problematic to say the least. The later hot water radiant systems he designed were great... until the pipes embedded in the slabs were eaten through and the system started to leak.
Same thing happened with the Levittown houses, virtually all of which were built with copper or steel piped in floor radiant. Virtually all of those systems are now out of service because they leaked.
Additionally, they weren't insulated, so the heat loss to the ground was monumental. It used to be said that you could always tell a Levittown house that had an operating radiant heat system, because the flowers were blooming next to the house in the middle of winter.
