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One of the world’s most famous houses is the weekend retreat called Fallingwater. Begun in 1936 and completed the following year, Wright designed the house for Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, whose son, Edgar Jr., was a Taliesin fellow.
Fallingwater’s floors and roofs are dramatically cantilevered over the waterfall of Bear Run, a creek in western Pennsylvania. Executed in reinforced concrete, the house’s floating planes echo the stream’s cascading flow. The composition is anchored to the site visually by vertical elements such as stairs and chimneys faced in rough stone and from a nearby quarry. Every detail reinforces Wright’s vision of the exploded box: floors and ceiling expand outward independently, vertical elements extend this movement skyward, and windows meet at the corners of rooms, opening to erode the very notion of containment.
Wright’s version of modernism was very much rooted in 19th century America. In the land, in the American culture, in the idea of home and domesticity, in warm materials that came out of the earth, wood and stone and so forth.
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