Though the late American architect designed more than 1,000 buildings during his career, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—a private home situated over an active waterfall in forested Mill Run, Pennsylvania—is one of his most celebrated. Considered a masterwork of the organic architecture style, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater embodies a harmony between site and design that the architect championed. Designed in 1935, the house is defined by a series of stucco-covered concrete cantilevered terraces that are fixed to the natural rock of the fall, and the façade is constructed of local sandstone slabs that create a visual kinship with its environment. Critics raved after Fallingwater opened three years later, with Time magazine calling it Wright’s “most beautiful job” in a January 1938 cover story on the architect.
The clients, Pittsburgh department store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann and his family, agreed. Their desire to be close to nature in this isolated weekend abode drove the design choices. Aside from the incredible beauty of its natural site, what makes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater an architectural icon worthy of being designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019? In this in-depth guide from AD, rediscover the importance and magic of Wright’s most famous private residence.
History of Fallingwater
Edgar J. Kaufmann and his wife Liliane, the owners of Kaufmann’s department store, became acquainted with architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1934 through their son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (who was a student of Wright’s at his six-month-long Taliesin Fellowship program in Spring Green, Wisconsin). They soon commissioned the architect to design a natural family retreat at their favorite countryside destination: a 30-foot waterfall on the Bear Run tributary in southwestern Pennsylvania’s mountainous Laurel Highlands. Knowing the Kaufmanns’ love for nature, Wright told them in 1935: “I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it, but for it to become an integral part of your lives.” His design for Fallingwater therefore suspends the architecture above the fall itself, filling the home constantly with the powerful sound of rushing water.
After completing the 9,300-square-foot main house (4,400 square feet of which are the outdoor terraces), Wright designed an additional 4,990-square-foot guest house. The latter was built in 1939, with 1,950 square feet of its own terraces.
What materials is Fallingwater made of?
“There in a beautiful forest was a solid, high rock ledge rising beside a waterfall, and the natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from that rock bank over the falling water,” Wright once explained of his 1935 design for the Fallingwater house. While this landform may have dictated—in Wright’s mind—the obvious building site, its massing and material palette were entirely his invention. The horizontal orientation of the home’s large terraces (which are enclosed by parapets) recalls two of Wright’s prior residential architecture explorations. The first is prairie-style architecture, which was inspired by the flatlands of the American Midwest, where Wright was born and raised. The second is his Usonian houses, an urban planning concept for ideal living that consisted of neighborhoods of small L-shaped abodes with a strong indoor-outdoor connection. Concurrently with the design of Fallingwater, Wright was exploring designs for the Usonia house. Later, in the 1950s, he would plan America’s only district of such homes in Pleasantville, New York.
Palette
For the vertical elements of the home—its structural piers and chimney, which also run through the interiors—Wright took inspiration from the specificity of Fallingwater’s isolated Pennsylvania site, as chosen by the nature-loving Kaufmann family. He clad them in local sandstone laid in horizontal striations, like the forms in its natural surroundings. To further the house’s connection to nature, Wright used flagstone flooring inside and out and employed large sheaths of glass windows for visual continuity. In Fallingwater’s six bathrooms, cork covers the floors and walls.
The house’s material palette is simple and largely unadorned, aside from two paint colors: ochre on the concrete elements and Cherokee red—the architect’s signature earthen hue—on the steel sash windows and doors.
Interior design
Frank Lloyd Wright was known for designing a residence holistically, including built-in furnishings, lighting fixtures, and millwork, as well as sourcing and arranging furniture for his clients. He executed projects with a vision not only for aesthetic and function, but for family living as defined by the architecture itself. Fallingwater was no exception. The architect designed almost 170 custom wood furnishings for the house in a style that blended harmoniously with the architecture.
The interior layout focuses of Wright’s signature concept of compression and openness, where small spaces lead to large open plan ones. On the first floor of the Fallingwater house, visitors move through the intimately sized entry to a continuous dining and living room. As always, nature is close by. A hatch in the floor opens to reveal an exterior suspended staircase that leads down to the Bear Run stream.
Renovations to Fallingwater
The structural success of Fallingwater’s cantilevers relies on their use of concrete reinforced with steel. During construction, Wright insisted that his design would perform, but on-site builders were less convinced and added more structural steel to the concrete slabs without the architect’s knowledge.
After living in the vacation home for 26 years, the Kaufmann family gave its custody to region’s Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963. The organization turned the house into a public museum and oversees its design preservation and all required maintenance to ensure the landmark will last for generations to come. In 2002, Fallingwater’s famous cantilevers underwent a major structural restoration to prevent their collapse.
What’s so special about Fallingwater?
“[Fallingwater] has served well as a house, yet has always been more than that,” Edgar Kaufmann Jr. once said, “a work of art beyond any ordinary measure of excellence.” Surrounded by 1,543 acres of natural land, the architecture is integrated with the spirit of its awe-inspiring environment. While its form is distinct and standout, Fallingwater was designed for a family to live in and among nature. Not only did the Kaufmanns commission the correct architect to achieve their specific ideal of country living, but Frank Lloyd Wright found the perfect clients to design a home that is the pinnacle of his explorations in the connection between land and building. Fallingwater is a 20th-century masterpiece in organic architecture—one that was created nearly four decades before the design world began to consider its impact on the planet.
Who owns Fallingwater now?
The Kaufmann family owned Fallingwater until 1963 when they entrusted it to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Pittsburgh that preserves land and natural resources across the region.
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Does anyone live in the Fallingwater house?
Though Fallingwater was designed as a private home for the Kaufmann family, it is now unoccupied to allow architecture aficionados from around the globe to explore its interior and exterior, all carefully designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. According to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy that protects and operates the house, more than 6.4 million visitors have visited Fallingwater since it opened as a public museum in 1964.
How much does the Fallingwater house cost today?
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house is now museum and has never been listed for sale. However, when the home was constructed in 1935, it cost the Kaufmanns $148,000 to construct, and they paid Wright an additional $11,800 in architectural design fees. Accounting for today’s inflation, the project’s construction would have racked up a price of $3.3 million, and Wright would have brought in $264,445 as its architect.
Today, tickets to visit the house at 1491 Mill Run Road range from $15 for a tour of the grounds to $87 for the most in-depth of its guided tour options, leading guests throughout the interior and exterior of the building and its natural site.
