Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a western Pennsylvania mountain retreat home built 1936-38 for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, owners of Kaufmann’s Department Store. The home was used by the Kaufmann household, Edgar, Liliane and their only child until 1963. It was then opened to the public in 1964 after being entrusted to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy by their son Edgar Kaufmann, jr. (1910-1989); the lower case “jr” was his preference. The home, which forms a strong and innovative organic bond to its setting, is considered by many to be the most famous house in America. It is undisputedly one of the architectural triumphs of the 20th century.

The Kaufmanns were wealthy, well traveled, educated and sophisticated people who sought out artists and creative people all their lives as they moved about in international circles. As Jews they encountered obstacles to their position in Pittsburgh society, but they remained passionate about aesthetic beauty and loved outdoor activity, especially horseback riding and fishing. At the urging of their son, who was working for Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) at Taliesin (Wisconsin) at the time, they chose the storied architectural genius to design a home on their 2,000 acre woodland retreat in 1935, when Wright was well into his late 60s. At the same time, Wright was asked to design an executive office for Edgar in the Kaufmann department store. Wright designed the walls, furniture and all textiles (including the rugs). This room has since been removed from the store (now a Macy's) and displayed in several museums here and abroad. Edgar jr. subsequently donated it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it is on permanent display (see photo at end of post).


Their son had been studying in Europe to become a painter, but made a career change in 1934 after reading Wright’s An Autobiography (publ. 1932), subsequently joining the Taliesin Fellowship of apprentices. In 1937 he began an 18-year association with the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), which eventually led him away from a career in retailing to his life’s work as a curator and scholar. Edgar jr. became a lecturer and authority on Frank Lloyd Wright as Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Art History at Columbia University (1963-1986). He remained a frequent visitor to Fallingwater after it opened to the public.


His generous transfer of Fallingwater to a conservancy has made it possible for millions of architecture enthusiasts to experience Wright’s masterpiece, located 72 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, in its original setting with all furnishings, books and artwork intact. The quality of art on casual display is exceptional: original works by Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, pre-Columbian statues and highly valuable sculpture placed both inside and out.

The woodland acreage was originally used as a summer camp and retreat for employees of Kaufmann’s Department Store, but the Depression years of the 1930s saw disuse of the property, since employees could no longer shoulder the expense of traveling to and staying at the camp. At that time the Kaufmann family decided to replace their log weekend house with a much larger home farther from the recently paved road. The rest is history. Today we can enjoy a visit to this landmark house just as it was constructed and furnished by the original owners. Fallingwater is surrounded by the conservancy’s 5,000 acre Bear Run Nature Reserve.

Click to enlarge: Guest house addition from 1939


The distinctive main house, which straddles a stream with waterfalls and boulders, was followed by construction of a complimentary 4-bedroom guest house in 1939. The two structures are separated by a winding pathway covered by concrete esplanades. The main house boasts 2,885 sq. ft. of interior space plus 2,445 sq. ft. of terraces (total 5,330 sq. ft.), while the guest house covers 1,700 sq. ft. The total cost for the house in the 1930s was $155,000, including $8,000 in architect’s fees and $4,500 for built-in walnut furnishings. Wright's original cost estimate had been $35,000. In today's dollars, $155,000 amounts to about $2.5 million, an extraordinary sum for a weekend house.

Although he had many ideas "in his head," Wright feverishly sketched plans for the house in a matter of a few hours. Months behind on the project, he rushed to have something to show Kaufmann, who had phoned to say that he was already on his way to visit Wright's office.

Wright exercised his typical control over interior furnishings and specifications, designing almost all the furniture and even the fireplace tools. He limited the palette to just two colors: a light ochre for the concrete and his signature Cherokee red for the metal surfaces (both may be purchased today from Pittsburgh Paints). There is liberal use of natural stone on walls, stairs and floors both inside and out.


The main house is approached by a stone-paved bridge spanning the cascading Bear Run. The sound of rushing water greets the visitor, but no entry door is apparent (it is in the rear). An innovative feature is a set of stairs that lead from one of the many terraces directly down to the stream. A plunge pool, walled off from the stream by stone, is adjacent to this area. Except for the stone chimney stack, the entire main house emphasizes horizontal planes and exaggerated cantilevers. The guest house, which boasts a 6-ft. deep swimming pool and a multi-car garage, is located uphill from the main structure.

