A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpiece

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter is a “house muse­um,” first designed as a res­i­dence, and now open to the pub­lic. In fact, as the insti­tu­tion’s direc­tor Justin Gun­ther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the mod­ern move­ment to open as a pub­lic site,” hav­ing begun offer­ing tours in 1964. The open­ness of Falling­wa­ter owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kauf­mann Jr., the son of the Pitts­burgh depart­ment-store mag­nate who com­mis­sioned the house in the first place. The fam­i­ly hap­pened to own a piece of land in south­ern Penn­syl­va­nia that was once an employ­ee retreat, and Kauf­mann fils, high on a read­ing of Wright’s recent­ly pub­lished auto­bi­og­ra­phy, knew just who should design a week­end home for the site.

Not that it was a sim­ple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luck­i­ly, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just estab­lished an appren­tice­ship pro­gram at Tal­iesin.” The young Kauf­mann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, know­ing who the Kauf­manns were, could sniff out a good poten­tial client.”

Soon accept­ed, Kauf­mann spent about six months study­ing under Wright, dur­ing which time his vis­it­ing par­ents also became “enam­ored with Wright’s ideas of organ­ic archi­tec­ture.” No oth­er liv­ing archi­tect, per­haps, could deliv­er on the promise of a house ful­ly inspired by its nat­ur­al con­text, which in this case includ­ed a water­fall. Still, one won­ders if even his most eager clients under­stood just what they were get­ting into.

“The Kauf­manns thought that they were going to have a house that was look­ing 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 view con­stant­ly, it would become some­thing that’s tire­some. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the land­scape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the water­fall instead, by local labor­ers and using stone quar­ried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impres­sion, and one that makes per­fect aes­thet­ic sense: as Gun­ther puts it, “the water­fall can’t live with­out the house, and the house can’t live with­out the water­fall.” Nor, these near­ly nine decades after the main build­ing’s com­ple­tion, is the course of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture quite imag­in­able with­out Falling­wa­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.