How tall was Frank Lloyd Wright?
A story that I heard some time ago had to do with the height of doors and ceilings in homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The standard door is eighty inches high (six feet, eight inches) and thus will accommodate all but the extremely tall among us. Wright designed homes which used doors which were 6' 2", or sometimes less, and the reason was that he himself was only 5'6" or 5'8" (accounts differ) and thus did not see the need for doors to be any taller.
He is quoted as saying, "I took the human being, like myself, as the human scale. If I had been taller, the scale might have been different."
Robert Green, in describing Taliesin West, Wright's winter refuge, noted that the ceilings were only six feet two inches high, and that many visitors grazed the ceiling or had to crouch as they came into the room. One of his students was 6'4" and was criticized by Wright for "destroying the scale" of the room by walking into it.
Frank Lloyd Wright is widely regarded as an architectural genius. These stories tell me that he was, in one important respect, an architectural imbecile. He may have designed homes of fluid grace, but he had a blind spot when it came to a key mandate of design: build for the user.
The legend may be a bit oversimplified, since we can assume that Wright would have provided for larger doors and higher ceilings if he was designing a home for a taller person. But short people have tall visitors, and it is foolish to consider only the needs of the resident when designing the key elements of a building.
To design buildings based solely on the architect's or owner's body size is the height, so to speak, of arrogance and stupidity. It is not a mark of genius.
This is not just an idle ramble through an interesting wood. These points are crucial considerations for anyone who writes software or who is involved in designing information systems and developing knowledge management techniques for lawyers. The work has to center on the user and his needs, not on those of the designer.
7:19:03 AM 
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