Wright’s Fallingwater: Analysis, Structure, and Commentary on the Architectural Work Built in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, in 1936 for Millionaire Edgar J. Kaufmann.Frank Lloyd Wright ‘s most justifiably famous work is Fallingwater, built in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, in 1936. Commissioned by billionaire Edgar J. Kaufmann , the villa is immersed in nature, inside a forest . It stands directly on a rocky outcrop, at the point where a stream falls for a few meters, creating a suggestive natural waterfall.
Features of the House on the Fallingwater
The construction is made with almost artisanal love, using simple local materials . This choice is never a fallback because the technologies used for the reinforced concrete cantilevered parts are very advanced and not at all pioneering. The insertion into the environment is extraordinarily harmonious, as the structure, as a whole, does not appear as a foreign body, built from a closed and defined volume. On the contrary, it highlights a series of planes that intersect and overlap in space , protruding into the void, above the waterfall, like a sort of marvelous living organism.
The interior of the house
The organizing center of the entire building is the enormous glass living room that, through stairs, views and terraces, opens towards the woods and the waterfall in an extraordinarily natural embrace. Observing the plan of the living room we see it full of apparently casual recesses and protrusions , but in fact they are millimetrically determined by the pre-existence of a tree that was not intended to be cut down or by the need to overlook the stream at a certain angle, to better admire its course. In this way nature and architectural artifact integrate without ever clashing.
Inside, even the furnishings seem to arise from the structure itself. The floor is made of the same stone as the external rock spur. The supporting pillars are covered in local stone , and the benches and seats that surround the living room perimeter are also made of stone and wood, just as the false skylight on the ceiling and a good part of the fixtures are made of natural wood. Through the vertical stone partitions and the horizontal reinforced concrete ones, Wright models the space freely, introducing differences in level, views and openings that create infinite different perspectives. In this way, the building has no front or back, just as the above and below are not important, since each facade has its own motivation and meaning , perfectly autonomous and distinct from those of the other facades, but at the same time connected to them.
