Fallingwater

Fallingwater is a house designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 in the Laurel Highlands of southwest Pennsylvania, about southeast of Pittsburgh in the United States. It is built partly over a waterfall on Bear Run in the Mill Run section of Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The house was designed to serve as a weekend retreat for Liliane and Edgar J. Kaufmann, the owner of Pittsburgh's Kaufmann's Department Store. After its completion, Time called Fallingwater Wright's "most beautiful job" and it is listed among Smithsonians "Life List of 28 Places to See Before You Die". The house was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 11, 1976. In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects named Fallingwater the "best all-time work of American architecture" and in 2007, it was ranked 29th on the list of America's Favorite Architecture according to the AIA. The house and seven other Wright constructions were inscribed as a World Heritage Site under the title, "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright", in 2019. At age 67, Frank Lloyd Wright was given the opportunity to design and construct three buildings. With his three works of the late 1930s, (Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Herbert Jacobs house in Madison, Wisconsin), Wright regained his prominence in the architectural community. Edgar J. Kaufmann was a Pittsburgh businessman and president of Kaufmann's Department Store. Liliane Kaufmann, like her husband, was a keen outdoors person; she enjoyed both hiking and horseback riding. She had a strong aesthetic sensibility which is reflected in the house's design. Edgar and Liliane's only child, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., became the catalyst for his father's relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright. In the summer of 1934, Kaufmann read Frank Lloyd Wright's An Autobiography (1932) and traveled to meet him at his home in Wisconsin in late September. Within three weeks, he began an apprenticeship at the Taliesin Fellowship, a communal architecture program established in 1932 by Wright and his wife, Olgivanna.