The Falling Water House

every architect recognizes that falling water is a masterpiece the American Institute of Architects voted it the most significant building in the last 125 years I think it's quite possible for people to come here and look at the house with abs absolutely no intellectual or philosophical or aesthetic or architectural preparation whatever so I think that when you walk into this house this say something grips you it's not just a house in milr Run Pennsylvania it's part of a total philosophy in a total way of life a sense of space nothing is more important and that is the sense of the new architecture the space within that's the new thought that we call organic architecture to which I have devoted my life deep in the woods the only sounds to be heard are the sounds of nature but here in the lauro highlands of Western Pennsylvania among the wild flowers and rodendan stands a work of art it is the most famous of 20th century houses it has been called the best known private house built for someone not of royal blood in the history of the world Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house and he called it falling water the story of falling water begins with the Edgar Kaufman family lilan and EJ Kaufman own a department store in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1934 their son Edgar Jr returned home from studying art in Europe a friend recommended that he read Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography he became so impressed with wri's philosophy that he went West to study with him joining a select group of apprentices in Spring Green Wisconsin he introduced his parents to Frank Lloyd Wright at the very time they were thinking of building in a new weekend retreat in the mountain woods they loved Edgar Kaufman Jr remembers those times when my parents invited rright to visit the property with the idea that he might design a house for them uh they took him around the property and uh explained why the existing house was insufficient and no longer very happily located and they also took him down to the waterfalls here and explained that a lot of the family's time and of course their guest time as a result too uh was spent basking uh on the Flat Rock at the base of the falls walking in under the Falls getting a massage sliding down into the pothole and having fun the Falls including the drama of the water movement and the charm of the noise that it made was something that everybody appreciated this was a focus of activity right took that in he didn't make any comment eventually when he designed the first scheme for the house which was also really the last scheme for the house uh he placed it as we all know directly above the waterfall which I don't think had ever crossed my parents' Minds Wright seemed to have been particularly fetched by these enormous rock ledges that had broken off and allowed the water to fall uh and that were such a visual feature of what remained you not only saw the water falling over them you saw the ledges extending you saw the difference in vegetation at the bottom and vegetation on the upper level and he saw in this a tremendous opportunity I think uh for architecture not only to work with nature but to almost become part of nature leak that we were talking about was occurring in this area M the wall that we talked about that it was coming through is in here and this is what I think we have to Louis asterino when he first saw it as an architectural student was inspired by Falling Water now his archit seual firm has been commissioned to make the first precise drawings of the house that's wri's plans existed of course but until these drawings there were no accurate measurements of exactly how the finished house matched his plans great thank you thanks The Genius of falling water from my point of view is exciting if you see the site it's in a lovely wooded area with a stream through it and a waterfall the natural tendency that any ordinary architect would do would be to site the the house looking at the waterfall and in fact I think probably Mr Kaufman Senor felt that that was the logical place to put the house himself um but that wasn't a good enough solution for wri because he felt that any solution had to do two things not only did it have to look good Ser an aesthetic function but also had to work well by sighting this the house on the Southern Slope it now worked because every room could receive sunlight it also put the house on top of the waterfall and what a unique way to view a waterfall come on are youu over Bob leaned against it it was in the fall of 1982 that the Pennsylvania Society of Architects organized a reunion of apprentices who had worked on the construction of falling water and so 48 years after he had discovered right's autobiography Edgar Kaufman Jr welcomed their return to the lur High an early Apprentice to write and one of the structural engineers was Wesley Peters the first on-site Apprentice was Bob moer who began the construction and took it up to the second floor and from there through to the finish the on-site Apprentice was Edgar tafle Mr Wright whom we shall always refer to as Mr Wright which is Frank Lord Wright out of deference and honor had come here to this very site and the shortest possible story about it is that he walked through these Glens and the gulches and the rivlets and so on and went back to tessen and he had ordered a site plan of this whole area and that Mr Kaufman furnished him and he was to then start to design the house and make the location for the house Mr Wright was in constant touch with Mr Kaufman and finally Mr Kaufman called one day and it was early in the morning and the plot plan was lying on the drafting table and Bob and I were in the drafting room we heard him on the phone talking with Mr Mr Kaufman he said oh yeah CJ come along he sat down to draw it was rapid fire so it just poured out of out of the uh I'd say he was cooking on a simmering on a back burner upstairs here for perhaps a long time because every line that was drawn was perfectly natural there wasn't any hesitation and he was just drawing first the first floor the second floor and details