For the northeastern US folks and anyone willing to travel: the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH has not one but two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection[0]. I’ve seen the Zimmerman House a couple of times, and it hews pretty close to the familiar aesthetic of Fallingwater: warm tones, lovely space, furniture to match.
The Kalil House I got to see recently, it’s the newer acquisition. It’s a Usonian Automatic, meaning the owner was meant to buy the plans and the molds for the concrete blocks, and the build it themselves. Long story short: it didn’t go exactly as planned.
The house is fascinating though: much of it is a concrete gray rather than the warmer tones we usually associate wiry Wright’s work. It feels less tied to the place it’s built than either the Zimmerman House or Fallingwater. It feels much less starkly architectural, and more connected to the way regular people live, more attainable, insofar as you can use that word with Wright. They also both have ceilings that work with taller people. Fallingwater is downright claustrophobic in places.
Highly worth the trip if you’re in the area.
And if you’re in the area of Fallingwater, Kentucky Knob is basically right there. If you’ve travelled more than a few hours to see Fallingwater, you’d be nuts to miss it.
> And if you’re in the area of Fallingwater, Kentucky Knob is basically right there. If you’ve travelled more than a few hours to see Fallingwater, you’d be nuts to miss it.
My fiancee and I traveled from Seattle to see Fallingwater because I'm an architecture nerd. And we missed Kentuck (no y) Knob, but only because we decided instead to do Polymath Park (where you can stay overnight, though we didn't).
But that was her anniversary gift to me, we actually did an extremely enjoyable "sunset tour" which included sit down wine and charcuterie and apps on the balcony with only 10 of us in total there (funnily enough, literally every other couple/group there had at least one architect in it, except for us).
I love the bathtubs in the Kalil house; one of the things I guess you can do w/ a slab foundation (that I've never seen in a more modern slab house) is to sink the bathtub so that the rim of the tub is even with the floor. I guess it made the last owner of the house (Dr. Kalil's brother) able to live in it until he was 101.
You’re welcome! If you have an interest in furniture, the Currier has a great collection of NH made furniture as well and it’s consistently on display in the museum. I really do love that museum!
Wright designed a gas station, with a control tower office from which the manager can look down on the gas jockeys.[1] It looks like it belongs in Southern California, but it's in Minnesota.
His Marin Civic Center is nicely integrated with the terrain. Gattica, the movie, was filmed there. Like the gas station, it includes a non-functional pointy tower. Wright went through a pointy object period.[2]
Wright emphasized materials and surface treatments, to complement the plain lines of his buildings. That tended to run up costs. But if you use Wright's lines without the materials, you get brutalism.
Having visited multiple Wright buildings, I must say this: no photograph or video will EVER do it justice. The man was a master of light. Wright buildings MUST be visited in person to experience this. You will FEEL it.
Fallingwater is more than work of art, it is a religious experience. I visited it three times (each time my visit to Pittsburgh and the area surrounding the house was to specifically see it) and every damn time I stood weeping leaving the tour.
I need to visit it in person I guess. The photos always leave me feeling like I am looking at a very small conference center and the feel of it seems off to me for a house. I dont quite get the appeal of a lot of his work. It sometimes feel everyone has decided its incredible and it persists on its fame over substance (not uncommon with art, eg. The Mona Lisa was just a small painting on a wall with a lot of arguably better paintings for a long time before we all decided to obsess over it)
I can see that. In photos it feels like a very small corporate retreat. And there are definitely design decisions we've evolved from. But when you are inside, it feels warm, open, airy. And so many things are so well thought out to make them invisible when they should be, and draw attention. I would have enjoyed living in, or vacationing there.
I love architecture and falling water disappointed me.
It was in terrible shape firstly. The new round of fixes has just been completed so it would be good to see it again before it resumes crumbling (those cantilevers have been drooping from day 1 and were 4 inches off by 1955, when I saw it there were seismic sensors all over).
Secondly as a tall person, 6’4”, the ceiling heights are just uncomfortable. Wright sized things for himself and he was a little man. For me I had the feeling I needed to duck constantly and the sense of unease destroys the other positive aspects of the house. A real shame.
I can only describe it being overcome with a sense of love and harmony. I was giggling ear-to-ear the whole time I was there.
Great works of art are meant to be religious experiences. At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right. The emphasis on integrating natural materials makes it feel one with nature. Frank Lloyd wright cared a lot about sight lines, which makes every space easy on the eyes.
I've had similar experiences in great Basilicas[0] such as Sagrada Familia[1]. Smaller objects have evoked similar feelings too. Be that cars (The Ferrari Roma[2] or Alfa 33 Stadale[3]) or intricate jewelery (Earrings [4] or watches [5]). Great beauty feels divine, and Fallingwater is one such example.
> At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right.
Even the little details, like the vents/intakes for the HVAC being built into the back of surfaces/built-ins, so they're invisible unless you peer over.
I studied graduate school in a building designed by William B. Fyfe, one of Wright's Praire School first apprentices. It was beautiful and serene. The same city where my school is located has a house designed by Wright himself in a special neighborhood known as Heritage Hill, also a great example of Wright's style.
I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.
If you ever visit Taliesin in Wisconsin (which has a pretty bland), you should also visit the nearby House on the Rock which is a fascinating and very weird collection of esoteric and kitschy items.
