Frank Lloyd Wright and Falling Water Author: CETArchis..

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Frank Lloyd Wright at a Glance


Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is architecture-
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1937

Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright) lived from 1867 to 1959. During most of these years, from1885 to 1959, he was a prolific architect, with close to 500 of his designs built (and hundreds more remaining unbuilt) - a career lasting three quarters of a century, and unequaled in output. Mr. Wright worked for architects J. Lyman Silsbee and Louis Sullivan, and he later himself trained many architects at his Taliesin School. Frank Lloyd Wright expoused "organic architecture" . Mr. Wright was born in Wisconsin, and he lived most of his life there, also spending some time living in New York City, Germany,Japan, Oak Park (Illinois), and the winter location of his school in Arizona.

Frank Lloyd Wright's innovations in residential architecture :

"Drawing inspiration from his native midwestern prairie, he coaxed Americans out of their boxlike houses and into wide-open living spaces that suited the American lifestyle" , Mr. Wright's "organic architecture" was a radical departure from the traditional architecture of his day, which was dominated by European styles that dated back hundreds of years or even millenia. He contributed the Prairie and Usonian houses to the vernacular of American residential design, and elements of his designs can be found (at least to some small degree) in a large proportion of homes today. While most of his designs were single-family homes (ranging from small homes for families of modest incomes, to mansions like his unbuilt design for Henry Ford), his varied output also includes houses of worship, skyscrapers, resorts, museums, government offices, gas stations, bridges, and other masterpieces showing the diversity of Frank Lloyd Wright's talent.

Frank Lloyd Wright's views on architectural space, ornamentation, and relationship to site, and concerning the place of architecture in art, life and philosophy have inspired generations of architects and artists all over the world.
Frank Lloyd Wright's career was notable in several areas:

Practicing Architect. He designed several hundred buildings, of which around 500 were built

Architectural Theoretician/Academic. He wrote several books on architecture, and founded and ran a successful school in the field, training many architects.

Artist (Draftsman). His drawings of his buildings and other plans were beautiful and notable in themselves. The L.A.Times said he was a "productive artist whose imagination continued to outpace even his long lifetime of work".

Interior Design and Furniture. Mr. Wright's design went beyond the building to the finest details of the interior space, including furniture, art glass, and other aspects of interior design.
Frank Lloyd Wright's views on architectural space, ornamentation, and relationship to site, and concerning the place of architecture in art, life and philosophy have inspired generations of architects and artists all over the world.

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Falling Water : Bear run, Pennsylvania

Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most widely acclaimed works, was designed for the family of Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann.

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 the location for a home.They were unprepared for Wright's suggestion that the house rise over the waterfall, rather than face it. But 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 house with its setting, original furnishings, and art work intact.
In 1986, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote: "This 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."


"Fallingwater is a great blessing - one of the great blessings to be experienced here on earth. I think nothing yet ever equalled the coordination, sympathic 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 ...."
Frank Lloyd Wright