America’s most famous architect trained his way to greatness in Chicago, and made his mark across the Midwest (and the world), expressing a special love for this city along the way. Inspired by his legacy, British cartographer Max roberts challenged himself to illustrate the routes of the Windy City’s ‘L’ system in the style of Wright.

Borrowing from FLW’s Arts and Crafts typography and abstract stained-glass works, he began drawing out the lines and curves of this urban railway network. At the same time, he also took cues from the CTA’s own color-based approach and geometric simplification. Together, these integrated approaches create a system of colors and symbols that is both legible but also aesthetically inspired.

And the results resonate — for anyone who already associates Chicago with the Robie House and other famous Wright creations, these new diagrams seem like a natural extension of his work, and something you might well found hung inside a Usonian house. While Wright favored cars as modes of transportation (during the automobile boom years of the early 20th century, one might also hope he would appreciate the role of public transit with the benefit of hindsight.

Much of the magic of the Star Wars films derives from the fantastic landscapes and exotic built environments that serve as backdrops for its intergalactic tales of empires and rebellions. But when world-makers like George Lucas create these places, they often draw on real architects and architecture for inspiration, including the last and largest work of starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Located north of San Francisco, the Marin County Civic Center consists of a massive rotunda housing a public library, offset by a strong vertical spire and long Hall of Justice (a classic Wright move to emphasize and juxtapose both horizontals and verticals). These same features can be found in the heart of Naboo, a Mid Rim world (near the Outer Rim Territories) featured across a series of Star Wars films.

As with their cinematic counterparts, Wright’s structures for Marin were designed to relate to the landscape – curved blue roofs pick up on the tones of the sky above while beige/pink walls tie into the earthen surroundings. Arched supports and the voids they create at different scales are also immediately recognizable as similar between the original Terrestrial architecture and its echos in Star Wars scenes.

For Wright as well as Lucas, there is an underlying idea at work in the design: a combining of grandeur worthy of civic architecture but also an aspiration toward something democratic, beautiful but accessible. The settings are also similar: complex and lush landscapes, fitting a similar vision found in both the architect’s and filmmaker’s works: a focus on working architecture into natural settings rather than envisioning dense cities. Lucas has directly acknowledged a debt to Wright for inspiring the architecture found in the Star Wars franchise, but has yet to announce whether he will be working on a sequel story: some of us are still waiting on Starchitecture Wars.

Icons of midcentury modern design by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer still stand across America, showing off the simplicity, clean lines and extensive use of glass the style is known for. Many are so perfectly preserved they’ve become actual museum exhibits, while others have been well-loved and lived in over the decades or restored after falling into ruin. These 10 examples represent some of the most famous midcentury modern homes in the country, as well as a few hidden gems.

Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois (1951)

Renowned architect and designer Mies van der Rohe created the most beautiful example of a glass midcentury house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a place to play violin, translate poetry and enjoy the landscape on the edge of the Fox River. About 1500 square feet, the house features floor-to-ceiling glass with exposed steel structural members in white. Elevating it 5.3 feet above the flood plain didn’t prevent it from being inundated after Hurricane Ike in 2008, but most of the home’s original midcentury furniture was saved, and it re-opened to visitors by 2009.

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1935)

The most famous creation of America’s most well-known architect, Fallingwater (or the Kaufmann Residence) is also one of the nation’s most-visited homes. Fallingwater was built right on top of a series of cascading waterfalls on Bear Run in the Allegheny Mountains, which might be a beautiful choice stylistically, but led to a series of architectural challenges and some extensive mold problems. The fact that the location on the bank of the river was not large enough to support the foundation of a typical Wright house is what prompted the cantilevered design. The original owners used it as a weekend home until 1963, when it donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and it’s been open to the public as a museum since 1964.

Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames, Los Angeles, California (1949)

One of about two dozen homes built as part of the Case Study House Program, an experimental architecture project sponsored by Arts & Architecture Magazine after World War II, the avant-garde Eames House resembles a Mondrian painting with its panels of white, blue and red separated by stark black beams. While many iconic midcentury modern houses have been preserved as they were originally decorated, the Eames House has a thoroughly lived-in feel because it has actually functioned as a comfortable and functional home for decades rather than a museum exhibit. It consists of a main residence and studio separated by a courtyard.

Hooper House II by Marcel Breuer, Baltimore, Maryland (1959)

Known for beautiful streamlined furniture designs as well as some of America’s most amazing Brutalist structures, Marcel Breuer showed an unusual restraint in designing the simple Hooper House II for philanthropist Edith Hooper. Two separate wings of the home, one containing the common spaces and the other the bedrooms, are connected by a glazed passageway to form a U-shape. Large segments of glass offer views of the courtyard as well as Lake Roland to the east, broken up by long walls of Maryland fieldstone.

Stahl House, Los Angeles, California (1959)

Is this the quintessential Los Angeles house? The Stahl Residence is certainly one of the city’s most iconic, cantilevering out of the Hollywood Hills to gaze upon the urban skyline, and it’s magnificent at night. The glass and steel volume projects the common areas outward while maintaining privacy for the bedrooms in a separate wing. The swimming pool serves as an interstitial space between the two. The house serves as one big lookout taking in panoramic views of Los Angeles.

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Gleaming glass, oxidized steel and matte black wood contrast with the rough concrete ruins of an old miner’s shelter found in the desert near Scottsdale, Arizona. ‘Miner’s Shelter‘ was designed and built by Dave Frazee of Broken Arrow Workshop as part of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture’s student shelter program, and is situated to take advantage of the remote natural environment.