The contrast in attitudes and aesthetics between the two is incredibly stark, and it's very interesting to see the reactions of visitors to each location.
Remember that Wright told HotR owner/designer Alex Jordon that he wouldn't hire him to design a chicken coop.
You are correct; both should be visited. However, get ready for monotony at HotR. Room after room after room of Jordan's curiosity collection.
The Tallesin 1 hour or so tour is definitely interesting to look at from a historical and design perspective, but definitely "art project" not "good engineering" given the poorly supported balconies, the continually leaky roof, and if you're over 6 feet tall you might hit your head in places.
I always assumed that part of what made "the great architects" great was their skill in combining lofty visions with practical engineering, making houses that were at once artistic statements and durable, comfortable living spaces... utilizing the strengths of different materials, built on sound engineering principles and so on.
But these architects seem to be more interested in the experience you get when _visiting_ the house in its environment, rather than the experience of actually living in it, and these houses are famously often impractical, hard to maintain, and in need of constant repair. That makes them less interesting to me.
That's just architects in a nutshell, and stems from the division of labor. They're primarily tasked with designing a grand vision, and because of that, aesthetics and features naturally end up being primary concerns they deal with (ie the "what" and "why"). Whereas engineers are tasked more about figuring out the details, the how, and ensuring that vision can actually be built, so naturally... practicality ends up being a primary concern of theirs, since they tend to have to deal with it more.
That's not to say that architects don't or can't make practicality their primary concern, just that things naturally slant this way since this is typically how labor is divided.
I live in the rainy Pacific Northwest. I specified a lot of things about it that would keep it dry. The general contractor thought it was a waste of money, but I said it's my money and that's what I want to spend it on. There were still mistakes, but it can be managed.
After 25 years, it has proven its worth.
I've watched my neighborhood evolve, with older homes regularly getting dozed and new ones put up. After two or three years I see the water damage on them. Sheesh!
Probably the most consequential feature is having large eaves, which keeps the windows and siding dry. Lots of modern houses around here have no eaves at all!!
The lack of eaves blows my mind, also in the PNW. My home, and this little subdivision (really just a loop of ~50 homes) was all early 80s. I was bummed because the lot next to me was empty (and I'm on the narrow part of the loop so it's just inner corner, me, inner corner), due to a fire shortly after construction, and it came up for sale just after I bought here. But a developer bought it up, and built one of those new houses, no eaves, etc., about three years ago. And not a month or two goes by without (still, 3y later) some subcontractor there doing work. They've already had foundation repairs, driveway partly replaced, dry wall work, plumbing, electric and flooring. Oof.
I see multimillion dollar homes being constructed with no eaves and flat roofs, and wood siding. Madness!
The eaves also have gutters (missing on many homes) which pipe the water away from the foundation. The driveway and deck also slope (ever so slightly) The away from the house. The garage floor also has a slight slope to it, which keeps the rain out of it.
I wish people talked more about the building's shortcomings: moisture, mold, mildew, etc. It's a good architectural demonstration, but not good architecture --- just like how an overengineered code might be interesting, but not practical.
Well TFA did sort of mention it, it said it was a work of art, not a house to live in. Lloyd Wright designed fabulous-looking buildings but also many that were eminently impractical, either because they started falling apart shortly after they were built and/or because they had so many problems that they were unfit for habitation.
Leaks are a given in any Wright house. Indeed, the architect has been notorious not only for his leaks but for his flippant dismissals of client complaints. He reportedly asserted that, “If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.” His stock response to clients who complained of leaking roofs was, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.”
Wright’s late-in-life triumph, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, celebrated by the AIA poll as “the best all-time work of American architecture,” lives up to its name with a plague of leaks; they have marred the windows and stone walls and deteriorated the structural concrete. To its original owner, Fallingwater was known as “Rising Mildew,” a “seven-bucket building.” It is indeed a gorgeous and influential house, but unlivable. For its leaks there can be no excuse.
I wanted to find a quote of my favorite story about Frank Lloyd Wright, although not verifiable it fits well with what we know of his character:
> Like the story of the client calling Wright during a rainstorm, saying water was dripping on his head, and what should he do, “Move your chair,” says Wright to Mr. Whateverclient depending on the source.
I visited Falling Water as a kid, so I probably had a limited ability to appreciate it. But I do remember finding it rather cold and uncomfortable, interesting with the waterfall flowing underneath but not really as somewhere I’d want to live.
When someone mentioned that these were available for download, I printed them in high res tabloid, and had them enlarged 4x and put the best two on my wall.
It literally entered my though my pores... I became a better designer, a better illustrator, a better carpenter, a much better visualizer.
I used to live in San Rafael, and San Anselmo, a stones throw away from the Marin Civic Center, and two of his houses... I studied and sketched the Civic Center from many angles, and saw 'Gattica.'
I really disagree with this and think this sentiment lies at the heart of a lot of our current architectural and housing issues.
Yes, houses should be beautiful and inspiring. However, they should not be “art” they should not be trying to say something. They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place. Every traditional form in a region is there because of tradeoffs of housing design in the area. Trying to build modern blocky houses and violating these tradeoffs with tech and materials always feels bad. Theres a reason New England farm houses are the way they are and so sought after.