Click images to enlarge:




Many of the local farmers and skilled workers in the area became part of the construction team that built Fallingwater. During the Depression, they were thankful for extra jobs and income. Walter Hall, a self-taught local builder, oversaw the construction project, including the guest house, for the sum of $50 a week. The stone used in constructing the house was quarried on site, and Hall himself taught many of the unskilled laborers building techniques they were able to use long after the Fallingwater project was completed.

Wright’s commission to design Fallingwater jump started a flagging career. This house became famous after being featured on the cover of TIME magazine in 1938. Many people expected Wright, who was 72 when Fallingwater was completed, to head into retirement. His renewed fame, however, brought him a flurry of commissions; more than half of the four hundred structures he designed were built after Fallingwater. Wright worked right up until his death at age 91.


More than 5 million people have visited Fallingwater since it was opened to the public in 1964. On average, about 150,000 people visit the site annually. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy completed major structural repairs in 2002 to strengthen Fallingwater’s extreme cantilevers, guarding against a possible future collapse and deflection. Attention was paid to leaks and problems with mold, as well.

Note: Kaufmann commissioned another architectural masterpiece for use as a vacation house. In 1946 he hired noted Viennese architect Richard Neutra to design a house to be built on the edge of Palm Springs, CA, as a retreat from harsh winters. Neutra had once been a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice and even named his son after Wright. Subsequent owners (including Barry Manilow) altered the Palm Springs house dramatically and insensitively, but a thorough and accurate restoration returned it to its original condition in the late 1990s. The house, a fabled example of the International Style against which Wright rebelled, was sold at auction in 2008 by Christie’s Auction House for $15 million.

Photo below: Fallingwater viewed from Bear Run.

Skeletons in the Closet:

Most visitors to Fallingwater come on a pilgrimage to the Holy Grail of modern architecture, where they are allowed to worship at the feet of a genius. However, Fallingwater was the scene of events lived on a less lofty plane. The house was a possession of a rich and powerful family that played by its own rules. Liliane and Edgar traveled to NYC to get married, because it was not then legal for first cousins to marry in Pennsylvania. Soon after she became immersed in the business of the department store and introduced the people of Pittsburgh to the fashions of Paris. While at Kaufmann’s, she turned the then-unprofitable 11th floor women’s shop into a successful boutique, Vendôme, a reflection of the elegant Place Vendôme in Paris. She traveled through Europe to keep it stocked with antiques, artwork, and interesting objects d’art. Liliane ruled the Vendôme floor completely, returning from buying trips to Europe with the flair of royalty, her attendants and chauffeur in tow. To her secretary at the time, Mary Michaely, it was like the return of a queen to her palace.

The Kaufmanns flaunted their money with an over-the-top lifestyle, regularly hosting extravagant themed parties that tipped toward debauchery. They shocked friends when they sunbathed in the nude. The Kaufmanns were given to avant-garde behavior and marketed themselves outrageously. Edgar was a notorious womanizer who favored women half his age, often showgirls; in 1929 Edgar fathered a child with a model from his store. Both Liliane and Edgar abused alcohol.

Liliane did not like Fallingwater, mentioning that the terraces made the bedroom hot (she had a bedroom separate from that of her husband), and that the location directly over a stream created problems with mold. And the roof leaked. She often retired to the guest house up the hill and swam in its pool, enjoying solitude there. She doted on her son, who withdrew from the family retail business in Pittsburgh for a career in New York City, where his homosexuality was more accepted.

Edgar Jonas Kaufmann Sr. (called “E.J.” by his close friends) frequently crossed swords with Wright (another notorious womanizer). E.J. commissioned another dozen projects from the architect, but never built any of them. Wright was offended when Edgar Sr. hired one of Wright’s own students, Richard Neutra, to design a winter home in Palm Springs. Liliane confided to Wright that she and Edgar seldom shared a house except for purposes of entertaining, and she approached Wright about designing a private retreat just for her in Palm Springs.

In 1952, Liliane died from an overdose of sleeping pills while at Fallingwater, after she learned that her husband had fallen in love with his much younger nurse (Edgar had chronic and often severe back problems). The coroner declared the death accidental, but Edgar jr. insisted his mother’s death was a suicide. After marrying said nurse (he was in his late 60s; she was 34), Edgar Sr. died only seven months later (1955) of bone cancer while in residence at his Neutra-designed Palm Springs home. Upon learning that Kaufmann had left the bulk of his estate to his charitable foundation, his new wife sued for $5 million, declaring that she needed to maintain her lifestyle and status. She had signed a prenuptial agreement, however, and after years of legal challenges, eventually lost the suit. She died in a tragic accidental fire inside her apartment in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, just 15 minutes before her maid arrived.

