Note to folks arriving here from a web search: This was essentially a post that got too long for Instagram. I was not able to spend hours researching everything my age-addled memory suggested ought to be the case. You should probably take it all with a grain of salt.
Thanks to my brother Mark making all the arrangements and doing all the driving, we made it to Fallingwater on Sunday for one of the early, in-depth tours, which I can’t recommend enough. Each tour guide, while following the general plan outlined by Edgar Kauffman Jr., is encouraged to focus on areas of their personal expertise, and we got a retired NYC designer who grew up in Johnstown for a cosmopolitan yet regionally attuned perspective.
They’re finally replacing the original concrete with a more robust, water-resistant composition that will mimic the original as closely as possible, a process expected to take two more years, I think the guide said. Although Frank Lloyd Wright was thoroughly influenced by Japanese aesthetics, he lacked the centuries of craft knowledge that informs traditional Japanese construction, concrete still being a fairly new material in 1936 (or newly revived – the Romans used concrete extensively, and it has lasted, but engineers have only recently learned the secrets of its composition).
The holes rusted through the top of that Buddha statue seemed Zen-like, somehow, and seeing the top floor wrapped in tarpaulins felt almost seductive, a veiling more like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap than a view obscured by clouds. But the old concrete looked sad. I don’t think that the wabi-sabi aesthetic is as relevant for Fallingwater as the complementary Japanese value of cleanness (kirei), though the two are often combined as kirei-sabi, ‘an idea that combines the purity of beauty (“kirei”) with the allure of time and imperfection (“sabi”)’ according to the Internet.
Like the copperhead snake we once encountered on nearby Ferncliff Peninsula—land donated to the commonwealth by the Kauffman family—the house needs to shed its skin. That’s what happens at the two most sacred Shinto shrines in Japan, where all the buildings are entirely, painstakingly replaced every hundred years. Someday, if I ever get back to Ise, it’ll be interesting if it’s in a more kirei-sabi state than it was in 1985, when it looked utterly pristine among the old-growth cypress trees.
Speaking of trees, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy is doing an impressive job of keeping the grounds looking ‘natural’: saving the eastern hemlock trees from woolly adelgids and excluding most invasive trees, shrubs and forbs, but the fantasy of living in harmony with nature seems increasingly threadbare as anthropogenic mass extinction looms.
In some ways, Fallingwater is a familiar Pennsylvania story: having a camp or cabin to retreat to is so common here, it’s contributed to extensive fragmentation of Pennsylvania wild areas, and to the extent that Fallingwater influenced that trend—and how could it have not, as instantly famous as it became—the Kauffmans might be thought to share some of the blame. But considering how much land they donated to the state to create Ohiopyle State Park, which kick-started an extensive state parks system that has become a model for many other states, I think to the contrary they were genuine conservation heroes, and I enjoyed learning more about them in an exhibition of well-edited home movies currently on display at the visitor center. Turns out they had a strong social conscience as well, and when the Depression hit, correctly understood their role in society (as our guide put it) and rather than laying anyone off, dramatically increased employment at their department store (Kauffmans in Pittsburgh). Then Edgar Jr. met an underemployed architect, and the rest is history.
More than anything, what I love when out hiking on the Allegheny Plateau is to climb among boulders of the Pottsville Formation, so it makes me happy that a world-famous architect fell in love with ‘Rocksylvania’ too, and that it revitalized his career and put him on the cover of Time. I’m grateful to the Kauffmans for the grace and generosity of their vision, and to the conservancy for being such good stewards of it. Long may Fallingwater continue to inspire with its message of reverence for the natural world.
All photos by me. Thanks to my mom, Marcia Bonta, for leading the way.