Houses as sculpture made by architects trying to impress other architects results in a disjoint aesthetic. Nobody wants to visit a hodge podge of houses in the style of whatever was in vogue when they were last remodeled. See all the blocky and angular, white, black with some wood tones built/remodel in the past 10 years that already look dated. They ruin beautiful traditional neighborhoods.
Buildings as art/fashion is inherently unsustainable as they have to be bulldozed whenever tastes change.
> They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place.
I take it you are not familiar with FLW's philosophy? He believed buildings should mirror their environment using local materials and forms that fit into the landscape. He definitely wasn't in favor of the houses you seem to be describing, which don't fit their environment or local nature. That doesn't mean his buildings can't be considered beautiful or art. Art can fit into and mirror its environment.
A house can be aesthetically appealing and matched to its surroundings without being leaky or damp. A house that is ugly and out of place can also be leaky and damp (they often are because those architects often are also prioritizing form over function, but an ugly form instead of an appealing form).
Yes, and those houses are by definition the traditional architectural vernacular of the area. Traditional architecture in each area evolves from survivor bias and navigating delicate trade-offs in the climate they are placed over long time frames.
I'm sad that we're coming up towards 100 years on from Fallingwater being built, and yet the American preference for new houses of a similar price (after inflation) is the sort of awful stuff that shows up on mcmansionhell.com.
The kind of bespoke construction in Wright's buildings couldn't be built today at an order of magnitude higher price, even considering inflation. A side effect of mass produced standard construction materials has been custom ones becoming astronomically expensive due to the skilled labor to build them having been replaced with mass production.
I suspect projects like fallingwater have siting considerations that wouldn't allow it to be built at all anywhere in the US... isn't it built basically on top of a WOTUS?
It'd be in litigation forever; which is why nobody with the means would try to build something like that today. Even if they could afford the construction, they can't afford the time in court.
Larry Ellison owns a replica Japanese daimyo mansion in Woodside, two mansions on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, and 98% of the island of Lanai...but none of those structures there are (AFAIK) atop a permanent watercourse.
People want square footage and comfort, not design. Frank Lloyd Wright homes look stunning in an Architectural Digest spread, but living in them is not really up to par for modern standards.
That hous is still extremely small for what most people in the US would put in a full sized suburban lot: Nowadays a median build is 2300 square feet (213 square meters). It makes that 1600 square feet look very small. The hallways, the large space dedicated to a great room and just 2 bedrooms won't help.
You will find new houses that small, but typically when it's extremely high value land, so typically infill. And then chances are it's a multi story house that fits the lot to the limit.
1600 square for two bed/two bath will feel large if well designed; many modern houses are not well designed for their size - usually one version of a given plan is the "optimal/designed" version, and you can keep adding things that make it frankly ridiculous, weird winding hallways, small rooms, etc.
That said, the kit pictured will, if constructed, will have amenities & physical qualities that the similarly sized original Jacobs house has had to have retrofitted at great cost.
The main house uses 9,300 square feet of which 4,400 is outdoor terraces, while the guest house totals 4,990 square feet of which 1,950 square feet is outdoor terraces.
>The main house uses 9,300 square feet of which 4,400 is outdoor terraces, while the guest house totals 4,990 square feet of which 1,950 square feet is outdoor terraces.
Falling Water is his masterpiece. Most client homes were around 1,500sqft.
The instinct to preserve and honor Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, where I live, has basically frozen the place in amber, which isn't something Wright would have wanted, and also worked synergistically with exclusive zoning to keep the Village ultra-expensive (it directly abuts the Austin neighborhood in Chicago, which is low-middle income) and white (unlike Austin, which is 90+% Black).
No idea what Wright would have thought about racial housing segregation, but it was certainly a knock-on effect of the preservationist cult he accidentally created.
Anyone downvoting you clearly doesn’t watch Arvin Haddads YouTube channel because it really is revolting how much subpar trash sells for $50 million+. Even at the highest end of the housing market you see a consistent demand for absolute garbage that is about as close to art as a pile of rancid shit.
I remember rumors going around Phoenix of someone trying to demolish the David and Gladys Wright House in 2011. Someone got a great deal on it around that time, $1m. It sold with a 7-10x return a a few years later.
Viewed in isolation it is a bit underwhelming, but if you see it in landscape it has a charm. I think a copper roof on both structures would make it pop.
About a decade ago, I got to spend a week at a residency centered on immersion and design, provided by the Fallingwater Institute. My group of about 12 people stayed at High Meadow, which is an educational complex the Institute operates and is also an award winning piece of architecture. My wife was insanely jealous. Visiting FLW works has been a minor travel hobby for us over the years.
Being only a short walk from Fallingwater, we spent some time there every day, including one day when we had the whole house to ourselves and had dinner on the terrace. We each tried to gain a sense of what it was like to live there, rather than just be a museum tourist. A couple of folks played card games sitting at the kitchen table all night. One person curled up with a book in one of the tall, narrow bay windows. I laid out on the floor of the living room and stared at the ceiling, something I do at home sometimes. I thought laying on the floor would give me a feeling of ownership, of doing whatever I wanted with a place, because you couldn't do that as a regular tourist.