Edgar jr., deeply affected by his parents’ estrangement and his mother’s subsequent death, was eventually able to accomplish what he was unable to do while his parents were alive. He commissioned an extravagant mausoleum of earth-toned stucco and stone to be built on the grounds of Fallingwater; he transferred his mother’s body from Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery and eventually interred his father there, as well. At last Edgar jr.'s parents were as he wanted them, joined together, side-by-side. Noted Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti created the crypt’s huge bronze doors, which depict two solitary bas-relief stick-like figures, a woman sitting against a tree on the right and a man standing far away on the left, facing each other across a barren valley. Kevin Gray, in a New York Times feature from 2001, described the doors as having “dark, stormy background branches evoking William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

The tomb is several hundred yards upstream from the main house, reached by its own bridge, although tourists are not allowed to visit it. In fact, docents and guides will not reveal its exact location. Edgar jr's own body was cremated in 1989, and his ashes were scattered around the grounds of Fallingwater, as well as those of his long time companion, Paul Mayén.

Edgar jr., as discrete as his parents were brash, had a substantial career as a learned and disciplined historian, an exact and graceful writer, a perceptive critic, educator and philanthropist – all without a traditional college education. One of his enduring legacies was co-founding, along with famed architects Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, the GOOD DESIGN awards in 1950; GOOD DESIGN grants international recognition upon designers and manufacturers for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality, and for stretching the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary product and consumer design. During the past 60 years winners have included Alessi, Porsche, Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Herman Miller, Bose and Knoll. The 2010 winners will be announced in September.

Tip: If salacious details fascinate you, buy the cookbook available in the gift shop. Elsie Henderson was the personal cook for the Kaufmann household, and she reveals much more than favorite family recipes.
Exerpt (text accompanies a recipe for chicken/avocado salad):

Elsie often featured avocado in salads when Edgar Jr. and his companion, Paul Mayén, were at Fallingwater. “Mr. Mayén loved avocados.”

Elsie Henderson, an African-American, is today 96 years old. A portion of the cookbook’s profits help support her.

The Mayén Connection

It is a curious fact that Paul Mayén, a Spanish-born industrial designer who for 36 years shared Edgar jr’s Manhattan apartment and retreat in Hydra, Greece, designed the gift shop, café and visitor center complex (built in 1978) set in the woods above Fallingwater. Everyone who tours Fallingwater passes through it. As well, one of Paul Mayén’s design creations, a red cubical sculpture, sits unheralded on the coffee table in Fallingwater’s living room.

Frank Lloyd Wright, who in 1956 had designed a retreat house known as Kentuck Knob for I.N. and Bernadine Hagan (just four miles from Fallingwater), suggested that they hire Edgar jr. and Mayén (as a couple) to assist in selecting furniture. Paul and Edgar jr. directed the Hagans toward furnishings by George Jensen and Hans Wegner. They selected Jack Lenor Larsen fabrics for the built-in Wright-designed seating area and purchased Moroccan rugs from Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh. Now owned by a British Lord, Kentuck Knob is open for tours. While it is a fine example of a modest Usonian house, and in pristine condition, every interior surface is marred by excessive clutter from the present occupants. Wright would have had apoplexy.

In 1975, Mayén designed a country house for the Hagans in rural New York State. As well, Paul Mayén designed the jacket of a book about Wright, Drawings for a Living Architecture (1959), and provided photographs for a 1965 book about Fallingwater.

Given his professional contributions to such an iconic architectural site and his personal ties to its heir, it is astonishing that so little is known about Mayén and his work.

Below: Wright's office for Edgar Sr. at the Kaufmann Department Store, now on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Frank Lloyd Wright's College Campus

Florida Southern College
Lakeland, Florida


Florida Southern College is home to the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright structures (twelve), yet they remain among the least known. At the urging of President Dr. Ludd Spivey, the college embarked upon an ambitious building program in the 1930s under the direction of the famed architect. His work transformed the campus and put the nearly bankrupt college on the map nationally. When Wright first visited the site in 1938, he was struck by the natural setting of groves of orange trees on a bluff above a large lake. At the time the college was housed in a clutch of 1920s era traditional red brick buildings that occupied only a small portion of the acreage available. Wright subsequently designed a grand 18-unit “Child of the Sun” campus, where buildings would emerge from the Florida sand into the light, an organic concept (click any image to enlarge).


