{"id":44060,"date":"2025-09-12T16:37:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T15:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=44060"},"modified":"2025-09-12T16:37:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T15:37:31","slug":"ihbc-features-heritage-from-the-global-doorstep-open-culture-on-a-meditative-tour-of-fallingwater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=44060","title":{"rendered":"IHBC features \u2018Heritage from the Global doorstep\u2019: Open Culture on \u2018A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

image for illustration: Falling Water<\/a> by Frank Lloyd Wright photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open Culture <\/em>has featured \u2018A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Architectural Masterpiece\u2019 as described by Justin Gunther, the house museum\u2019s director in a video piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Open Culture<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Fallingwater is a \u2018house museum,\u2019 first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution\u2019s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it\u2019s \u2018the first house of the modern movement to open as a public site,\u2019 having begun offering tours in 1964. The openness of Fallingwater owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of the Pittsburgh department-store magnate who commissioned the house in the first place. The family happened to own a piece of land in southern Pennsylvania that was once an employee retreat, and Kaufmann fils, high on a reading of Wright\u2019s recently published autobiography, knew just who should design a weekend home for the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not that it was a simple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luckily, \u2018Frank Lloyd Wright had just established an apprenticeship program at Taliesin.\u2019 The young Kaufmann applied, \u2018and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, knowing who the Kaufmanns were, could sniff out a good potential client.\u2019 Soon accepted, Kaufmann spent about six months studying under Wright, during which time his visiting parents also became \u2018enamored with Wright\u2019s ideas of organic architecture.\u2019 No other living architect, perhaps, could deliver on the promise of a house fully inspired by its natural context, which in this case included a waterfall. Still, one wonders if even his most eager clients understood just what they were getting into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The Kaufmanns thought that they were going to have a house that was looking at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had different ideas. He thought that if you put the most dramatic part of a landscape in your view constantly, it would become something that\u2019s tiresome. You would just become used to it.\u2019 But \u2018if you were forced out into the landscape to see it, then it would always have an impact.\u2019 Built atop the waterfall instead, by local laborers and using stone quarried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impression, and one that makes perfect aesthetic sense: as Gunther puts it, \u2018the waterfall can\u2019t live without the house, and the house can\u2019t live without the waterfall.\u2019 Nor, these nearly nine decades after the main building\u2019s completion, is the course of American architecture quite imaginable without Fallingwater.

Read more….<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

image for illustration: Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Open Culture has featured \u2018A Meditative Tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Architectural Masterpiece\u2019 as described by Justin Gunther, the house … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[48,6,18,36,107,30,23,29,31,22],"class_list":["post-44060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ihbc-newsblog","tag-architecture","tag-building","tag-conservation","tag-culture","tag-design","tag-environment","tag-expertise","tag-heritage","tag-nature","tag-skills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44062,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44060\/revisions\/44062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}