Fallingwater House Tour

Fallingwater House Tour

Frank Lloyd Wright

1491 Mill Run Road
Mill Run, PA 15464

We are a group of young architects living in NYC. These last months we are traveling around, Boston, Niagara Falls, Toronto, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington and Pittsburgh. For this last trip we rent a van, can you image 8 architects in a van? 

 

We spend Saturday in Pittsburgh enjoying downtown in Melon Square Park and the outdoor Cinema in the Grandview Park, (last film of Harry Potter and the skyline of downtown in the background).

 

 

On Sunday we woke up early to go to Fallingwater House. At 10:30 am started our tour and you can be there until they close. Since the main road until the house everything is amazingly perfect, the green areas, the road... You have a little control house at the begin, continue with the parking to finish in the visitor center with the reception, restrooms, shop and coffee shops. When is turn of your group they call you though the speakers to start the tour.

From the visitor center to the house is a lovely walk between the trees. Suddenly, there it is, the house that all of us dream so many times, the Fallingwater House designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright!

I saw other projects of Wright, like the Guggenheim here in NYC, but I have to say that this house is,, in my opinion, his masterpiece. I don't think can be in the world a house more perfect that this one... I'm going to talk just a little bit, because I will need a full book to describe the construction details, etc. (There are so many book about it and the official website is very complete, even has an architectural tour for each level).

We payed for the regular tour: "You will become aware of the rhythmic interplay between interior and
exterior space by the numerous terraces, open-air walkways and
unexpected views of the trees and water as you move through the house on
this guided experience. This tour features all the major rooms of the
house and lasts approximately one hour. Photography isn’t permitted
during this tour. The Regular Tour allows children six years and older
to enjoy the house with their parents."

In front of the bridge a woman introduce herself, she was our guide in the tour. She show us all the allowed spaces inside the house, telling us a lot of details and anecdotes, without any doubt she is an expert about the house. We couldn't make any pictures in the interior but at least we were allowed to feel free outside with our cameras.

 

 

Special mention has for me this note: at that time, when they start to built the house, a similar size house in Pittsburgh costed around 5.000 dollars, Wright made an estimation for the house around 30.000 dollars. Guess how much cost the house at the end... 150.000 dollars, and without finished the guess house. What that means? Means that architects like Wright,incredibly influential, need very rich clients to build the masterpieces of architecture... it was always like that and it will continue to be this way...

When you are in the interior of the house, you have the feeling that the ceilings are not tall enough. However, this is an effect that Wright did to send your view directly to the exterior, to the trees. All the time is the continue relation between the house and the landscape around it. 

My favorite part of the house? the living room, of course! ...with the stairs going down directly to touch the water and creating the cross-ventilation, (this remind me the stairs of the palaces in Venice, going to the canals)... with the main rock coming inside, forming the fire place... the amazing views... the sound of the fall... the same shiny rocks from the mountain on the floor... the built and static furniture... It's just perfect! (It was a pity that we couldn't access to the kitchen space). The guide told us that the iron ball designed for the fire place has never worked properly.

I like that each bedroom has each own bathroom and terrace. Especially I like the fact that the original dressing room in the second floor plan finally was Mr. Kaufmann bedroom and Mrs. Kaufmann had on her own the master room, (as a result of the husband's snoring), lucky her!

The third floor, for the son, has a really nice study, with a specific and unic red stone like the joinery windows. The workers find it on the mountain when they were selecting the stones for the house and saved it for a special location. The shelves in this room are not Wright's design. The small space designed for the bedroom surprise me, only can be for a twin bed.

 

My favorite detail? The exquisite hiding places for the radiators, (Wright didn't like how look a radiator and I agree with him... 

Is anything I didn't like there? Not really, I love mostly everything, but if I have to choose something, I will take out the Mexican art from the family...

