Falling Water

When visiting Pittsburgh one must go to see Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece house that he designed for the Kaufman family as a country retreat, located an hour and half drive southeast of the city in a large forest of trees situated next to and cantilevered over a running stream.  It is the goodness and generosity of the Kaufman family, whose fortune came from a department store in Pittsburgh, that led them to donate the property to the Pennsylvania Trust for the public to visit in perpetuity, and for that organization to take up a much needed restoration a few years back when as is often the case with Wright's designs and in this particular instance the cantilevering needed serious redress in terms of stress and ballast.  Funds have been provided--maybe from entrance fees which are not cheap--for decent amenities, parking lot, entrance pavilion, splendid docents, the works.  I encountered one oddity typical of the often quirky detail in Wright's thinking, namely, in the men's room at the visitors pavilion the one stall is located first and then there are two urinals which are, however, obscured from view by a bend in the structure.  Any fellow entering and encountering as will more often than not be the case a guy or two waiting to sit down will think there are only stalls and all are filled and join the queue, and it requires men standing to explain the arrangements, a very unusual provocation as males have extreme difficulty communicating in a situation like that. The house is several stories high, including a wading pool at the stream's edge, a glorious terrace off the living room, another off the master bedroom and on and on, all the rooms being small, and with minimal windows but opening always onto striking and dramatic vistas. The wall at the edge of the terraces, is like the wall of the ramp at the Guggenheim slightly unnervingly low--maybe mid thigh--, more of an indication of barrier than an actual protection against throwing oneself or falling off the edge.  The terraces are splendid; Wright wants you to get outside, not linger and look out as is the case with the other great American architectural domestic work, Philip Johnson's Glass House where outside is inside, true to the Bauhaus tradition.  And Wright wants you to have the experience of working through elevations; there are something like one hundred stairs to climb to get to the highest elevation of the house.  I was particularly aware of this as there are no railings to accommodate the elderly and infirm, and as the docent kept reminding us "no touching" although I surreptitiously reached out to grasp at the lengths of stone jutting out every so often from the walls made up of layers of local stone laid one piece atop another.  Spending time in this house must have been a powerful sensual experience, although I do not think that "cozy" would have applied.  There are large fireplaces in every room and the Kaufman family was fortunate have staff to keep the fires burning.  I kept thinking that the stone and concrete vertical support of the building must have been a very cold element in winter although the fact that the flues of every fireplace went through it do doubt was a warming element as in the eighteenth century central chimney stack in New England farmhouses.  And of course there was also central heating at Falling Water.  The place is beautiful in its setting, there is no way but to constantly participate in the design of the rooms, the terraces, the sound of the rushing water, always you are thrust into the natural setting, but the emphasis is upon "thrust," as opposed to The Glass House, where the inside/outside dichotomy does not exist.