Intended to serve as a rustic shelter for respite and relaxation rather than as a permanent dwelling, the off-grid structure is just large enough to accommodate a bed, sticking to the limited size of the concrete pad discovered there. The existing concrete chimney was incorporated into the design, which frames views of adjacent mountains and the Phoenix Valley.

The backside of the shelter is covered in oxidized steel panels that help it blend into the warm desert tones of its setting. In the distance are several similar student shelters, some still in use and some in ruins.

Wright spent every winter of the final two decades of his life camping in a tent-like structure in the desert before starting the tradition of building permanent, modern structures through Taliesin West, the Arizona branch of his architecture school.  The program “demonstrates how climate, building materials, site orientation, and client needs and preferences inform design choices based on the tenets of Wright’s organic architecture.”

Even the world’s most famous and celebrated architects have their failures, whether due to unforeseen consequences of an extraordinarily complex design or just plain shoddy construction. From the mold and cracks in Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater to downright dangerous flying roof panels at Calatrava’s opera house in Valencia, these structural defects have led to injuries, lawsuits and in some cases, potential razing of a project before it’s even opened to the public. You can’t quite call these buildings outright failures just because they’ve got structural issues, especially since some of them are already iconic. But is this what happens when architects neglect practical considerations in favor of bold aesthetics?

Mold and Structural Failures: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater

The masterpiece of perhaps the only architect who’s a household name in America, Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright was a fantasy home, a grand experiment that sought to push the boundaries of existing technology and building methods of the time. Cantilevered over a waterfall on Bear Run in rural Pennsylvania, the residence is undeniably stunning. Who wouldn’t want to live in a house perched right over the water, constantly filled with aquatic sounds and reflections? Anyone who’s ever dealt with mold. Fungal growth and excess humidity got so bad so quickly, owner Edgar Kaufmann nicknamed the house ‘Rising Mildew.’ And that’s just one of the major problems that began to plague the house almost immediately after it was built.

There were conflicts all along between Wright, Kaufmann and the contractors building the house and various elements were rebuilt several times. The cantilevers developed for the structure weren’t quite up to the task of holding it up, and the building started to deform before it was even complete in 1937. Two large cracks formed on the terrace’s parapet as soon as the formwork was removed. Wright insisted that the design didn’t require any kind of propping system, but by 1995, a deflection of 7″ was measured at the edge of the largest cantilever, along with a number of serious cracks. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which owned it by that point as a museum, had to do an extensive restoration and add steel trusses to support the cantilevers. Of course, these problems hardly put a dent in the importance of this house’s impact on 20th century architecture, or in Wright’s legacy.

Roof Falling Off: Calatrava’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Opera House, Valencia, Spain

Santiago Calatrava is best known for sweeping, bird-like designs that seem like they could lift up off the ground and fly away. His Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Opera House in his hometown of Valencia, Spain is a perfect example of his signature style, with 14 above-ground stories and three below-ground, all covered in a curved roof reminiscent of a helmet. The tallest opera house in the world at 246 feet, it contains four auditoriums. Right after it opened to the public in 2005, a series of problems began to plague the structure: the main stage platform in the largest hall collapsed, forcing the cancellation of performances. Then, the complex was inundated with 7 feet of floodwaters, destroying electronic equipment in the lower levels.

But in early 2014, the city of Valencia filed suit against Calatrava for a more serious issue: sections of the mosaic roof began to come off in high winds, forcing authorities to cancel performances and close the building to the public. And this is just one among many lawsuits and accidents relating to Calatrava’s structures. A conference center he designed in Oviedo suffered structural collapse, his footbridge to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has required the city to pay out medical costs for dozens of pedestrians who slipped on the glass surface, and another footbridge over the Grand Canal in Venice has required ‘excessive repairs.’ Calatrava was also ordered to pay for the leaking roof of the Ysios Winery (pictured above.)

Leaking, Cracks and Falling Ice: Gehry’s Strata Center

This massive 720,000-square-foot academic complex for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known as the Ray and Maria Stata Center after its two primary donors, and houses the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in addition to other academic departments and offices for thinkers like Noam Chomsky. It would be hard for anyone who knows the slightest thing about architecture to miss the fact that it’s a Frank Gehry design, with its sharp angles and melange of metallic finishes. Like most of Gehry’s work, the structure is both praised and reviled – you either love it or you hate it. Gehry himself says it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

But MIT administrators have a less than glowing opinion of it for a different reason. The structure leaks, masonry has cracked, mold has developed, drainage has backed up and falling ice and debris repeatedly blocks emergency exits. MIT sued the architect in 2007, accusing him of negligence and breach of contract in the design of the center. Gehry’s response is that MIT is simply after his insurance money, stating “A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small. I think the issues are fairly minor.”

Falling Apart: Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera Center

Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera Center has been praised as the world’s most beautiful performing arts venue with a futuristic ‘twin boulder’ design on the edge of the Pearl River. Sharp angles, geometric patterns and stark white surfaces belie Hadid’s organic inspiration, taken from the geology and topography of the setting. Dotted with starry lighting, the main auditorium has a womb-like feel in gleaming gold. Unfortunately, just a single year after it opened to the public, the building was marred by falling glass and large cracks in the walls and ceilings, leading to serious leaks.

Like many of these ‘failures,’ the problem here isn’t so much Hadid’s design as it is the shoddy materials and construction techniques of the contractors that built it. Many of the 75,000 granite slabs that make up the exterior have begun to fall off, with some blaming poor quality craftsmanship and others blaming Guangzhou’s extraordinarily humid climate. But in China, deadlines to complete even the most complex buildings are often rushed, and a lot of architecture is built with the expectation that it will only stand for about 25 years. The construction group that built the opera center say that it was just extremely difficult to fulfill Hadid’s vision.

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