The article makes clear that the orientation of the lettering has changed over time, which counts against the idea that what it is now necessarily reflects the original intent.
For the love of all this is holy, do not read this article. If the internet has taught has anything, it's that you cannot unsee an image - I predict you will not be able to unsee upside-down H's (and even an S) post-reading. Save yourself.
Im curious if the mounting points for the letters had 180deg rotational symmetry. If they didn’t (such as a mount point on the crossbar in the H), that’d go a long way to explaining “correctness”.
I will admit I lost interest after it was revealed that the letters had been replaced several times and that the original was most likely correct. "frank lloyd wright messed up the orientation of an H" has a bit of interest to it; "some random later person messed it up" has none.
Given that there had been wrongly installed letters continuously since at least 1956 and we have no proof that an entirely "correct" version ever existed, I'd consider the inverted H historically accurate and I hope it won't ever get fixed and especially not as an overreaction to the article.
I don't understand why the author is intent on pinning the ever changing orientation of the letters on architects. Wright's intent would have been in the architectural drawings. Everything after that, including the original installation, would be the responsibility of the person who installed the lettering. I've seen much more obvious errors (e.g. spelling errors) occur during the installation of similar signage ... things that would not have made it to the final architectural drawings.
The typeface that is used there is not something typical, and it's very top-heavy in letters like P and R. The top-heavy H (called "upside-down" in the article) does not seem too odd in this context. F on the other hand is almost "normal".
man some grouchy people. I enjoyed the thoroughness and tenacity the author had for such an insignificant thing. While inconclusive if FLW goofed it doesn't matter, it's still kinda interesting to see how often the letters flipped around.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 33.7 ms ] threadThat it is not aesthetically obvious, suggests it was drawn that way and not a mistake. Good typography is subtle and bespoke typography even more so.
Just send an email to the board of trustees / body corporate and move on.
Is this some kind of joke, or is the author really lost in some conspiracy-level detail tracking, hunting for "hidden signals"?