Fallingwater, Mill Run, Penn.
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) conceived this remote Allegheny Mountain getaway in 1935 for Pittsburgh department-store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. and his wife, Liliane.
Completed four years later and opened as a museum in 1964, the evocatively named Fallingwater is a dynamic three-story domestic sculpture, composed of intersecting sandstone, glass, and reinforced-concrete planes that spring out of a rock ledge and are graced with great terraces cantilevered over a natural waterfall.
Surprisingly, that picturesque cataract is heard rather than seen, a counterintuitive stroke of brilliance that reinforces the impression that Fallingwater is at one with the primeval landscape rather than merely an object from which to view it. The dampness that resulted from the inventive positioning, however, led Kaufmann to wryly call the retreat “Rising Mildew.”
