|
| Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania, 1936–37. Photo: Sxenko, 2007 (Wikimedia Commons). |
Start at the water. Bear Run slides over a ledge of rock directly beneath the house, and you can hear it from every room.
Now follow the terraces. They are pale concrete trays that shoot out over the stream with no visible support beneath them. Engineers call this a cantilever: a beam fixed at one end and floating free at the other, like a diving board.
Then look at the stone. The tall, dark tower that anchors everything is built from sandstone quarried on the property itself. In other words, the house is made of the hillside it sits on.
Inside, the boulder the Kaufmanns used to sunbathe on rises through the living-room floor and becomes the hearth. A glass hatch opens onto a staircase that leads straight down to the stream.
Not everyone was calm about it. Kaufmann had his own engineers check the design, and they warned that the cantilevers were dangerous. Wright was furious. Letters flew back and forth in the summer of 1936, and at one point Kaufmann told him to go to hell with the whole thing.
They made up, and the house was built. But the engineers had a point. When the wooden supports came out from under the main terrace, the concrete began to sag, and it kept sagging for decades.
|
| Fallingwater from below the falls. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. |
In 2002, engineers finally solved the problem. They threaded steel cables through the old concrete and tightened them, a technique called post-tensioning, so the terraces could carry their own weight at last.
The house had already won its argument. In 1938, Time magazine put Wright on its cover and called Fallingwater his most beautiful job. Kaufmann’s son, Edgar Jr., gave the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, and it opened to the public the following year.
Members of the American Institute of Architects named it, in 1991, the best all-time work of American architecture. In 2019, it joined the UNESCO World Heritage list with seven other Wright buildings.
Back in my finance years, I would have called the whole project an unacceptable risk. Then I stood on that living-room floor, with the stream running underneath my feet, and understood why Kaufmann kept paying. Some risks are the point.
If you would like to read the whole story, including the angry letters, the Wikipedia history of the house is detailed and well sourced: Fallingwater →
Kaufmann asked for a view of his waterfall. Wright gave him something better… a house you can hear before you can see it.
|
