Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright - Essay Example

Fallingwater: Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater is an architectural marvel built by Frank Lloyd Wright that is organically built into its environment in such a way as to both seem as if it is part of the landscape, springing out of the rocky forest as if grown, and yet has stark contrasts with industrialized details. The structure is a concert of linear creation, the interestingly bold use of cantilevers leaving concrete masses in horizontal form to seem as if they are suspended in midair. The architecture of the house is considered a masterpiece with the building being one of the more important public attractions in the United States as it is now used as a museum and open to the public. Because of its unique construction and design, the home is considered to be one of the greatest achievements in American architecture. According to Toker and Morgan, “he combined rock-faced walls with high tech industrial finishes and gave life to his buildings by lifting them up on concrete legs or pilotis” (62). The structure was in response to the work that was being done by European architects such as Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropus. When compared to all of his work previous to the building of Fallingwater, it can be seen that Fallingwater is a complete departure from his ideas of the natural house. In contrast to the Kentucky Knob, which was the epitome of Wright beliefs and construction as it sat low to the ground, organically positioned and designed with the idea that it should sit into its setting, Fallingwater has a tall, vertical line, even as the cantilevers stretch horizontally. Fallingwater reflects the mass of its surroundings, its nature both reflecting its setting and coming against it (Toker and Morgan 62). Fallingwater was a “singular detour”, the type of construction and design was unique for Wright and he never built anything that was similar (Toker and Morgan 64). Wright was in his sixties when he designed the home, his mastery threatened by younger designers for which Fallingwater was built as a response. It was built for a client by the name of Edgar Kaufman who desired a summer home in a remote area of Pennsylvania near Bear Run. The area was a rocky nest of streams and forest where what would define Wrights design was “the pervasive sound and rhythm of the white water”. He wrote to Kaufman saying “the visit to the waterfalls in the woods stays with me and a domicile has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream” (Stoller 6-7). For twenty years, between 1914 and 1934, Wright didn’t often use stone as a building material. He had used stone in Taliesin, a work that was emotionally connected to him and with one notable exception in building the summer home for the family of Darwin Martin, a friend and someone who was connected to Taliesin and evoked sentimentality within him (Menocal 57). His Taliesin studio had been the site of his own summer home, in which his lover and six other people were murdered by a man servant by the name of Julian Carlton while the building burned around them. Carlton had stood outside the only space he had left open after nailing the building shut and hacked each person with the axe as they crawled out of the building. The terrible event changed the nature of the work that Wright did after the horrible deaths and the burning of Taliesin (Friedland and Zellman 38). Stone became the story in Fallingwater. While the use of concrete is prevalent, the return to stone is also evident. Where Taliesin had represented the ’static’ forms of nature, however, Fallingwater was a representation of movement, the growth of life that was “made to be an intervention in the dynamic flux of natural processes and thus to represent such changes as occur over time” (Menocal 57). In the use of stone, combined with the industrial look of the concrete allows the seemingly organic growth of the building from its natural setting, this contrast creating a hidden element to the design as it becomes a part of its setting. The home appears to reveal its construction, but in truth is designed to hide the physics that allows it to stand. The cantilevers are hard and concrete, but the methods used to hold them in place are not revealed. This has created some difficulties where the stabilization of the home is concerned. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy was forced to do reconstruction in the 1990s on the living room in order to ensure that it would stay stable and not fall to its own delicately balanced construction. The appeal of the building is based upon the contrasts as “vertical walls and piers of roughly laid stone supports horizontal terraces (with) slabs of concrete that appear to slice through them” (Stoller 8). From some angles the building appears to have slabs of concrete suspended without support, the cascading waterfall coming directly out of the home, organically part of the building as if it was placed by God rather than by man’s work. The living room floor hovers directly over the rush of the fall to its edge, the closeness to nature creating the feeling of living within it rather on top of it. Wright was a member of the Arts and Crafts Movement, one of the leading designers of the Prairie School of thought. Although it was not known as the ‘Prairie School’ during the time he worked, it was typified by the flat, horizontal work that typified the Frank Lloyd Wright design aesthetic. This had been influenced by the Japanese form of construction, his work taking on the organic nature of the Japanese design for building with overhanging eaves and simplistic structures (Nute 18). The Arts and Crafts movement signaled a truth to materials aesthetic, a sense of naturalism over the plastic aesthetic of construction. The term ‘craft’ although often diminished in modern terms as intending to be less serious and the term ‘arts and crafts’ often refers to the work of children in classrooms, the period denoted a high level of attention to detail with the use of materials carefully executed in order to express their organic nature. According to Cardoso, the word ‘craft’ had originally meant “power, strength or skill, evolving slowly into the idea of a specific trade or calling and spawning the more persistent notion of the craftsman” (322). The industrialization of the 19th century had left a series of poorly constructed items with which those who would help to create the ‘arts and crafts movement’ came