 

The complex upstairs formed with the garages, service rooms and guess house is also very nice, but you can appreciate on the floor plan that looks incomplete, and it is, they couldn't afford the original project and is not finish. In each space of the full complex, the design has the same high quality of material and details, the Kaufmann family wanted the best for their servants and guess. The only thing you can miss in the servants area are the buttons to call them. in the space outside the garages you can find the only high walls on the project, the reason was that there was the space where the servants dry the family clothes, so Wright try to hide it.

Some years ago, the garages were converted into a cinema space, and the service room and laundry are for offices and administration now. The swimming never worked properly, the water come out between the rocks of the stairs. They are still working on it to fix. In the guess house, in the bedroom, there is the original chair design that Wright designed for the living room on the main house, but Mrs. Kaufmann didn't like it and she chose a rustic and natural design for the current chairs.

After we took all the pictures around, we walk to the see the famous point of view of the house, the overlook with the fall and the birds-eye view. As you can imagine, none of us wanted to leave the house, as in big brother...

I would like to add that the house was restored a few year ago. Below two articles from the period when the house was restored:

Fallingwater Restoration Update

July 2002 

Fallingwater has reopened for our 2002 season following the successful structural strengthening of the main cantilever on the first level of the main house. The Living Room is now completely reinstalled, the temporary structures removed, and tours are now available on our regular schedule. (See Visiting Fallingwater for tour information).

With the major structural work complete, we are undertaking other discreet restoration projects that have been coordinated in such a way as not to dramatically impact public tours. All Fallingwater tours in 2002 will feature our continuing restoration, which includes the repair of Wright's famous stairs to the stream and the waterproofing of all flat roofs and terrace.

In 2001, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy launched an $11.5 million restoration project to preserve this world-famous house and its equally important natural setting for all time. The restoration encompasses major structural repairs to Fallingwater, restoration of its wood furniture and steel sash windows and doors, waterproofing of its flat roofs and terraces, the construction of an on-site zero-discharge waste management system, and an ambitious landscaping plan to improve the visitor experience while protecting the Fallingwater property.

The structural repair to Fallingwater's deflecting main level was successfully completed in March 2002. Three of the four main beams, as well as several of the smaller east-west joists, were post-tensioned. If the beams and joists can be thought of as the bones of the building, the post-tensioning cables provide the extra muscle to give the house the strength to hold itself over the waterfall. Before stressing, cracks in the concrete were repaired and three badly cracked joists were recast. After post-tensioning, the house lifted .5" (as expected), historic cracks on the Master Bedroom Terrace were sealed, and the cantilever lifted off of the temporary shoring beneath it. The temporary shoring, also in place for the stairs to stream repair, will be removed later in 2002. [Click here to view a slide show of the structural repair.] 

Restoration of drooping Fallingwater uncovers flaws amid genius

Saturday, December 08, 2001

By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic

It is, in a word, shocking. 

No matter how much you're prepared intellectually for the restoration of
Fallingwater, the sight of that iconic living room deconstructed still
takes your breath away. 

Furniture has been removed to the visitors' center cafe, now closed for the season, for conservation. 

The flagstones that cover the living room and two flanking terraces --
more than 600 of them -- have been mapped, numbered, taken up and
stacked inside three plastic sheds on the path from the visitors' center
to the house.

Exposed for the first time since Fallingwater was completed in 1936 are
three of the four main concrete beams that support the living room as it
cantilevers over the waterfall. 

They are by now the stuff of legend. Edgar Kaufmann's engineer thought
the beams should have more reinforcing steel than Wright's engineers
specified. It was Kaufmann's house; he won. Workers doubled the amount
of one-inch-square bars in each beam from eight to 16. It wasn't enough.
When they removed the wooden formwork supporting the first floor, the
terrace sagged 44.5 millimeters -- about 1 3/4 inches. 

Kaufmann recorded the terrace's movement periodically until his death in
1955, but between then and 1995 only one or two random measurements
were taken. That was the year the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy hired
Robert Silman Associates of New York to examine the obvious structural
problems. 

Silman found that the living room terrace had deflected as much as 7
inches and, without intervention, someday would fall into Bear Run. 

