Timeless

Posted 8/21/12

Last month I finally found the time to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936 masterpiece in western Pennsylvania. I’ve been looking at pictures of this famous house since I was in my …

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Timeless

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Last month I finally found the time to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936 masterpiece in western Pennsylvania. I’ve been looking at pictures of this famous house since I was in my twenties, so I thought I knew what to expect and how I would feel about it. But, like many iconic places, this one defied my expectations and delivered a more complex and visceral experience than I had anticipated.

Photographs emphasize the monumentality and the breathtaking counterbalance of Fallingwater’s cantilevered, reinforced-concrete terraces. In person, the house feels nestled into its site, harmonizing rather than competing with the waterfall on Bear Run. The front door is tucked away, modest and almost hidden. In photographs, the interiors are made to look vast. In person, there is a sense of intimacy, even in the large main floor living area. The bedrooms are small by today’s standards, although each has its own outdoor space, thanks to those ingenious terraces. The bathrooms are tiny, but the thoughtful space-saving layout and use of materials—sandstone native to the site and marine-grade plywood chosen to withstand the damp—create a sense of unity that doesn’t need grandeur of scale.

Wright’s career spanned 70 years, and as early as 1896 he was advocating for more affordable, smaller, simpler houses that suited the way we live in our own time, and promoting the idea that a well-designed home should be accessible to every American. As his work evolved, he introduced many design innovations, including open-plan living spaces, prefabricated structural components, built-in storage and furniture, and radiant floor heating. He also took care to orient each house on its site to provide privacy from the road, minimize the need for artificial light in the daytime, cool the structure without air conditioning in the summer, and harness passive solar heat gain in the winter. In the last decades of his career, he brought everything he had learned to the service of affordable homes for everyday people, and between 1936 and 1959 he orchestrated these qualities into projects as small as a 450-square-foot cottage, made spacious by its generous outdoor space and harmonious details.

Our knowledge of construction materials and methods has changed over the years, and our everyday lives are even less formal today than Wright envisioned, but his core values are timeless: the spiritual well-being we gain when we live in harmony with nature, and the mental liberation that can be achieved when we put less emphasis on the quantity of our possessions and focus more on the quality of our experiences. That’s the source of the emotional punch I felt at Fallingwater and nearby Kentuck Knob, a smaller Wright project built in 1954. Both houses provoke a thought process, however gently they may prod: How do I want to live? What’s important me? What extraneous stuff would I be willing to jettison in order to make room for a richer everyday experience of the natural world, the closeness of family life and the luxury of quiet contemplation?

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