Named for Lucius Pond Ordway, president of 3M Company, the Ordway Arts Building (photo above and below) was initially conceived as a cafeteria and dining hall, before its use evolved into an industrial arts center. Architecturally, the building is evocative of Wright’s Taliesin West (Arizona), which had been completed just a few years before.


The buildings are especially suited to the landscape and are connected by a 1.5 mile long series of covered concrete walkways that Wright called “esplanades,” in which thin cantilevered flat roofs, trimmed with embossed copper, span thick concrete supports, providing much needed protection from the Florida sun. These esplanades, originally built without expansion joints, were difficult to maintain and had fallen into disrepair. The college has just completed a top to bottom restoration of these unique structures that link most of the campus buildings, correcting design and construction deficiencies along the way. They have been returned to their original sandy beige color.


Another architectural giant, Gene Leedy of Winter Haven, a leading member of the Sarasota School of Modernists, was working in Florida in the 1950s when Wright was still alive and presiding over his work at Florida Southern. He recalls Wright walking with a cane and broad hat under the controversial esplanades which critics attacked for insufficient head clearance. Says Leedy, “He raised his cane and tapped the roof and said, 'This is exactly the right height.'” Wright was a man of noticeably short stature.

Wright worked on the Florida Southern project during the last twenty years of his life, the same period in which he was engaged with the Guggenheim museum project in New York City. He charged the college $13,000 in architectural fees, plus his usual ten percent of construction costs. Spivey's charisma and charm were such that Wright agreed to allow the college to pay in installments, sending along money as it became available. The school often had a tough time scraping together the architectural fees and sometimes had to resort to creative measures, such as robbing the faculty fund of $250 to satisfy an obligation. Wright received substandard commissions, however, because most of the labor for the first four buildings was provided by students. In exchange for full room, board and tuition, the student workers attended classes 3 days a week, worked construction 3 days a week and then had Sundays off. When WWII came along, and male students were scarce, women who were enrolled at the college stepped in and continued construction under the same terms.

The landmark Pfeiffer Chapel was the first building erected on campus (completed 1941) and was built exclusively with unpaid student labor (photos above and below). Spivey pushed this project through so that he could have something to show prospective donors and subscribers. Generous contributor Annie Pfeiffer, widow of the founder of Pfeiffer Chemical Company, was a bit taken aback by the avant-garde architecture of the chapel which bears her name. During her speech delivered at the opening, she said, "They tell me it is complete," a reference to the unfinished look of the metal grid that sits atop the tower. In 1941 Pfeiffer was awarded an honorary doctorate for her generosity. She even donated the pipe organ, manufactured by the Reuter company in Kansas, that stood in the balcony from the 1940s until the late 1970s.


The photo above shows the angled seating (not original) and rear cantilevered balcony. Below is a photo of the embossed Aztec inspired concrete screen that shields the pipe organ and choir, which are placed in a balcony above the chapel's pulpit.


Archive photos show Wright speaking in this room from a pulpit of his own design (since removed), and indicate that the original furnishings included modular angled leather-upholstered bench seats with plank wood backs. The floors and steps were Wright's favorite red-painted concrete, and the exterior doors were of wood, since replaced by commercial metal ones. These changes, along with air conditioning and carpeting, were made when the chapel was less than 20 years old.

The Pfeiffer Chapel is the only Wright building on campus of any height; all the rest are uniformly low slung. In many ways the exterior of this structure echoes his landmark Pennsylvania private residence, Falling Water. Wright designed one-off sand colored molded concrete blocks for the lower exterior surfaces of the Pfeiffer chapel. Each one had to be crafted by hand, and many of them contained recessed square pieces of stained glass.


Note: Florida Southern still owns the original molds for these unique building blocks. The architects of the new McKay building that houses the Wright archives borrowed two of them to craft identical new ones for use in their 2009 project, which sits beside an original Wright campus building, thus affording a transition relating to the historic cluster of land-marked structures.

A smaller chapel (below) displays a distinctly horizontal profile that suggests forward motion. It is named after William Danforth, the founder of Ralston-Purina. Happily the interior contains the original pews and chancel furnishings, all designed by Wright and constructed by students, and houses a floor to ceiling wall of Wright-designed leaded glass.


