The house instantly was famous. Fallingwater, a home created for a Pittsburgh business tycoon, emblazoned the January, 1938 cover of Time magazine, celebrating its completion. Designed by America’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, this engineering feat of modern design positioned the residence atop a rushing waterfall and later was voted “the best all-time work of American architecture” by the American Institute of Architects. Today, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece is the only major Wright-designed house open to the public with its furnishings, artwork, and setting intact, having drawn over four million visitors to its door and idyllic locale—the Allegheny Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Visitors make pilgrimages to the site from around the globe—France, Australia and Japan. I made the trip last week in just over four hours, door to door, from the Eastern Shore. I’d recalled reading a piece in Smithsonian magazine placing it on a list of 28 places you must see. OK, I know, I abhor that “bucket list” stuff. But, you know, they put it right up there with the Taj Mahal—a wee bit far. Suffice to say, it really was worth the morning drive—no kidding around.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Fallingwater embodies Wright’s ideal: A house should be in harmony with nature. The residence represents Wright’s brilliance integrating indoor and outdoor space as texture, color, and the dramatic interplay of forms echo the geometry and beauty of the land. Wright advised architects in training: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” Placed over cantilevered concrete trays ingeniously secured to native sandstone walls, the house soars 30 feet above the falls, yet mimics the strong patterns of the surrounding landscape with strong low-lying horizontal walls.
Visitors to the site can choose from varied tours, but most go for the twenty-dollar standard ticket, as I did, joining a group of about a dozen attendees guided throughout the house for 90 minutes, oohing and ahhing from the cantilevered terraces overlooking the falls, warming our hands at the living room hearth with Asian-inspired motifs (a strong design influence) and dazzled by the Wright-designed furnishings that put him far ahead of his time. Our tour guide, with an encyclopedic array of facts and figures, shared highlights of Wright’s career, as well as amusing anecdotal stories about Fallingwater. Yet, for those who enjoy digging a bit deeper into biography (and there’s oodles written about Wright), it’s apparent that a lot was left out of the tour’s overview in its pleasing and celebratory tone including some, um, not so pretty stuff: Wright abandoning his wife and six children and running off to Europe with a neighbor—a client’s wife, a seriously gruesome ax murder (I’ll leave you in suspense here), arson (even more suspense), and Wright’s well-known betrayal of his longstanding mentor, fellow architect Louis Sullivan. Wanting more? No problem. All kinds of stuff pops up on the Internet and is documented in books like Wright’s link to Stalin’s daughter (no joke), Gurdjieff (the famed spiritual leader), and Anne Baxter (the popular Hollywood actress). Have fun.
A bedroom at Fallingwater
Prior to his passing in 1959, Wright designed more than 1,100 works including New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Chicago’s Robie House and the grand Johnson Wax Headquarters in Wisconsin. Remarkably, nearly one-third of his output occurred during his last decade of life (in his eighties and nineties), while at his Arizona residence. Now the home of his archives, it continues as the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.
Architects and architecture enthusiasts often find inspiration in Wright’s sublime and innovative designs, as well as his astonishing productivity late in life. Near 70-years-old and near bankruptcy, his early designs said to be passé, he staged an extraordinary comeback seemingly against all odds leaving a legacy of buildings, both commercial and residential, that repute him as America’s greatest architect.
If you go:
Tickets and reservations for tours to Fallingwater, in Mill Run, Pa., are available for purchase online at www.fallingwater.org or by calling 724-329-8501. Advance ticket purchase or reservations are essential to guarantee your tour.
By Amy Abrams
Amy Abrams is a freelance journalist and author living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. For more information, go to her website here.
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