It... kinda worked. Not really. It was too surreal. I don't know if I'd ever be able to feel like Fallingwater was home.
My wife and kids and I visited Taliesin West last summer as part of a Grand Canyon trip. I had much the same feeling there, while listening to the tour talk about FLW and his apprentices living there, that I couldn't imagine it as a real living space. Also, I started getting real cultish vibes from the stories of some of the stuff the apprentices went through. Of course, Scottsdale, AZ wasn't any cooler back then than it is today and they built the place themselves, by hand, without any air conditioning. More than one apprentice's marriage ended in divorce over the place because their wives couldn't stand living in tents in the desert without power and running water during the construction years. I was also struck by how I would not expect anyone to even be allowed to bring a spouse on any similar apprenticeship in the modern day, but that's a different issue.
Between all of those experiences and also hearing the stories of how much the wives of FLW's clients would fight with him over kitchens, my own career as a consultant, not being able to imagine telling a client they couldn't have the kitchen they want, and other issues, in recent times I've lost some respect for FLW.
I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society. For one thing, most people don't even know Usonian is a word, as evidenced when I see them try to come up with a word for a North American who isn't Canadian or Mexican (USian has to win a prize for finding an even more awkward term than Usonian).
That leaves all of his contract work, which was frequently deeply flawed in construction. Some of that defectiveness was due to him experimenting with new construction techniques that eventually got perfected and are no longer so flawed, but there are still many core issues. I would come home from visiting his works and I would wrack my brain over how to employ his ideas of incorporating nature into living spaces before I finally remembered I live in Virginia: nature here is primarily composed of mosquitoes a this breathable water we call "air".
His designs are all-or-nothing, it must be employed as a unified whole. It doesn't look right if it's a single piece of furniture or a window treatment in an otherwise normal house. Putting a 50" flat screen in Fallingwater would ruin the place. Got walls at 90 degree angles to each other? Sorry about your luck! It ends up looking like wearing cargo shorts and a Fedora. If you have a regular ass house like every other "impoverished" slob with a quarter acre lot in suburbia, FLW-style design does not work. I say "impoverished" because FLW-style designs are exclusively the purvue of the ultra rich. To have a house that coordinated, that put together, takes "I make people work overtime for me and I don't even know their names" kind of money.
In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962. Less than a decade before that, Kentuck Knob had been completed for about $96,000. My house may not be as pretty, but at least the roof doesn't leak and the stove can fit a cake.
> I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society.
The word Usonain has vanished, but the style's influence has not.
> In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962.
The Jacobs First House [1] in Madison, WI was the first Usonian house; it is credited with many features that became common in the mid-century ranches of the 50's and 60's. Stewart Hicks has a good deep dive [2] into Wright's influence on 20th century architecture.
I don't know, man. I mean, I know it's the standard Architecture School answer that Wright was influential. But I feel like that can only be said if you focus on superficial, outward appearance and completely ignore his design philosophy, why he designed the way he did.
The materials he chose were meant to make home ownership accessible to the common man. Your own link to the Jacob's House talks about Mr. Jacobs being "a young newspaper man". The $5000 cost in 1935 is like $120k today. Yeah, if 1500sqft houses cost $120k today, I could believe a journalist just starting out on their career could afford the mortgage on it.
Are houses L-shaped now? Yeah, sure. Are they accessible to the common person? Not at all. People are talking the Little Golden Book version of Wright's philosophy.
Also, my house is not L-shaped. Jacobs got 25% more house for 1/6th the inflation adjusted price. He got a study and a shop; I'm performing my own manual labor in my back yard to build a gazebo that I hope will work as a shop for me. As a newspaper hack with a likely-unemployed wife he got a house near a lake. My electrical engineer with a master's degree wife working at a major military research institution and I got a drainage ditch that kinda looks like a stream when it rains really hard. And we're in our 40s. Everyone massively missed Wright's point.
For the northeastern US folks and anyone willing to travel: the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH has not one but two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection[0]. I’ve seen the Zimmerman House a couple of times, and it hews pretty close to the familiar aesthetic of Fallingwater: warm tones, lovely space, furniture to match.
The Kalil House I got to see recently, it’s the newer acquisition. It’s a Usonian Automatic, meaning the owner was meant to buy the plans and the molds for the concrete blocks, and the build it themselves. Long story short: it didn’t go exactly as planned.
The house is fascinating though: much of it is a concrete gray rather than the warmer tones we usually associate wiry Wright’s work. It feels less tied to the place it’s built than either the Zimmerman House or Fallingwater. It feels much less starkly architectural, and more connected to the way regular people live, more attainable, insofar as you can use that word with Wright. They also both have ceilings that work with taller people. Fallingwater is downright claustrophobic in places.
Highly worth the trip if you’re in the area.
And if you’re in the area of Fallingwater, Kentucky Knob is basically right there. If you’ve travelled more than a few hours to see Fallingwater, you’d be nuts to miss it.
[0] https://www.currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright
> And if you’re in the area of Fallingwater, Kentucky Knob is basically right there. If you’ve travelled more than a few hours to see Fallingwater, you’d be nuts to miss it.
My fiancee and I traveled from Seattle to see Fallingwater because I'm an architecture nerd. And we missed Kentuck (no y) Knob, but only because we decided instead to do Polymath Park (where you can stay overnight, though we didn't).
