Architecture & Design Entropy | 13 Nov 2009
Falling Water
“What Wright does in his architecture is make poetry. He makes images that people can relate to and he makes buildings that celebrate the various purposes for which they were designed.”
—Neil Levin
One of the world’s most famous houses is the weekend retreat called Fallingwater. Begun in 1936 and completed the following year, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house for Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, whose son, Edgar Jr., was a Taliesin fellow.
Wright named his building Fallingwater. It would eventually become the most iconic modern house in the world. And he had drawn it all it in less than three hours.
Ken Burn’s documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright shows Wright did the actual drawings for the famous Falling Water house in less than three hours !
Great architecture, like any kind of great art, ultimately takes you somewhere that words cannot take you at all. And Fallingwater does that the way Chartres Cathedral does that. That there’s some experience that gets you in your gut and you just feel it. And you can’t quite even say it. My whole life is dealing with architecture and words. And at the end of the day, there’s something that I can’t entirely say when it comes to what Fallingwater feels like.
I remember the first time I went to Fallingwater, taking a long walk down, looking at it from across the waterfall and you just wanted to sing. Just looked at it and you wanted to start singing some song or doing something. There was nothing really to say. It was so extraordinary.
—Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic
Explore Falling Water website