FLW's Fallingwater

[The Lawspeaker]

Perhaps one of the most famous Modern and organic buildings ever build.

Fallingwater or Kaufmann Residence is a house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The home was built partly over a waterfall on Bear Run in the Mill Run section of Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains.
Hailed by Time shortly after its completion as Wright's "most beautiful job", it is also listed among Smithsonian's Life List of 28 places "to visit before you die." It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966. In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects named the house the "best all-time work of American architecture" and in 2007, it was ranked twenty-ninth on the list of America's Favorite Architecture according to the AIA. Fallingwater was featured in Bob Vila's A&E Network production Guide to Historic Homes of America.

Opinions ?

[Svipdag]

From an engineering point of view,FLW's "masterpiece" is structurally unsound.
If the contractors hadn't disregarded FLW's specifications and added cables and turnbuckles in places where they did not show,there would be no such building today.

The man who designed the Imperial Hotel so that it survived the 1923 Sagami
Bay earthquake virtually undamaged couldn't design a building that could endure the force of gravity in his old age. He abandoned the sound design principles of his youth to embrace the disastrous "Use the lightest beam." philosophy of the later 20th century.

[Eldritch]

New photo gallery in Slate:

Falling for Fallingwater

The granddaddy of modern house museums is surely Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year.

A new, superbly illustrated book is a reminder of just why this extraordinary building maintains such a strong hold on the American imagination.

The Fallingwater Living Room


Wright’s interiors are like landscapes in which the scattered groups of furniture resemble natural features. The polished flagstone floor of Fallingwater’s living room, which mimics the wet rocks in the stream outside, reinforces the metaphor, especially where it turns into a rock outcropping at the fireplace. The streamlined shapes above the fireplace are metal shelves that continue around the room and across the windows. The red spherical shape is a cast-iron kettle on a hinged arm that swings into the fire and was used for mulling wine. “You’ll hear the hiss,” said Wright. When not in use the kettle sat in a niche in the sandstone wall. Unlike most architects, he continuously varied the ceiling heights throughout, but the low ceiling of the living room, about 7 feet, is a surprise. Most of the rooms in Fallingwater have even lower ceilings. This has less to do with his stature—5 feet 8 inches—and more with the proportion of the exterior, and creating a sense of release as you move from inside to outside.

Liliane Kaufmann’s Bedroom


The largest of the four bedrooms belonged to Kaufmann’s wife, Liliane. Her desk, like so much of the furniture, is built-in. All the Wright-designed furniture in the house is made of marine-quality plywood (to avoid warping) veneered with North Carolina black walnut. The Kaufmanns—wisely—resisted using Wright’s designs for sitting furniture, however, and except for his hassocks and built-in ottomans, the rest is a richly diverse mixture of modern designs (by Bruno Mathsson, Jorge Hardoy, László Gábor) and rustic pieces like the three-legged Florentine backstools in the living room, or this English peasant armchair. Wright designed the dramatic fireplace specifically to hold the 15th-century Madonna and child sculpture. The Kaufmanns’ interest in Native American crafts, such as this basket, was stimulated by trips they took in the Southwest with Wright and his wife, Olgivanna.

Stairs to Nowhere


At one end of the living room, a sliding-glass panel that resembles a ship’s hatch provides access to a staircase that descends to the rushing stream and is one of Fallingwater’s trademark features. Initially conceived as a bathing platform, this function was obviated when it proved impractical to blast out the rocky streambed, which at this point is shallow. The Kaufmanns questioned the practicality of a stair that went nowhere, but Wright knew better; the stair links the house to the water in an almost mystical way. When the hatch is open, air from the stream cools the interior and the sound of the falls permeates the room. Although the stair appears to be suspended, it actually rests on the stream bed and the steel columns reinforce the structural “bolster” (visible on the right of the photograph), one of a series that support the cantilevered living room above.


Entrance


Fallingwater signaled a comeback for Wright. He was 67 when he designed the house and had been practicing for almost 50 years, but after his halcyon Prairie style period, his career hit several bumps, and many considered him a has-been. The public’s attention had been drawn to the so-called International style of a younger generation of Europeans: Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. According to Wright biographer Franklin Toker, when Wright saw the waterfall site at Bear Run on a preliminary visit, he told apprentice Cornelia Brierly, “Well, Cornelia, we are going to beat the Internationalists at their own game.” And he did. The pin-wheeling plan has been compared to Mies and the terraces take a cue from a California house by Neutra. The painted concrete appears International style (although it is painted light ochre rather than refrigerator white), and so does the abstract composition of planes, as in the entrance (left). On the other hand, there is nothing remotely machinelike about the house; it is a cave for living in.

The Iconic View


What makes this iconic view of Fallingwater so compelling is the crisscrossing terraces that appear to hover magically in the air, especially the upper one on the right, which Wright lengthened by 10 feet at the last minute. Once built, the lower terrace showed signs of sagging almost from the beginning, although Kaufmann, assured by Wright that the structure was sound, took no action. In 1995, alarmed at the cracks that continuously reappeared in the lower terrace, the conservancy that oversees the house commissioned an investigation. The engineers found that while the concrete was good quality, there was insufficient reinforcing in some of the supporting girders. They also discovered that although the upper terrace appeared to be hovering, it was actually partially supported by the lower terrace, thus adding to its load. To rectify the situation—and to prevent a catastrophic collapse—the beams under the lowest terrace were reinforced with post-tensioned cables. We can be thankful for modern technology, yet nothing can take away from the old magician’s accomplishment. Happy birthday, Fallingwater.