My Favorite House

As a residential Architect, people often ask what my favorite house is -- not one I’ve designed, but rather a home I’ve studied or experienced. Over the past 40 years, my answer has never changed despite a growing list of possibilities.  I first learned of this home as a student of Architecture and today, none has had as profound an impact on me. Others have come close, but when you understand the underlying design principals and its Architect, it will help you understand why this home remains my favorite.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Southwestern Pennsylvania is unequivocally (in my opinion) the greatest house in North America, if not the world. Despite dating back to 1935, few houses, old or new, are as innovative and contextually perfect for its site and owners. Commissioned by Edgar J. and Lillian Kauffman of the famed Kauffman Department Stores, the house was designed as a vacation retreat for the owners who both worked in the city. Their son Edgar Jr. said of the house, “It was something to give their lives balance by giving them an immediate relationship with nature.”  

When Wright first walked the site, he saw an opportunity for not only an Architecture that could work with nature, but also become one with nature. Kauffman himself was fascinated with nature, one of the reasons he and Wright had such a strong relationship.

The story, according to Edgar Tafel, one of Wrights apprentices, was that Wright designed and drew one of the greatest homes in the world in a matter of hours as he awaited Edgar Kauffman’s arrival to his Taliesen Studio in Madison, Wisconsin. Corroborated by several others, it’s incomprehensible to think such a complex structure could be designed in that short amount of time. 

The reality is Wright had been designing the home in his head for months and needed only hours to commit it to paper. It has also been confirmed that the built home did not deviate significantly from the initial design and drawings. Kauffman had several high society friends, some of whom were engineers, and he shared Wright’s drawings with them. The engineers told Kauffman the house would never stand and the shale that it was to be built upon would crumble. They even put reports together, which Kauffman shared with Wright. Wright’s response to Kauffman was essentially, ‘if you believe this rubbish, you are not worthy of one of my designs.’Kauffman agreed and when construction started, they buried those reports in the concrete structure for archeologists to find, one day proving them wrong. It reminds me of a quote close friend and client Tom Martin used to say to me, “Never take no from an Engineer!” Sorry, my Engineer friends. 

The house was designed to rise out of the landscape and emulate the shale ledges surrounding the site. Wright positioned the house directly above a waterfall where the family would play prior to having a structure above it. Wright professed that this siting of the home would permit the Kauffman’s to not only view and hear nature but actually live in its midst. The cantilevered terraces, vertical stone walls and iron red window frames work together creating a spectacular composition of structure and materials. Wright would often say music is made up of sounds and Architecture of structure and materials. To him they were parallel art forms. 

To reinforce nature further, Wright designed very low ceilings in the house, counterintuitive to the way we think today. The philosophy was that if you’re in a room with low ceilings your eyes will inevitably move toward the edge of a room, and if the edge of the room is glass, your eye goes out and relates to nature. In large rooms with tall ceilings, you’re looking up and you’re thinking about how you fit in the space rather than how you relate to the space. 

I experienced Fallingwater for the first time as a student of Architecture in 1985. I remember the anticipation as I parked and waited in a reception/gift room for my group number to be called. Once called you hiked through the forest and as you got closer the faint sounds of the waterfall began to grow until suddenly, through the trees, this masterpiece reveals itself. As a naïve student who was going to change the world of housing, I admired what I was looking at, but I didn’t revere it. I had no experience and therefore no idea of how challenging something like this would be to achieve. As a student you simply dreamt it, drew it and that was as far as it went.

Fast forward some thirty years and my second visit was very different. Visiting family on the East Coast, we decided on a road trip to Fallingwater. Seeking out influential buildings is something I’ve made a habit of doing with my wife and daughters when we travel. After 30-plus years of designing homes and communities for some of the best clients and builders in the country, on this visit I teared up when Fallingwater poked through the trees. It was cathartic to try to comprehend all the variables, obstacles, technological deficiencies, etc., and realize that in spite of all that, one man created something so powerful. It not only exceeded the Kauffman’s expectations and imagination, but that of the country and world as a whole. 

In that moment and to this day, I revere it.