into theoretical conflict. In returning to the more natural and high end form of ‘crafting’ an idea, design, and construct, the combination of nature and the man-made design form became a central dialogue in design. The idea was to create “a community of producers, not consumers” in order to return to the ideals of pride and authorship in the act of design and creation (Cardoso 331). Wright used these aesthetics in creating Fallingwaters, however, he utilized new ideas in architecture to balance both the ideals of the arts and crafts movement, the aesthetics of industrialization, and the modernist ideals in which the plastic world was reflected. The interesting contrast is in the hidden architecture that seems to suspend the build in mid air, while creating a firm foundation into the rocky landscape through reiterations of the natural surroundings. Even in its linear construction, both on horizontal and vertical axes, the build reflects the planes of the water as it falls, the angles of the striking water coming in less round, but sharp, flattened shears of movement. In addition, the sound that had so inspired Wright has become part of the discourse that has been created by the design, the rhythm of the movement an imitation of the sound of the water as it crashes along its path. The instances of details create the greatest measure of how the work must be viewed. According to Frascari, details are how the imposition of order is placed upon a construction (24). The details provide the nature of the reason that is applied to the ornate, the design of a build held into place by the order that has been conceived of the chaos. It is the order that is imposed that must provide the foundation upon which a design is built. Fallingwaters was ambitious, the details of the complex system of rhythms and linear plane needing the order of the details of the physics required to hold it in place to give it a balance and, needless to say, safety. The ambition, as in evidence of the instances of having to shore up the safety factors of the build to ensure it would continue to stand, was slightly beyond the capacity of the details to render into order. However, small adjustments to the ’order’ of the work in no way diminishes its value, but rather increases the admiration held for the ambition of its nature. Wright discusses the plastic nature of the industrialized aesthetics and of the way in which the Machine has been developed to enhance the concept of ‘craft’, but in its use may be abused. He states “The Machine is an engine of emancipation or enslavement, according to the human direction and control given it, for it is unable to control itself” (108). The nature of the machine is without a conscious, but Wright, even in admitting this, suggests that the Machine is a monster. What Wright sees as the consequence of having built the machine is that man, by virtue of his own greed, becomes enslaved to the Machine, not using it to heighten the event of creation, but to allow it to diminish into a state of a lack of craft, greed overwhelming the quality and stripping the ‘craft’ of the act of making. He reveals that through historically set eyes, the modern human existence is in admiration of the craft and skill with which creation took place in the past. However, in searching for the wonder of what was made, there is a resigned feeling that what has been accomplished is not possible in modern standards of design and creation. He asks “What do we do with this inheritance? We feed it remorselessly into the Maw of the Machine to get a hundred or a thousand for one” (109). Through this understanding of the nature of modernism, Wright took reason and order and applied to a naturalized sense of his experience in interactions with the organic world. Through creating architectural works that took their setting within their design, the Prairie School representing the flat planes of the prairie, his work in Bear Run on Fallingwater taking in the setting as part of the construction, the plastic representation of the concrete creating the rhythms of the water, the structure of the intersecting planes imitating the rocky formations within which the build was created. The design hides its nature, the infusion of a dwelling upon the natural landscape made as if it was a natural emergence from the animal world, as if a nest has been created by any other creature that might inhabit the Earth. The industrial contrasts in no way diminishes its natural effusion as it hangs in concert with its surroundings. The Machine is present, but tamed by the natural world that provides context for the existence of a human presence. The architectural phenomenon of Fallingwater is an achievement that combined the aesthetics of the ‘arts and crafts movement’ with the rise of the modernist values. The serene nature of the building seems in contrast with itself, the order imposed upon it creating a natural setting suspended planes from which the design is not more important that the design of the natural world in which it sits. The work of Frank Lloyd Wright has left an epitome of the ’arts and crafts’ aesthetic, but this piece proved that his work didn’t have to be locked within a framework of school and thought. He competed with those who were following him, rising stars in the European architectural world that would find themselves shadowed by this piece of work. Fallingwaters is an achievement of design, its hidden structures creating a infusion of the organic aesthetics as they reflected through the plastic representation of the concrete planes. Works Cited Cardoso, Rafael. “Craft versus Design: Moving beyond a Tired Dichotomy“. Found in Glenn Adamson. The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2010. Print. Frascari, Marco. “The Tell-the-Tale Detail”. Found in Glenn Adamson. The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2010. Print. Friedland, Roger, and Harold Zellman. The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print. Menocal, Narciso G. Fallingwater and Pittsburgh. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2000. Print. Stoller, Ezra. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Print. Toker, Franklin, and Bill Morgan. Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.j. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Print. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “In the Cause of Architecture: The Architecture and the Machine”. Found in Glenn Adamson. The Craft Reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2010. Print. Read More