Fallingwater

Listen first. Before you see anything, you hear it. A steady rush of water moves over stone somewhere below the trees. The air under the forest canopy feels cooler and damp, and it smells of moss, wet leaves and rock. The path is soft underfoot. Then, through the branches, pale horizontal shapes appear above the stream. The house seems to float in the air over the falls.

This is Fallingwater, in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it in the mid-1930s as a weekend retreat for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh. Edgar Kaufmann ran a large department store in the city. He, his wife Liliane and their son Edgar Junior already loved this stretch of woodland along a stream called Bear Run. They came here to escape the smoke and noise of an industrial city.

Here is the first surprise. The Kaufmanns loved the waterfall, and they expected a house that faced it. They imagined sitting on a porch and looking at the falls. Wright had a different idea. He placed the house directly on top of the waterfall. From most rooms inside, you cannot actually see the falls at all. You hear them instead. Wright wanted the family to live with the water, not simply look at it.

There is a famous story about how the design came together. According to the popular account, Wright had little on paper for months. Then Kaufmann telephoned to say he was coming to see the drawings. In the few hours before his client arrived, Wright is said to have drawn the whole scheme. The tale may be polished by many retellings. But it is clear that Wright had studied this site closely before he drew.

Now look at the terraces. They reach out over the stream with no visible support at the far end. This is a cantilever, a beam fixed at one end and free at the other, like a diving board. Wright built the terraces in reinforced concrete, which was still a daring choice for a private house. The engineers of the day had serious doubts. Wright pushed ahead, and the house was built in the late 1930s.

Those doubts were not entirely wrong. Over the decades, the main cantilevers began to sag. By the end of the twentieth century, engineers were worried about the structure. A major repair project in the early 2000s strengthened the concrete from within, using steel cables pulled tight to carry the load. Visitors today see almost no sign of this work. The terraces look the same as they did when the Kaufmanns stood on them.

Next, look at the stone. The vertical walls are built from local sandstone, quarried close to the house. The masons laid it in rough, uneven bands. Some stones project slightly, so the walls catch shadow and look like the rock ledges in the stream bed. This is deliberate. The concrete runs flat and smooth, while the stone rises in rough layers. Together, the two materials repeat the shape of the waterfall itself.

If you go inside on a tour, watch the floor near the fireplace in the living room. A large boulder breaks through the polished stone floor and forms the hearth. Before the house existed, this rock sat on the bank of Bear Run. The Kaufmann family used to sit and sunbathe on it. Wright kept the boulder exactly where it was and built the house around it. It is the original ground of the site, still in place.

The living room holds another surprise. A set of glass panels in the floor can open like a hatch. Below it, a suspended stairway drops down toward the stream. It does not lead anywhere grand. It stops just above the water. On warm days, the family could walk down and put their feet in Bear Run. Air from the stream also rises up through the opening and cools the room.

Notice the windows, especially at the corners. In many places, Wright removed the corner frame, so two sheets of glass meet with nothing between them. Some corner windows open outward, and when they swing open the corner of the room disappears. Elsewhere, the glass runs straight into the stone wall, set into a narrow groove with no frame. The edge between indoors and outdoors becomes very thin. The trees seem to stand inside the room.

The colours are simple. The concrete is a soft, warm ochre, close to the colour of light sand. The steel window frames are painted a deep red that Wright used again and again in his work. Inside, the floors are dark polished stone and the furniture is built-in wood. Above the driveway, concrete beams curve around a tree trunk instead of cutting it down. Wright let the forest shape the plan.

The Kaufmanns used the house for many years. A guest house was added up the hill soon after the main house was finished. In the 1960s, Edgar Junior gave Fallingwater and its land to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which opened it to the public. Much of the original furniture and the family's art collection stayed in place. In 2019, the house became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing that groups together major works by Wright.

Before you leave, walk down the path to the overlook below the falls. From there, you see the view that appears in so many photographs. The terraces stack above the white water, and the stone chimney rises behind them. Stand still for a moment. Listen again to the water moving over the rock, as it did long before the house was here. As you walk back up through the trees, the sound will follow you a long way.