But that was her anniversary gift to me, we actually did an extremely enjoyable "sunset tour" which included sit down wine and charcuterie and apps on the balcony with only 10 of us in total there (funnily enough, literally every other couple/group there had at least one architect in it, except for us).
> Kentuck (no y) Knob
Damn you, autocorrect :-( Thanks.
The sunset charcuterie sounds lovely. Thank you for the tip! I’ll look into it the next time I’m that far west.
I love the bathtubs in the Kalil house; one of the things I guess you can do w/ a slab foundation (that I've never seen in a more modern slab house) is to sink the bathtub so that the rim of the tub is even with the floor. I guess it made the last owner of the house (Dr. Kalil's brother) able to live in it until he was 101.
As someone 15 min south of Manchester, thank you. Will check these out!
You’re welcome! If you have an interest in furniture, the Currier has a great collection of NH made furniture as well and it’s consistently on display in the museum. I really do love that museum!
Wright designed a gas station, with a control tower office from which the manager can look down on the gas jockeys.[1] It looks like it belongs in Southern California, but it's in Minnesota.
His Marin Civic Center is nicely integrated with the terrain. Gattica, the movie, was filmed there. Like the gas station, it includes a non-functional pointy tower. Wright went through a pointy object period.[2]
Wright emphasized materials and surface treatments, to complement the plain lines of his buildings. That tended to run up costs. But if you use Wright's lines without the materials, you get brutalism.
[1] http://www.flwright.us/FLW414.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_County_Civic_Center
Im drinking my morning coffee from my souvenir mug as I read this… https://imgur.com/a/c0USqaA
Having visited multiple Wright buildings, I must say this: no photograph or video will EVER do it justice. The man was a master of light. Wright buildings MUST be visited in person to experience this. You will FEEL it.
Fallingwater is more than work of art, it is a religious experience. I visited it three times (each time my visit to Pittsburgh and the area surrounding the house was to specifically see it) and every damn time I stood weeping leaving the tour.
I need to visit it in person I guess. The photos always leave me feeling like I am looking at a very small conference center and the feel of it seems off to me for a house. I dont quite get the appeal of a lot of his work. It sometimes feel everyone has decided its incredible and it persists on its fame over substance (not uncommon with art, eg. The Mona Lisa was just a small painting on a wall with a lot of arguably better paintings for a long time before we all decided to obsess over it)
I can see that. In photos it feels like a very small corporate retreat. And there are definitely design decisions we've evolved from. But when you are inside, it feels warm, open, airy. And so many things are so well thought out to make them invisible when they should be, and draw attention. I would have enjoyed living in, or vacationing there.
I love architecture and falling water disappointed me.
It was in terrible shape firstly. The new round of fixes has just been completed so it would be good to see it again before it resumes crumbling (those cantilevers have been drooping from day 1 and were 4 inches off by 1955, when I saw it there were seismic sensors all over).
Secondly as a tall person, 6’4”, the ceiling heights are just uncomfortable. Wright sized things for himself and he was a little man. For me I had the feeling I needed to duck constantly and the sense of unease destroys the other positive aspects of the house. A real shame.
Can you describe why?
I can only describe it being overcome with a sense of love and harmony. I was giggling ear-to-ear the whole time I was there.
Great works of art are meant to be religious experiences. At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right. The emphasis on integrating natural materials makes it feel one with nature. Frank Lloyd wright cared a lot about sight lines, which makes every space easy on the eyes.
I've had similar experiences in great Basilicas[0] such as Sagrada Familia[1]. Smaller objects have evoked similar feelings too. Be that cars (The Ferrari Roma[2] or Alfa 33 Stadale[3]) or intricate jewelery (Earrings [4] or watches [5]). Great beauty feels divine, and Fallingwater is one such example.
[0] Special shout-out to the new Romanesque basilica in DC - https://maps.app.goo.gl/8r59NzbgVnqKYAv2A
[1] https://thebarcelonafeeling.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/S...
[2] https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/5f96f18f0a2396c...
[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Alfa_Rom...
[4] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39320
[5] https://www.watchclub.com/upload/watches/gallery_big/watch-c...
> At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right.
Even the little details, like the vents/intakes for the HVAC being built into the back of surfaces/built-ins, so they're invisible unless you peer over.
I studied graduate school in a building designed by William B. Fyfe, one of Wright's Praire School first apprentices. It was beautiful and serene. The same city where my school is located has a house designed by Wright himself in a special neighborhood known as Heritage Hill, also a great example of Wright's style.
I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.
If you ever visit Taliesin in Wisconsin (which has a pretty bland), you should also visit the nearby House on the Rock which is a fascinating and very weird collection of esoteric and kitschy items.
The contrast in attitudes and aesthetics between the two is incredibly stark, and it's very interesting to see the reactions of visitors to each location.
Remember that Wright told HotR owner/designer Alex Jordon that he wouldn't hire him to design a chicken coop. You are correct; both should be visited. However, get ready for monotony at HotR. Room after room after room of Jordan's curiosity collection.
This is, by far, one of the weirdest places I've ever visited. Tonal whiplash is an understatement.
-> which [is?] pretty bland
That's a shame to hear, as Taliesin West in Arizona is very fascinating and interesting, but rather poorly curated and run.