and a section always a section to the building and he had this totally in his mind he knew how it fit in here he knew the relationship of the waterfall to the gland to everything and he get then the third floor and then he did one elevation and what I've told you lasted about 3 hours it's about 130 miles from Milwaukee and suddenly then at the end he drew big lines at the bottom his T titles were always big falling water a house for Mr Mrs EJ Kaufman miler in Pennsylvania Frank ly Wright architect and of course I may be romanticizing it in retrospect but nevertheless at that moment Mr wri secretary came in and said Mr Wright EJ Kaufman is here Mr Kaufman and Kaufman came toward the drafting table and Mr wght got up and lifted up his hand and said EJ we've been waiting for you you had the combination of a great owner a great client who was appreciative and Cooperative with the architect and a a great architect who was appreciative and Cooperative the of the owner's Direction and at the same time involved on a unparalleled natural site when he designed falling water Frank Lloyd Wright was almost 70 years old he had already lived several lives as an architect he was still being discovered for his Brilliance and then rejected for his Maverick ways in wild ideas now in the 1930s he was out of fashion he had built little for the better part of a decade once called America's single most important architect he was reduced to the rebel with no worthy cause back in the late 1920s he had established a unique School of Architecture a place where apprentices could study and learn his philosophy firsthand he built the school and his home on the brow of a hill and took its name from his Welsh Heritage tesen shining brow there in Wisconsin and italies and West in Arizona Frank Lloyd Wright taught the principles of his practice and inspired belief in his new architecture now almost 70 he was ready to begin again ahead of him lay 20 years of productive creativity and in that lifetime he would introduce many more revolutionary ideas like the Marin County Center in California the best Shalom Synagogue near Philadelphia and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City every great building has a great idea behind it and if uh you are studying architecture you will remember and get these symbols of these buildings the parnon um Cathedral at chart in that photograph of falling water keeps coming up the idea here is a wedding between various ideas various emotions various materials and a piece of difficult and wonderful landscape it's tied into the Rock on this side it opens up on the other side to be in here in in the winter and the snow is coming down to be here in the fall when the leaves are falling each year each Time of the Season has has a different implication sh falling water had a rather special function it was a vacation house for people who lived in a city worked in the city my mother worked as well as my father and uh the whole idea was it was something to give their lives a balance it wasn't the their home it was the the aspect of their life that augmented what they did during the body of the week by giving them a an immediate relationship with nature uh a simple example of how the house helped them in this weekend and vacation relationship lies let's say in the windows in the front of the living room it's a strip of ribbon windows and they look out on a hillside you don't see the bottom of the hill you don't see the skyline you don't even see the bottom of the vegetation you don't see the roots of the trees or the plants you see a panorama of plants and you see them in a very precisely framed relationship which doesn't depend on whether one tree survives or not this relationship to Nature is still dictated and and given uh a certain Clarity by the framing and then it's given a certain Rhythm by the division of that frame into regular spaces so that as you look out you are seeing nature given a human scale falling water gave the Kaufman family A special relationship to their beloved Woods Edgar Kaufman Jr remembers how much his father loved the outof doors my father was indeed a nature bu anything that was natural and living appealed to him forever Frank Lloyd Wright appreciated that love of Nature and responded and I said why not build your house here inhabit the place that you love so we built a house that spot he loved on the stream and there he lived the plans were completed and construction began in the spring of 1936 there were no news real photographers to record the event falling water was destined to make architectural history but only an amateur photographer was there to document its beginnings while rights apprentices represented him at the site a local contractor oversaw the concrete and stone construction work the stones were cut from an Old Quarry just west of the falls all of the labor was by local workmen and both contractor and crew had to be quickly trained to wr's ways some of the local experts however were not confident about the wisdom of wri's bold design when my father father uh received the blueprints from right of the house he naturally discussed uh these with friends of his in Pittsburgh including many who are engineers and some of these Engineers were extremely doubtful about the viability of the structure and also of the possibility of placing such a heavy element directly on the piece of rock that it was meant to go on so that he then asked for more complete studies of the problem and got lengthy reports uh all of which tended to show that the house couldn't conceivably stay upright and uh that his money would be down the drain and he would ruin the landscape and everything would be disaster and he mailed these to Mr Wright and he got back a very brisk stroke of lightning which said you are not worthy to have a house of mine if you believe in this junk or words to that effect uh and uh my father agreed that this was true so he wrapped up the reports and they were duly buried in one of the stone walls that was going up at that time and future archaeologists can have a circus first by that time the house will indeed have fallen down so there's no telling who's going