Frank Lloyd Wright Falling is a “house museum”, designed for the first time as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as explained by the director of the Justin Gunther institution THE Open space video aboveIt is “the first house of the modern movement to be opened as a public site”, having started to offer visits in 1964. The opening of Fallwater owes a lot to the efforts of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the magnate of the Pittsburgh department group who commanded the house in the first place. The family had land in the south of Pennsylvania which was once a employee retreat, and Kaufmann kidsAt the top of a reading of the recently published autobiography of Wright, knew just who should design a weekend house for the site.
Not that it is a simple process, even for the son of a magnate. But fortunately, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just created a learning program at Taliesin”. The young Kaufmann applied: “And of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, knowing who were the Kaufmanns, could sniff a good potential customer.”
Soon accepted, Kaufmann spent about six months studying under Wright, a period during which his visiting parents also became “in love with Wright's ideas on organic architecture”. No other living architect, perhaps, could keep the promise of a house fully inspired by its natural context, which in this case included a cascade. However, one wonders if even his most impatient customers understood exactly what they entered.
“The Kaufmanns thought they were going to have a house that looked at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had different ideas. He thought that if you put the most dramatic part of a landscape in your opinion, that would become something terrible. You were just getting used to it.” But “if you were forced in the landscape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built at the top of the waterfall instead, by local workers and using the stone extracted right there on the site, the house makes a unique impression, and which has a perfect aesthetic meaning: as Gunther says, “the waterfall cannot live without the house, and the house cannot live without the waterfall.” These nine decades either after the completion of the main building, the course of American architecture is quite imaginable without Fallingwater.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
