![]() Still, so what if the great reinforced concrete balconies that project 17ft over and 62ft along the waterfall are giving up the ghost? Good old Frank could tell you a tougher story than that. Even the house's name reveals his initials: Fallingwater - FLW. On quiet weekdays at the end of the summer season you can feel him peering over your shoulder. ![]() Stunning though the house is, Frank Lloyd Wright is the star here. They maintained Fallingwater fastidiously before handing it over in 1963 to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which opened Fallingwater to the public. This is funny, but not perhaps if you were spending $155,000 on a new house when $155,000 was an enormous sum of money. Wright once told him: "Sit down, Wes, you're ruining the scale of my architecture." William Wesley Peters, one of Wright's associates, was well over 6ft tall. Wright based proportions intuitively around his own height - 5ft 8 1/2 in - and if his clients were tall, well, they just had to bend to the maestro's proportional will. The ceilings inside Fallingwater drop from a maximum of 9ft to a rather stooping 6ft 4in. The house appears both to have landed from outer space on its rocky waterfall site and to be growing out of it. Fallingwater went one step further: it made a dynamic and convincing connection between an uncompromisingly Modern architecture and a wild landscape. His buildings connected to the outside world, blurring the distinctionsbetween interior and exterior, landscape and architecture. Wright introduced the western world to the concept of open-plan living the plans of his houses flowed. They offered something else, too: freedom and a heightened sense of space and light. Wright was able to get away with professional murder because of his dominating personality and the fact that, though unreliable, his houses were quite simply beautiful. Many of his buildings have given trouble. His was a monstrous ego, and therein lay his genius and his downfall. You can almost hear the contractors saying: "You sure we've got the damp-proof courses right, Mr Wright?"įLW was always right. It might stand beside a river, but never on top of one. ![]() A normal house in the area would have been a grand, two-storey timber cabin complete with moose heads on the walls. They had often driven out to picnic at Bear Run and dreamed of living there. The Kaufmanns were big-time Pittsburgh store owners. His clients must have had the patience of saints. It went something along the lines of: "Frank Lloyd Wright built a house over falling water/which he really shouldn't have oughta." But nobody was going to tell Wright that back in 1935, when he turned up at Bear Run and sketched out a home for Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann in a matter of moments. I remember seeing a rhyme in a cafe on Pennsylvania's Route 381, which passes close by Wright's domestic masterpiece.
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