Fallingwater

 
Announcement

Announcement

A Fallingwater Entrance :: Photographer Unknown

A Fallingwater Entrance :: Photographer Unknown

Interior – Postcard :: Photographer Unknown

Interior – Postcard :: Photographer Unknown

Exterior :: 2007

Exterior :: 2007

I have a suite of recurring dreams that occasionally show up together and the feeling they leave behind sometimes lasts the entire morning and if I’m lucky, lingers for an entire day. They uncover powerful fragments and hazy touchstones from my grade school and junior high years that merge with the smell of my dad’s architecture office, the landscapes surrounding my hometown, sage, the Missouri River and one of the last big hugs I shared with him. Those dreams and residual feelings are based in real history, but they’re filtered, reshaped and reconfigured into abstract versions of themselves as I grow older.

Occasionally I spent parts of some Saturdays at my dad’s first office. There were three main rooms with exceptionally high ceilings. The drafting studio had big, heavy, wood drafting tables lining one side of the room under large east facing windows, worn, noisy wooden floors like in a saloon from a western movie, and classic, minimal nineteen fifties and sixties office furniture in the understated reception area and conference room, and a couple of small storage spaces. The public bathrooms were out the front office door and down an expansive, dimly lit hall. It was a magical world where I spent hours looking through sets of technical drawings, blueprints, and original ink renderings on Mylar that I pulled from the endless banks of flat files. I leafed through the architecture magazines at the long wood conference table where I first learned about Richard Neutra, Oscar Niemeyer, Louis Khan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Back in the drafting room, sometimes Phil K., Bill K., or my dad, would ask me what I was looking at, we might talk about it if I had a question and then one of them would often wave me over to show me what was on their board. Eventually I’d settle in next to my dad’s drafting table and watch him work for as long as he could tolerate me.

Four decades later during a quiet Easter weekend with my folks, we talked about the idea of visiting Fallingwater someday. We’d originally discussed it a few years prior when my dad was healthier. We knew it wasn’t possible anymore. We’d missed our window, but we talked about it anyway. We’d had quite a few spontaneous architectural adventures together over the years, like visiting the University of Lethbridge that bridged a coulee by Arthur Erickson, the Kresge Auditorium and Chapel by Eero Saarinen and the Baker House by Alvar Aalto in Boston, the Portland Museum of Art by Henry Nicoles Cobb in Maine, the Chapel of St. Ignatius by Steven Holl in Seattle, and several buildings in Minnesota, including Saint John’s Abbey by Marcel Breuer. Most of these visits were spontaneous sidebars to trips already in progress.

Similarly, I found myself at Fallingwater the following summer after that weekend in April. It was a last-minute decision to visit once I realized how close I was while passing through Pennsylvania on my way back to Minnesota from Providence. I couldn’t miss the opportunity after years of talking about it, even if my folks weren’t with me. My first overnight stop was in a small town near Mill Run, Pennsylvania. I made a reservation to tour the house for the next afternoon and I was lucky because usually it takes weeks ahead of time to schedule a tour. After a late breakfast, my drive took me through the deep green countryside and the rolling farmland of the Appalachians, interwoven with oak forest, immaculate Dutch barns, cattle and hidden limestone ravines. Eventually I found myself in a medium sized parking lot surrounded by woods. After I parked, I didn’t see the house from the lot, you kind of sneak up on it and before I knew it, I was standing in front of a secondary door carved out of stone and glass, almost like it was a private entrance to a cave. Once in, the ceilings were surprisingly low, and the compression I felt was slowly released as the height grew slightly in the main living space. The ceiling heights don’t change radically anywhere though, they’re all low and horizontal and the spaces seemed to pull me sideways just like I imagined they might.

I paid for the basic guided tour which provides some history and allows you to explore independently afterwards. They also provide fancier tours that end with wine and dinner at sunset. After roaming through the interior for a while where I touched as many custom components as I could, like window hardware and built-in cabinetry, I stood in front of the fireplace for a long time, stunned at how part of the stone floor surrounding it was an actual rock formation from below that protrudes into the space. Eventually, I exited through some doors to one of the floating porches and sat on the perfectly designed rail that accommodates everyone’s height and everyone’s body type. It was wide enough to sit on and textured just enough to provide traction and confidence as you looked down over Bear Run and the green ravine below — feeling how this place steps down the slope which echoes what the falls do, and on its descending journey from miles upstream was visceral.

Afterwards, I walked the short trail to the overlook to experience the same view I’d first seen in my dad’s office decades earlier. After some other admirers and I took each other’s picture, I called my folks from that spot to let them know I’d finally made it for the three of us.

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"There in a beautiful forest was a solid, high rock ledge rising beside a waterfall, and the natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from that rock bank over the falling water..." Frank Lloyd Wright interview with Hugh Downs, 1954​

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Songs :: The Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov, July by Amy Petty, On The Nature of Daylight by Max Richter, I Contain Multitudes by Bob Dylan, Darn That Dream by Dexter Gordon, Another World by Joe Jackson, Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, Heroes by David Bowie and Sand by Phish

© C. Davidson