DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
Issue link: https://www.southbaydiggs.com/i/915435
He looked at the site and saw it: a house emerging from the hillside, its peninsular planes seemingly suspended and staggered downward to emulate the stony cliff over which rushes a surge of mountain stream. e elevations, the geometry, the complexities, he saw it all. A vision that only a true visionary possibly could. But Frank Lloyd Wright, well into his sixties at the time, produced nothing tangible for nine months thereaer. Everything was in his head. e commission, he knew, had the potential to reignite his career, one that he began when America still turned to horses for transport. And here it was, 1934, the Great Depression, with Wright in the wilderness of his professional life, having completed just a handful of commissions in the last 10 years. Many wondered if Louis Sullivan's protégé, who helped pioneer the Prairie School and designed both the Uni Temple and the Robie House, was all washed up. Not Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, however, who commissioned Wright to design for them a weekend home on a wooded site in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. Prosperous department store owners, they were a good match for Wright in every way, both worldly, with operations in Pittsburgh and an off ice in Paris. Kaufmann was a larger-than-life character who loved big ideas and interesting people. His wife was a H 116 DIGS.NET | 12.15.2017 woman of great taste and an exceptional eye; she was devoted to beauty and ran a specialty shop with an international selection of haute couture on the 11th f loor of the Kaufmanns' department store. They also shared the architect's love of nature and appreciated his honest expression of materials and form. They showed Wright the site, then waited. Myth oen has it that Wright conjured the design for Fallingwater almost from thin air. But three of his apprentices—witnesses to the following events—told it somewhat differently. Kaufmann, in an effort to get something out of Wright, made a series of calls to Taliesin, Wright's home in Wisconsin, telling the architect he was en route to see the plans. On the day Kaufmann was to arrive, "Wright finished breakfast and went into the draing room with his apprentices around him," relays Lynda Waggoner, director of Fallingwater since 1996, who knew each apprentice. "ey said all they could do was sharpen pencils. But because Wright had this incredible abili to design things in his head, I'm sure that during that nine-month gestation period he thought through the night, did a little sketch here and there, so that by the time Kaufmann arrived to see the preliminary sketches, he just drew it all out." In an unpublished essay Kaufmann later wrote for an exhibition at Fallingwater, he confessed to not fully seeing the house at this stage. Which might explain the surprise the Kaufmanns felt when they realized that Wright's final plans did to not include a view of the site's natural wonder, which they loved and clearly expected to see from the house. A terrific salesman, Wright reminded the Kaufmanns that the waterfall had always been a destination point for them on the site. ey had picnicked there and watched the falls. His plan would help retain that sense of destination. Because if they were always looking at the falls, he explained, it would become commonplace. Wright would have his way. In 1938, aer a few rough patches, Wright realized what is an ingenious configuration of structure and site that exposed the depth of his unorthodoxy and architectural gis. Fallingwater had traces of his earlier work (the cantilever, taken to its absolute limit with this project, and concrete, a modern material he used early in his career), but was unlike any building he'd ever done—the very model of organic architecture, which for him meant the merging of architecture and nature. "But it's more than that," Waggoner explains. "It's a principle; a holistic view of the world that man has a place in nature . . . Wright believed that there should be as many sles of buildings as there are pes of people, and they should be individualistic." Accordingly, Fallingwater stands alone. With its exaggerated planes of reinforced concrete and bands of steel-framed windows, the house is best understood as a response to what the architects of the International Sle were doing. It is exceedingly geometric and horizontal, characteristic of (clockwise from le) Frank Lloyd Wright; drawing of Fallingwater. Inside Fallingwater; Frank Lloyd Wright at work. e Kaufmann family. FR ANK LLOYD WRIGHT; DR AWING OF FALLINGWATER. COURTESY OF THE FR ANK LLOYD WRIGHT FOUNDATION ARCHIVES (THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART | AVERY ARCHITECTUR AL & FINE ARTS LIBR ARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y, NEW YORK). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. INSIDE FALLINGWATER; FR ANK LLOYD WRIGHT AT WORK. COURTESY OF THE FR ANK LLOYD WRIGHT FOUNDATION ARCHIVES (THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART | AVERY ARCHITECTUR AL & FINE ARTS LIBR ARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y, NEW YORK). ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE K AUFMANN FAMILY.