Student laborers prepared a mixture of concrete, sand and ground up coquina shells to pour into wooden molds to form each of the blocks, which served as both interior and exterior finished surfaces of the structures for which they were specified. Inspired by Mayan graphic designs, they were stacked like children's building blocks, secured by thin iron rods. Because the buildings were not air conditioned, these porous blocks promoted mold growth and, lacking a vapor shield, absorbed rain water, which eventually caused rusting and swelling of the vertical iron rods that ran through the center of them. As these buildings are restored, such deficiencies are being corrected. While none of Wright's buildings is easy to maintain, these blocks (fine for use in projects in the arid southwest) became a maintenance headache in Florida's rainy, humid climate.




The last structure to be built was completed in 1958, a year before Wright’s death. However, many of the campus buildings of Wright’s master plan were never realized. Drawings exist for six projects that were never undertaken; many were abandoned for lack of funds, and the retirement of Spivey (1957) and death of Wright in 1959 signaled the end of a symbiotic relationship between two men of genius. Those who have seen sketches of the unbuilt designs says that a planned music building is especially noteworthy.

In another instance, plans for a building that would hold an art gallery, studio workspace and small recital auditoriums met with criticism from the donor. The plans, requested by the college in 1942, were submitted for approval in 1944. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, who had studied music at Florida Southern in the 1920s, offered to fund the construction of a new arts building on campus. But she disapproved of Wright's design, and demanded that changes be made. Wright refused, and the project was abandoned.

Below is Wright's master plan for Florida Southern College (click to enlarge). Note that he left the groves of orange trees largely intact. The ampitheater on the right of the drawing near the lake shore was never built.


A large circular water dome was an original Wright designed feature (lower left in master plan illustration). However, when it was constructed in the 1940s, sufficient water pressure and jets powerful enough to shoot a blast of water 45 feet into the air did not exist. Nearly 70 years after Wright first designed this architectural folly, the water dome was re-engineered (2007) so that 75 water jets are able to span the entire 160- foot diameter of the fountain. Today's visitors can view Wright's creation as it was originally meant to be enjoyed. Computers control the various combinations of underwater lights and the intensity of the streams of water.


Preservation and restoration projects are ongoing. Florida Southern College’s collection of Wright buildings was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and the college has begun a $50 million restoration project targeting the original Wright structures. Current campus restoration work includes Wright's only planetarium (in the Polk Science building, below) and theatre-in-the-round (in the Ordway Arts building).


Many have compared the importance of Wright’s work at Florida Southern College to that of Thomas Jefferson’s designs for the University of Virginia. The archive photos below show Wright at work in his on-sight office in the 1940s and surveying construction progress with college president Spivey, who made the initial contact with the famed architect a decade earlier by sending him a telegraph.



Interiors of the Wright campus buildings are distinguished by shallow steps (4.5" risers), painted concrete surfaces, high clerestory windows and thin vertical iron screens painted brick red (click photos to enlarge).












Wright did not take into account the unique climate of central Florida’s citrus belt, which was hurricane prone, and the day-to-day heat and humidity took their toll on these buildings. Pfeiffer Chapel’s wrought-iron grid at the top of the tower was originally designed to house hanging plants, but no watering system was incorporated into the plans; consequently, everything planted soon perished. Tragically, just three years after completion, the Pfeiffer Chapel suffered serious hurricane damage. The immense skylights and iron grid atop the tower were heavily damaged, and water damaged both the interior and exterior. Under Wright’s supervision, the rebuilt portions were altered to withstand severe weather. Most of the “tapestry” or “textile” building blocks (each one painstakingly crafted by hand) placed near the base of the tower were covered with stucco to make them more water resistant (see photo from 1941, below).


Architectural distinction at Florida Southern continues to this day. Famed architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, has designed several new structures, including two dormitories and a recently completed humanities building. Nicholas Hall, a lakefront dormitory facility, echoes the ship’s prow angles of Pfeiffer Chapel and incorporates Wright’s signature cantilevered eaves and brick red trim.


Straughn Trout Architects (Lakeland, FL) designed the new McKay Archives Center, which houses Frank Lloyd Wright documents, drawings, photographs, and other memorabilia from the architect's association with the college. The building, which was dedicated on February 20, 2009, pays homage to Wright’s original designs for the campus. Note the molded blocks at the base of the structure (replicated from the college's extant original Wright-era forms) and cantilevers at the top in the photo below. The long sandstone blocks used at the base of the building were manufactured using the original molds, which are still in possession of the college. This building recently won an AIA award.



A sundial designed by Wright still stands in its original position. The photos that follow illustrate various architectural details of these landmark status buildings.