My bad on the typo.
The Tallesin 1 hour or so tour is definitely interesting to look at from a historical and design perspective, but definitely "art project" not "good engineering" given the poorly supported balconies, the continually leaky roof, and if you're over 6 feet tall you might hit your head in places.
If you'd like, you can still speak to the last living client (as of last year) of FLW; still living in the house the architect designed for him:
https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/reisley-wright-last-c...
Fallingwater has just gone through a series of renovations and all areas are now accessible. If you haven't seen it yet, now is a great time.
I wouldn't want to live in it, though, because everything would be damp.
I always assumed that part of what made "the great architects" great was their skill in combining lofty visions with practical engineering, making houses that were at once artistic statements and durable, comfortable living spaces... utilizing the strengths of different materials, built on sound engineering principles and so on.
But these architects seem to be more interested in the experience you get when _visiting_ the house in its environment, rather than the experience of actually living in it, and these houses are famously often impractical, hard to maintain, and in need of constant repair. That makes them less interesting to me.
That's just architects in a nutshell, and stems from the division of labor. They're primarily tasked with designing a grand vision, and because of that, aesthetics and features naturally end up being primary concerns they deal with (ie the "what" and "why"). Whereas engineers are tasked more about figuring out the details, the how, and ensuring that vision can actually be built, so naturally... practicality ends up being a primary concern of theirs, since they tend to have to deal with it more.
That's not to say that architects don't or can't make practicality their primary concern, just that things naturally slant this way since this is typically how labor is divided.
I live in the rainy Pacific Northwest. I specified a lot of things about it that would keep it dry. The general contractor thought it was a waste of money, but I said it's my money and that's what I want to spend it on. There were still mistakes, but it can be managed.
After 25 years, it has proven its worth.
I've watched my neighborhood evolve, with older homes regularly getting dozed and new ones put up. After two or three years I see the water damage on them. Sheesh!
Probably the most consequential feature is having large eaves, which keeps the windows and siding dry. Lots of modern houses around here have no eaves at all!!
The lack of eaves blows my mind, also in the PNW. My home, and this little subdivision (really just a loop of ~50 homes) was all early 80s. I was bummed because the lot next to me was empty (and I'm on the narrow part of the loop so it's just inner corner, me, inner corner), due to a fire shortly after construction, and it came up for sale just after I bought here. But a developer bought it up, and built one of those new houses, no eaves, etc., about three years ago. And not a month or two goes by without (still, 3y later) some subcontractor there doing work. They've already had foundation repairs, driveway partly replaced, dry wall work, plumbing, electric and flooring. Oof.
I see multimillion dollar homes being constructed with no eaves and flat roofs, and wood siding. Madness!
The eaves also have gutters (missing on many homes) which pipe the water away from the foundation. The driveway and deck also slope (ever so slightly) The away from the house. The garage floor also has a slight slope to it, which keeps the rain out of it.
Lots of little details!
I wish people talked more about the building's shortcomings: moisture, mold, mildew, etc. It's a good architectural demonstration, but not good architecture --- just like how an overengineered code might be interesting, but not practical.
The curse of the roof top garden, looks great but weighs a tonne when the soil is dump and often leaks.
Well TFA did sort of mention it, it said it was a work of art, not a house to live in. Lloyd Wright designed fabulous-looking buildings but also many that were eminently impractical, either because they started falling apart shortly after they were built and/or because they had so many problems that they were unfit for habitation.
Leaks are a given in any Wright house. Indeed, the architect has been notorious not only for his leaks but for his flippant dismissals of client complaints. He reportedly asserted that, “If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.” His stock response to clients who complained of leaking roofs was, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.”
Wright’s late-in-life triumph, Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, celebrated by the AIA poll as “the best all-time work of American architecture,” lives up to its name with a plague of leaks; they have marred the windows and stone walls and deteriorated the structural concrete. To its original owner, Fallingwater was known as “Rising Mildew,” a “seven-bucket building.” It is indeed a gorgeous and influential house, but unlivable. For its leaks there can be no excuse.
—Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn
I wanted to find a quote of my favorite story about Frank Lloyd Wright, although not verifiable it fits well with what we know of his character:
> Like the story of the client calling Wright during a rainstorm, saying water was dripping on his head, and what should he do, “Move your chair,” says Wright to Mr. Whateverclient depending on the source.
https://franklloydwright.org/willey-house-stories-part-10-lo...
I'm not in the least surprised!
I visited Falling Water as a kid, so I probably had a limited ability to appreciate it. But I do remember finding it rather cold and uncomfortable, interesting with the waterfall flowing underneath but not really as somewhere I’d want to live.
When someone mentioned that these were available for download, I printed them in high res tabloid, and had them enlarged 4x and put the best two on my wall.
It literally entered my though my pores... I became a better designer, a better illustrator, a better carpenter, a much better visualizer.
I used to live in San Rafael, and San Anselmo, a stones throw away from the Marin Civic Center, and two of his houses... I studied and sketched the Civic Center from many angles, and saw 'Gattica.'
Where are you finding the downloads?
> “The house is a work of art”
I really disagree with this and think this sentiment lies at the heart of a lot of our current architectural and housing issues.
