Fallingwater
By Edgar Kaufmann Jr.
Abbeville Press Inc., 190 pages, $55
Of all the architectural images seared into every American`s memory, one of the most instantly recollectable is that of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house cantilevered over a waterfall in a woodsy section of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Yet there is more to this geometrically and technically complex residence than a bubbling brook and Wright`s structural ingenuity. Kaufmann`s book, published 50 years after Fallingwater was built (for $145,000), is a visually sumptuous and textually comprehensive account of almost everything about the house that most of us might conceivably wish to know.
The author could hardly be better equipped to tell the story. He is the son of Edgar J. Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh department store president who with his wife commissioned the house as a rural getaway. The younger Kaufmann also studied under Wright before embarking on a lifelong architectural career of his own in teaching, writing and on the staff of New York`s Museum of Modern Art.
Without resorting to technical jargon, Kaufmann tells us about the conception of Wright`s Fallingwater scheme, the troubles accompanying construction, additions and modifications made over the years, how the house once survived a tornado and a rich assortment of other details.
It is perhaps unfair to call this a picture book, since that term suggests a spectacular but often slapdash approach applied to too many subjects, including architecture. Let us say that the book contains 200 photographs, half of them in color, and that they have been organized along with other illustrations and a text with great graphic acumen, sense of pace and surprise. Moving through this volume for the first time is like moving through Fallingwater itself: one senses a pleasurable intricacy along with a clear sense of order.
Yes, Kaufmann has included photographs taken from the favored position below the house, looking up at the falls–and even offers us pictures showing the falls before there was any house at all. But the variety of the other views is almost astounding, even when one considers the limitless interplay of shapes, colors, lights and shadows across both residence and terrain.
The book opens with a double-page aerial panorama of Fallingwater and several square miles of heavily forested land around it. From this macrocosmic view, the perspectives range all the way down to a detail of shelving in a bathroom linen closet.
In between, Little and Heinz have captured the beauty, tranquility and spatial interplays of the multilevel house–inside and out–as it appears day and night during every season of the year. The photos and text reveal and explain Fallingwater`s furniture, lighting, appointments and works of art as well as its purely architectural presence. Several drawings made specifically for the book are particularly helpful in understanding how Fallingwater`s spaces are organized.
Kaufmann`s concluding text sums up the magic of the place:
”Fallingwater thus reveals the astonishing vitality of Wright`s architecture, which he endows with riches like those of polyphonic music, stirring responses instinctual as well as rational and esthetic. Through this human wholeness the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright appears unique in the 20th Century.”(