"That was a sobering day, when we heard that from the engineers," said
Sarah Beyer, Fallingwater's curator of education, at the end of a
recent Hard Hat Restoration Tour. 

At $50 per person, the tour isn't cheap (regular weekend tours are $15)
but it does present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the house at
a critical moment in its history -- and support its renewal. 

The first thing you notice is that Fallingwater is under wraps, its
first-floor terraces covered with slanting roofs of translucent plastic
sheeting to protect the work crews. 

With the living room inaccessible, entrance now is through the back door
and into the kitchen. Tours are led into the dining area of the living
room, where they're separated from the work area by a plywood and
Plexiglas partition that lets them look but not touch -- or fall through
the grid of concrete beams and wood joists. 

For 18 months after he was hired, Silman took measurements from
electronic monitors that showed the terraces were still sagging and
their cracks still widening. 

The next step was to examine the structure of the house to see how much
it conformed to Wright's drawings. Using radar, ultrasound and magnetic
detection, they plumbed the interiors of the beams, floors and parapets
to verify the number, size and location of the reinforcing bars in the
cantilever beams and other structural elements.

Analysis showed that the living room cantilever supports not only itself
but the one above it -- the master terrace that leads from the master
bedroom and rests on the living room's steel window frames. To stop the
deflection, Silman determined there was only one pragmatic solution:
Strengthen three of the four concrete beams under the living room with a
post-tensioning system that will hold them tautly in place.
High-strength steel cables will be added along each side of the beams,
with one end anchored in new concrete blocks attached to the beams and
the other end fed through a hole drilled through the outside wall of the
living room. 

Hydraulic jacks will gradually tighten the cables and then permanently
anchor them, stopping the deflection. The engineers won't try to correct
it; at this point that would only cause more problems. Just as
importantly, the deflection will continue to tell, at a glance, the
20th-century history of the house.

In addition to making other structural repairs, workers also are
waterproofing the flat-roofed house. Water damage is especially evident
in the guest bathroom, where the cork walls are stained and concrete is
spalling.

The house that cost $155,000 to build will take $11.5 million to
restore, a figure that also includes water treatment, sewage and
landscape improvements to be done over the next few years. Restoration
of the house will be completed next year. 

Site changes, designed to enhance the visitors' experience, include
creating a new trail to provide a bird's-eye view overlooking the house
from across Bear Run, accessed by a boardwalk hugging the hillside.

The Fallingwater Restoration Team includes:

-Structural Engineer: Robert Silman Associates, New York, NY and Washington, D.C.

-Post-Tensioning Consultant: Schupack Suarez Engineers, Inc., Norwalk, CT

-Post-Tensioning Contractor: VStructural, LLC, Springfield, VA

-Architect: Wank Adams Slavin Associates, LLP, New York, NY

-Architectural Contractor: J.L. Robinson, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA

-Wood Conservator: Thom Gentle Consultants, North Adams, MA

-Steel Sash Conservator: Seekircher Steel Window Repair, Scarsdale, NY

-Landscape Architects: Andropogon Associates, LTD, Philadelphia, PA Marshall Tyler Rausch, LLC., Pittsburgh, PA

-Buried Utilities Engineer and Construction Manager: CH2M Hill, Pittsburgh, PA and Herndon, VA

-Buried Utilities Contractor: Target Drilling Inc, Jefferson Hills, PA

-Wastewater Treatment and Reuse Engineer: CH2M Hill, Pittsburgh, PA and Herndon, VA.

-Fallingwater Maintenance Staff

References: 

- http://www.fallingwater.org 

- http://old.post-gazette.com/lifestyle/20011208lowry1208fnp3.asp

- http://www.paconserve.org/fallingwater/restoration/updates.html

- http://www.nylandmarks.org/events/lectures_and_other_events/fixing_frank_restoration_of_fallingwater_and_guggenheim_museum/

- http://faculty.arch.tamu.edu/anichols/index_files/courses/arch631/case/2004/fallingwater.pdf