Yes, houses should be beautiful and inspiring. However, they should not be “art” they should not be trying to say something. They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place. Every traditional form in a region is there because of tradeoffs of housing design in the area. Trying to build modern blocky houses and violating these tradeoffs with tech and materials always feels bad. Theres a reason New England farm houses are the way they are and so sought after.
Houses as sculpture made by architects trying to impress other architects results in a disjoint aesthetic. Nobody wants to visit a hodge podge of houses in the style of whatever was in vogue when they were last remodeled. See all the blocky and angular, white, black with some wood tones built/remodel in the past 10 years that already look dated. They ruin beautiful traditional neighborhoods.
Buildings as art/fashion is inherently unsustainable as they have to be bulldozed whenever tastes change.
Architectsagainsthumanity has a lot about this.
> They should be trying to mesh with and improve the neighborhood they are in. They should be rooted in time and place.
I take it you are not familiar with FLW's philosophy? He believed buildings should mirror their environment using local materials and forms that fit into the landscape. He definitely wasn't in favor of the houses you seem to be describing, which don't fit their environment or local nature. That doesn't mean his buildings can't be considered beautiful or art. Art can fit into and mirror its environment.
I get what you’re saying but Falling Water is notoriously damp, rusting, and uncomfortable. Most of his houses are form over function.
A house can be aesthetically appealing and matched to its surroundings without being leaky or damp. A house that is ugly and out of place can also be leaky and damp (they often are because those architects often are also prioritizing form over function, but an ugly form instead of an appealing form).
Yes, and those houses are by definition the traditional architectural vernacular of the area. Traditional architecture in each area evolves from survivor bias and navigating delicate trade-offs in the climate they are placed over long time frames.
If you haven't visited falling water, definitely go. It's American architecture at its finest.
I'm sad that we're coming up towards 100 years on from Fallingwater being built, and yet the American preference for new houses of a similar price (after inflation) is the sort of awful stuff that shows up on mcmansionhell.com.
The kind of bespoke construction in Wright's buildings couldn't be built today at an order of magnitude higher price, even considering inflation. A side effect of mass produced standard construction materials has been custom ones becoming astronomically expensive due to the skilled labor to build them having been replaced with mass production.
I suspect projects like fallingwater have siting considerations that wouldn't allow it to be built at all anywhere in the US... isn't it built basically on top of a WOTUS?
It'd be in litigation forever; which is why nobody with the means would try to build something like that today. Even if they could afford the construction, they can't afford the time in court.
Larry Ellison owns a replica Japanese daimyo mansion in Woodside, two mansions on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, and 98% of the island of Lanai...but none of those structures there are (AFAIK) atop a permanent watercourse.
People want square footage and comfort, not design. Frank Lloyd Wright homes look stunning in an Architectural Digest spread, but living in them is not really up to par for modern standards.
The newest homes that FLW had a hand in building date from 1959.
By the standards of the time, they were comfortable (if a bit lacking in closet space).
If you'd like, you can buy a modernized kit Usonian (inspired by the Jacobs I house) from Lindal here:
https://lindal.com/home-designs/madison/
That hous is still extremely small for what most people in the US would put in a full sized suburban lot: Nowadays a median build is 2300 square feet (213 square meters). It makes that 1600 square feet look very small. The hallways, the large space dedicated to a great room and just 2 bedrooms won't help.
You will find new houses that small, but typically when it's extremely high value land, so typically infill. And then chances are it's a multi story house that fits the lot to the limit.
1600 square for two bed/two bath will feel large if well designed; many modern houses are not well designed for their size - usually one version of a given plan is the "optimal/designed" version, and you can keep adding things that make it frankly ridiculous, weird winding hallways, small rooms, etc.
Lindal has larger models, for those so inclined.
That said, the kit pictured will, if constructed, will have amenities & physical qualities that the similarly sized original Jacobs house has had to have retrofitted at great cost.
Looks more MCM than FLW to me
The main house uses 9,300 square feet of which 4,400 is outdoor terraces, while the guest house totals 4,990 square feet of which 1,950 square feet is outdoor terraces.
https://fallingwater.org/media-resources/fallingwater-facts/
>The main house uses 9,300 square feet of which 4,400 is outdoor terraces, while the guest house totals 4,990 square feet of which 1,950 square feet is outdoor terraces.
Falling Water is his masterpiece. Most client homes were around 1,500sqft.
The trouble is that twentieth century architectural innovations were often watered down to the extent they become monstrosities or copies of copies.
The instinct to preserve and honor Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, where I live, has basically frozen the place in amber, which isn't something Wright would have wanted, and also worked synergistically with exclusive zoning to keep the Village ultra-expensive (it directly abuts the Austin neighborhood in Chicago, which is low-middle income) and white (unlike Austin, which is 90+% Black).
No idea what Wright would have thought about racial housing segregation, but it was certainly a knock-on effect of the preservationist cult he accidentally created.
You might like the British TV show Grand Designs.
Anyone downvoting you clearly doesn’t watch Arvin Haddads YouTube channel because it really is revolting how much subpar trash sells for $50 million+. Even at the highest end of the housing market you see a consistent demand for absolute garbage that is about as close to art as a pile of rancid shit.
https://archive.org/details/frank-lloyd-wright-ken-burns
As student I had privilege of visiting Taliesin West in Arizona. Easily my favorite architect, a true artist.