to win now here we have this marvelous concept building a home over a waterfall but there are some practical problems to it how in fact how do you do it normally when a house is built you you build a foundation and directly above the foundation is the remainder of the house well if you do that on our site or on this site the house wouldn't work it wouldn't it because part of it had to be can't delived over the waterfall part of it had to extend over the waterfall so right employed a means which we call a Calver he built a foundation and then on top of the foundation was another beam that stuck out above and over the foundation and it's not unfamiliar not unsimilar to a diving board on top of that beam then much more structure rested such as the chimney masses to help really secure that diving board and you can see that beam really becomes pretty solid Wright used this method four times in the foundation of falling water there are in fact four of these peers as I said 1 two three and four first one being Stone the other three being a combination of stone and and concrete they became the main support system for the entire house we then take on top of those piers and we add the main floor and as you can see we have the four beams resting directly over the piers which becomes now the foundation for the main floor of the house the living room of the house falling water has been designed and constructed of four basic materials Stone which was quarried locally on the site concrete very organic material Steel largely showing showing up in the reinforcing of the concrete but also evident in the frames of the windows and glass basically your four materials right invented the casement window which opens from the side in as use of the casement window in falling water when you open up the windows on the corner of a building you expect to see a post but because of the canal levers they're not needed so when that window is opened up nature just takes you over and it's just a marvelous experience whenever the opportunity arose to orient a house on a on a site that wasn't a restricted City lot of sorts Mr Wright always liked to take his tsquare lay it on the East West line this being East this being West and then work with a 30 60° triangle what I have is a floor plan of falling water and we tested the theory in our office of wondering whether or not it worked in this particular case put the 30 put the T squ on the the East West line took a 30 60° triangle laid the hypotenuse across the tsquare and then found that in fact all the edges of the house lined up exactly to the edges of the 30 60° triangle by doing this this oriented the house exactly as Mr R liked it so that the sun would appear in most of the rooms in addition to these Innovations there are other signs of the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright the house itself is anchored to a boulder one of the very Boulders on which EJ Kaufman would lie in the Sun and listen to The Falls Wright made that Boulder The Hearth and heart of falling water Frank Lloyd Wright designed all of the furniture to Echo the house sofas can't aever from the walls and the low seats and tables have edges that extend like balconies the basic color scheme of falling water was selected by Wright it shows his fondness for the warm Earth colors of the American southwest Cherokee red became Wright signature even his car was painted Cherokee red as was the huge Grog Kettle at falling water and all of theal metal work in the entire house the stone walls of falling water are laid up to match the strata of Natural Stone from the surrounding area stones in the floor are waxed to resemble the bed of the stream the great architect's design never forgets the setting the living room opens to the stream below here a Stairway lets in the sound of the falls and provides ventilation it is the final link that Weds the house to the stream what influenced your father to go to Mr wght just you that's a was the initial influence then they really clicked and then in 1963 Edgar Kaufman Jr gave his family home in the surrounding Woods to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy of it was to become a public trust some of them belong to a friend of ours since then over a million and a half people have visited the site some have a particular interest in architecture but most are just curious to see the house on the waterfall don't you ever get the urge to come back and just try I mean just just take a summer vacation here uh you can't take a summer vacations with people like you around falling water changed the way the world thought of Frank Lord Wright he was once a figure from the past now again he was the innovator falling water also changed the light of Edgar Kaufman Jr the house was acclaimed from the very beginning and the Museum of Modern Art mounted a special exhibit in 1938 afterwards Kaufman joined the museum staff and went on to teach architectural history at Columbia University he hasn't lived in the house on the waterfall for over 20 years but he continues to visit because it is a Place full of memories of the waterfall before the house and now of the house Forever at top the waterfall memories of early morning dips in the Stream of quiet times and happy times memories of his family and of a 70E old architect with the very newest of ideas who once designed a special house that would reveal its beauty from every perspective and in every detail he remembers how in this house the sun came into his room each morning falling water the house that was his the house that he gave to the Future today falling water lives among the trees open to the air and sky in perfect harmony with nature the house on the waterfall that Frank Lord Wright designed to be a home in the deep forest falling water shines like a lantern in the dark wood the generous Legacy of a great architect architecture is essentially human it is the human Spirit manifesting itself because when a man builds they got him you can't hide you know what who and how that man is oh

Channel: Noy Washington

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Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2013