[Fallingwater: fall photo]
View of the house from a low angle view showing two waterfalls.
From this low angle the cantilevered terraces are particularly dramatic, as they seem to float in the air above the stream (Bear Run). The soaring vertical tower (center-left in the photo) rises more than three stories, windows stretching from floor to ceiling, creating a continuous column of glass, broken only by narrow steel support beams, painted an earthy brick-red. The tower serves as a visual and literal anchor for the cantilevered floors and the terraces that extend them further. While the vertical and horizontal lines demarcate the geometry of the house and its boundaries, there is at the same time an interpenetration of vertical and horizontal, and of inside and outside. There are many examples, but several are at least partly visible in the picture. The windows in the tower, even when closed, suggest relatively little barrier between inside and outside, but they also can be opened at the vertical "corner" where normally a support beam would be, creating an unexpected but pleasing empty space that joins inside and outside, liberated from a boxed-in structure one might expect from architecture involving so many vertical and horizontal faces. Also, above the far terrace extending out from the living room is a trellis with large rectangular openings (visible in the far right of the photo). It extends out horizontally from the living room ceiling, but is vertically open to the sky. It seems to be paired with the stairs leading down to the stream from the living room through a hatchway; see the view from the east side of the living room. For other examples of harmonization of vertical and horizontal, and of inside and outside, see the explanation under the photo showing the beautiful fall photo of Fallingwater.

What are these grounds and this house? Acres of rock and acid earth, second-growth trees and icy streams, roughly cast in the Appalachian mold - and something more: a place of vigorous beauty, of self-renewing enchanatment, of adventuresome picturesqueness that answers perfectly a romantic need in modern hearts, the need to be natural, to experience nature not as grist for our mills but as the habitat that has formed us.
      Designed for this setting, the house was hardly up before its fame circled the the earth; it was recognized as one of the clearest successes of the American genius Frank Lloyd Wright.

- Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., Fallingwater: A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House, p. 65.



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