I remember rumors going around Phoenix of someone trying to demolish the David and Gladys Wright House in 2011. Someone got a great deal on it around that time, $1m. It sold with a 7-10x return a a few years later.
Viewed in isolation it is a bit underwhelming, but if you see it in landscape it has a charm. I think a copper roof on both structures would make it pop.
Surprised to see nothing about what he's done for S.C.Johnson, in and around Racine, WI.
About a decade ago, I got to spend a week at a residency centered on immersion and design, provided by the Fallingwater Institute. My group of about 12 people stayed at High Meadow, which is an educational complex the Institute operates and is also an award winning piece of architecture. My wife was insanely jealous. Visiting FLW works has been a minor travel hobby for us over the years.
Being only a short walk from Fallingwater, we spent some time there every day, including one day when we had the whole house to ourselves and had dinner on the terrace. We each tried to gain a sense of what it was like to live there, rather than just be a museum tourist. A couple of folks played card games sitting at the kitchen table all night. One person curled up with a book in one of the tall, narrow bay windows. I laid out on the floor of the living room and stared at the ceiling, something I do at home sometimes. I thought laying on the floor would give me a feeling of ownership, of doing whatever I wanted with a place, because you couldn't do that as a regular tourist.
It... kinda worked. Not really. It was too surreal. I don't know if I'd ever be able to feel like Fallingwater was home.
My wife and kids and I visited Taliesin West last summer as part of a Grand Canyon trip. I had much the same feeling there, while listening to the tour talk about FLW and his apprentices living there, that I couldn't imagine it as a real living space. Also, I started getting real cultish vibes from the stories of some of the stuff the apprentices went through. Of course, Scottsdale, AZ wasn't any cooler back then than it is today and they built the place themselves, by hand, without any air conditioning. More than one apprentice's marriage ended in divorce over the place because their wives couldn't stand living in tents in the desert without power and running water during the construction years. I was also struck by how I would not expect anyone to even be allowed to bring a spouse on any similar apprenticeship in the modern day, but that's a different issue.
Between all of those experiences and also hearing the stories of how much the wives of FLW's clients would fight with him over kitchens, my own career as a consultant, not being able to imagine telling a client they couldn't have the kitchen they want, and other issues, in recent times I've lost some respect for FLW.
I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society. For one thing, most people don't even know Usonian is a word, as evidenced when I see them try to come up with a word for a North American who isn't Canadian or Mexican (USian has to win a prize for finding an even more awkward term than Usonian).
That leaves all of his contract work, which was frequently deeply flawed in construction. Some of that defectiveness was due to him experimenting with new construction techniques that eventually got perfected and are no longer so flawed, but there are still many core issues. I would come home from visiting his works and I would wrack my brain over how to employ his ideas of incorporating nature into living spaces before I finally remembered I live in Virginia: nature here is primarily composed of mosquitoes a this breathable water we call "air".
His designs are all-or-nothing, it must be employed as a unified whole. It doesn't look right if it's a single piece of furniture or a window treatment in an otherwise normal house. Putting a 50" flat screen in Fallingwater would ruin the place. Got walls at 90 degree angles to each other? Sorry about your luck! It ends up looking like wearing cargo shorts and a Fedora. If you have a regular ass house like every other "impoverished" slob with a quarter acre lot in suburbia, FLW-style design does not work. I say "impoverished" because FLW-style designs are exclusively the purvue of the ultra rich. To have a house that coordinated, that put together, takes "I make people work overtime for me and I don't even know their names" kind of money.
In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962. Less than a decade before that, Kentuck Knob had been completed for about $96,000. My house may not be as pretty, but at least the roof doesn't leak and the stove can fit a cake.
> I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society.
The word Usonain has vanished, but the style's influence has not.
> In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962.
The Jacobs First House [1] in Madison, WI was the first Usonian house; it is credited with many features that became common in the mid-century ranches of the 50's and 60's. Stewart Hicks has a good deep dive [2] into Wright's influence on 20th century architecture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_and_Katherine_Jacobs_F...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXyiK-zVKsE
I don't know, man. I mean, I know it's the standard Architecture School answer that Wright was influential. But I feel like that can only be said if you focus on superficial, outward appearance and completely ignore his design philosophy, why he designed the way he did.
The materials he chose were meant to make home ownership accessible to the common man. Your own link to the Jacob's House talks about Mr. Jacobs being "a young newspaper man". The $5000 cost in 1935 is like $120k today. Yeah, if 1500sqft houses cost $120k today, I could believe a journalist just starting out on their career could afford the mortgage on it.
Are houses L-shaped now? Yeah, sure. Are they accessible to the common person? Not at all. People are talking the Little Golden Book version of Wright's philosophy.
Also, my house is not L-shaped. Jacobs got 25% more house for 1/6th the inflation adjusted price. He got a study and a shop; I'm performing my own manual labor in my back yard to build a gazebo that I hope will work as a shop for me. As a newspaper hack with a likely-unemployed wife he got a house near a lake. My electrical engineer with a master's degree wife working at a major military research institution and I got a drainage ditch that kinda looks like a stream when it rains really hard. And we're in our 40s. Everyone massively missed Wright's point.
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