Featured work
Residential
Avery Coonley
Arthur Heurtley
A. Goetsch & K. Winckler
Fallingwater House
Living room & bedrooms
Visitor information
George Barton House
I. N. Hagan House
John Storer
Frederick C. Robie
Taliesin West
Ward W. Willitts
Institutions
N/A
Towers
Price Tower
Commercial
Anderton Court Shop
Imperial Hotel & Annex
Museums
Guggenheim Museum
Places of worship
Annunciation Church
Beth Sholom Synagogue
Featured Books
Top 5 selling books
Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses
Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater: The House and Its History
Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece
Frank Lloyd Wright's
Taliesin and Taliesin West
Fallingwater books
Fallingwater Rising : Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told. When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul–“the smartest retailer in America”–and a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture. "Highly Recommended".
Fallingwater: A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House An engaging, intimate, sumptuous appreciation of Wright's 1936 house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Kaufmann is the distinguished architectural historian who trained with Wright and is the son of the clients for Fallingwater, the most famous modern house in America. He is able to explain the intentions of architect and client, and writes with both feeling and critical knowledge, having lived in and with the masterpiece all his life. The rich color photographs taken for this book are supported by views taken during construction, family photographs of the house in use, and excellent specially drawn plans of the house as built. "Highly Recommended".
Fallingwater : Frank Lloyd Wright's Romance with Nature - The photographs are the best part of this book. Since you will probably not be one of the 160,000 visitors who come in most years, these images are your way to know the home. Almost all are in color, and are nicely distributed throughout the four seasons. My only complaint is that the book's page size should have been larger to permit a stronger connection between the viewer and these remarkable scenes. If you are like me, you will hear the water as you commune with the images. Through the essay and quotes, Fallingwater curator and
administrator Lynda S. Waggoner does a marvelous job of using Fallingwater to also demonstrate the essential concepts of all Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture and interior design.
"Highly Recommended".
Fallingwater: The Model - Fallingwater is one of the great masterpieces of modern architecture. Its model, constructed by Paul Bonfilio in 1984, is a masterpiece of model making and a high point in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In discussing how the model was built, the design of the famous house itself is also analyzed, throwing new light on many intricacies of its complex construction. Anyone who ever found satisfaction in the minutely focused process of assembling a model car or airplane will be completely absorbed by Bonfilio's quest to reproduce with unstinting detail and realism the diverse textures of Wright's masterpiece, from the complex stonework of its inner and outer walls to the dazzling sheen of the waterfall over which the front of the structure so famously perches. "Highly Recommended".
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (Wright at a Glance Series) A small format that nonetheless captures a great spirit. Every page has beautiful, full-color photographs that illustrate the design and decoration of the house in its natural environment. There are also a few construction photos that show development stages. The book also includes several handy time-lines and bullet-point pages, including one of Wright's pre-Fallingwater history, and one highlighting the major aspects of the design considerations. Carla Lind, the author of this text, is also the author of 'The Wright Style' and 'Lost Wright'. She has worked to preserve Wright buildings for several decades, and worked in various foundations and organizations dedicated to maintaining Wright's designs and structures. "Highly Recommended".
Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater The: The House and It's History - Latest new edition of a fine account of Wright's most famous house. The book contains a wealth of maps, letters, summaries of interviews with those who worked on the project, drawings, plans, and photographs of the work in progress in black and white. This detail brings the challenges to life in a very real way.. A fine production at a minimal price. The fascinating part of this book that Fallingwater's final effects are the opposite of its creation. The home seems to float above the water, like a mirage. It seems to exude tranquility and peace. Yet, its every stage of movement toward becoming a reality was like a Sumo wrestling match with enormous heavyweight egos and ideas colliding at high speed and with little regard for the impact on the other fellow.
"Highly Recommended".
Fallingwater location
Over 2 million people have visited Fallingwater since it opened to the
public in 1964. The house is located about 2 hours south east of
Pittsburg, halfway between the villages of Mill Run and Ohiopyle on PA
Route 381. (From Pittsburgh, take PA Turnpike Exit 9 south. Turn left
onto Route 31 East, then right onto Route 381 South. Fallingwater is
located midway between Mill Run and Ohiopyle. From Baltimore &
Washington, take I-68 Exit 14 onto Route 40 West to Farmington. Turn
right onto Route 381 North).
More
Kentuck Knob, Pennsylvania, 1937
Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright said of his house; Fallingwater is a great blessing - one of the great blessings to be experienced here on earth. I think nothing yet ever equaled the coordination, sympathetic expression of the great principle of repose where forest and stream and rock and all the elements of structure are combined so quietly that really you listen not to any noise whatsoever although the music of the stream is there. But you listen to Fallingwater the way you listen to the quiet of the country.
The key to the setting of the house is the waterfall over which it is built. The falls had been a focal point of the family's activities, and they had indicated the area around the falls as as the location for a home. They were unprepared for Wright's suggestion that the house rise over the waterfall, rather than face it. The architect's original scheme was adopted almost without change.
Completed with guest and service wing in 1939, Fallingwater
was constructed of sandstone quarried on the property and laid up by
local craftsmen. The stone serves to separate reinforced concrete
"trays," forming living and bedroom levels, dramatically
cantilevered over the stream.
Fallingwater was the weekend home of the Kaufmann family from 1937
until 1963, when the house, its contents, and grounds were presented
to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.
Fallingwater is the only remaining great Wright's house with its
setting, original furnishings, and art work intact.
"...having a good start, not only do I fully intend to be the
greatest architect who has yet lived, but fully intend to be the
greatest architect who will ever live. Yes, I intend to be the
greatest architect of all time." Frank Lloyd Wright
In 1986, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger
wrote: "This is is a house that summed up the 20th century and then
thrust it forward still further. Within this remarkable building
Frank Lloyd Wright recapitulated themes that had preoccupied him
since his career began a half century earlier, but he did not
reproduce them literally. Instead, he cast his net wider,
integrating European modernism and his own love of nature and of
structural daring, and pulled it all together into a brilliantly
resolved totality.
Fallingwater is Wright's greatest essay in horizontal space; it is his most powerful piece of structural drama; it is his most sublime integration of man and nature."
"....So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no ‘traditions’ essential to the great tradition. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but—instead—exalting the simple laws of common sense—or of super-sense if you prefer—determining form by way of the nature of materials...”
Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture, 1939
"..... Within less than a century the life of this city and of all the United States will be utterly transformed. I believe that a great deal of happiness is in store for the American of the twenty-first century.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1943
Fallingwater House floor plans
Fallingwater House details
Window detail & Tiffany light lamp - The use of windows in
the house to maintain the most of day light and night moon light to
carry the nature concept throughout the house. (A close up picture
of the famous TIFFANY light, estimated price at $300,000+ US).
Stairs railing types - Throughout the house, you can notice the work of detail on everything and on anything. Frank Lloyd Wright always kept his concept alive.
Library - One of two library rooms in the house.