Author Archives: Ginger

Views near Golden Grove

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted a Block Island sunset. For a while there, I was consumed by posts about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, and by travel. But I’m home now for a brief spell to catch up.

On the island, the last of the summer tenants have gone, and I hope the summer was all the more delightful for them because they shared our island home.

It’s September already, and autumn. I’m looking forward to returning to our home near Golden Grove in just over a week. So in anticipation, here is a September sunset from last year.

Views of Falling Water

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At last we come to the guest house. This is all in one structure with the servants’ quarters, a three-car carport, and the, well… I guess it was a sort of living-room for the servants. The servant/car side of the structure now houses offices for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. The guest house, though adjoined, functions independently.

The covered walkway to the guest house takes off from a vestibule on the second floor of the main house. Here’s the beginning of the walkway (seen, I think, from the corner of the master bedroom deck on the second floor).

Here’s the best view of it, seen from the deck off Edgar Sr.’s room. This may be the only place from which the walkway and guest house structure are visible from the main house.

The walkway itself is an interesting structure. Its roof of reinforced concrete is cantilevered from only a few supporting posts, supported both by the depth of the posts’ footings (I forget whether our guide said 30 or 40 feet), by the compression on the interior of the curve, and by the folding of the canopy, which was all poured as one single structure. Just in case you were beginning to think you’d seen it all, when it comes to cantilevers!

Just as the guest house was barely visible from the main house, so the main house is barely visible from the guest house above. Where it can be seen at all, the visitor sees only the roof, which the architect has thoughtfully planted in ivy so that it doesn’t dominate the view. (I’m sure he wasn’t thinking of energy conservation at the time–but there you have it: a green roof!)

Many of the themes of the main house are carried into the guest house. These include a covered, but open, walkway to the entrance…

…nearly invisible glass corners…

…and a cantilevered structure covering part of the terrace.

That’s wisteria growing up there. It must be wonderful in the spring!

The terrace also adjoins a lovely, and private, spring-fed pool.

I ‘d like to thank everyone who has shared this tour with me through these pictures and blog posts. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure!

Views of Falling Water

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Upstairs to the bedrooms!

We now live in an age of luxurious bedrooms and sumptuous baths. To our standards, the rooms upstairs at Falling Water are small and almost spartan. But then, as Frank Lloyd Wright must have intended, who would want to spend much time in the bedrooms anyway, with such magnificent living spaces? In the bedrooms at Falling Water, the visitor is reminded that bedrooms, after all, are for sleeping. With the eyes closed.

What more is needed, really, than a bed, a nearby shelf or nightstand, and some closet space? Oh… well… and a desk with shelves, a private deck, and of course a fireplace.

Maybe not so spartan after all. The bedrooms at Falling Water, though small, are comfortable and pleasant. As in the rest of the house, the details delight.

Here is the desk in the guest bedroom. The blinds were added later, perhaps because the windows overlook the master bedroom deck. The desk lamp is an original Frank Lloyd Wright piece, as are the night lamps by the beds.

Frank Lloyd Wright preferred methods other than blinds where he thought privacy would be necessary. Here is the sink of the master bathroom, which overlooks the master terrace. The planters are built into the fenestration.

The desk in the master bedroom has a genuine Tiffany lamp, as well as one of those wonderful windows where the glass wraps mullionlessly around the corner.

Here’s a view of that corner window as seen from the next deck over.

Yes, those are really fig trees. With real figs on them. And they’re going to ripen this year, too–or so we were told.

Here’s a nifty corner window detail found in both Edgar Sr.’s room and Edgar jr.’s above it. Each of these window pairs opens outward, leaving the corner entirely and breathtakingly open. Screens on the inside (opening inward) were added later; these unfortunately add to the heavy appearance of the windows when they are closed, but on a summer evening a person sensitive to mosquitoes can see why they were needed.

Let’s take a closer look at that desk detail (the same in both men’s rooms). It has been ever-so-cunningly designed so that the full-length window next to the desk can be opened (inwards) unhindered. Need more desk space? Er… no. You don’t.

This could be a small essay on the importance of the fenestration in the design of Falling Water. And no such essay would be complete without a closer look at the joining of glass and rock–as delicately and invisibly as possible.

Finally, each of the bedrooms has a deck/terrace (except the guest room). At least in some cases, the architect specified plantings for the terraces. The herb garden still grows outside Edgar jr.’s window.

Views of Falling Water

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It’s time to look around inside Falling Water. The main living area is designed as one large open space, differentiated in function most obviously by the layout of the furniture (much of it built in) and more subtly by changes in ceiling height. Much of the exterior wall is glass, so that the walls of the house do not separate the exterior and interior so much as join them together. Low ceilings and long horizontal mullions give the space an intimate scale despite its sweeping openness.

Here is a good view of the living area from the outside. The view here is of what I’ll arbitrarily call the “left side” because it’s on the left as you enter the space.  Note that you can see right through the entire room. In fact, the structure almost reads as two decks, and only later does the living area even register as a significant part of the house. (I love this.) Notice, too, the stairway descending from the living room down to the pool above the waterfall. More about this later.

The first part of the living area a guest sees upon entering is what looks like a small library. Beyond, the entire living space is visible.

Notice how the ceiling structure carries straight through the house to the outside deck, with only minimal interruption by the glass wall. Immediately beyond the bookcase is the stairway to the water (occupying the middle portion of the “left” side of the living area). The stairway is encased in a glass enclosure cleverly designed to fold away and almost disappear when the stairway is opened up.

Beyond the stairway in the far part of the “left” side is the entry to the deck that is visible in the first photograph of this post. Even in this relatively insignificant corner of the house, the detailing reveals a rhythm and harmony that is almost breathtaking.

The “living room” occupies the far half (or more) of the living area, extending from one deck to the other. Built-in furniture conceals the heating vents and enhances the horizontal, intimate scale of the space and its feeling of great harmony and peacefulness.

Around the almost invisible far corner is the entry to the living room’s other deck, and beyond that, the great fireplace with its hearthstone of bedrock.

Notice the red globe-shaped object to the left of the fireplace. This is a great built-in kettle designed by the architect to swing over the fire when in use. A pretty detail. I wonder if they ever actually used it…

Finally, the dining area sits to the rear of the living space (and to the right side of the fireplace as you face the hearth).

The table is a modest size, but the credenza in the background (behind the flowers) contains two more table sections that add on to the end so that the table can be extended into the living room, and a large number of guests can be accommodated. The chair whose back you can see behind the glass and plate is not one of the original chairs that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for this dining room but rather an antique Bavarian chair that the owner’s wife preferred. The original chairs looked like this:

Pretty, yes?

The owner, by the way, was one Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. and his wife Liliane. Their son Edgar jr. inherited the house after the death of his parents and left it to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the current owners. Mr. Kaufmann Sr. must have been an interesting person–a hugely successful businessman who loved the outdoors, visionary enough to hire an illustrious architect such as Frank Lloyd Wright and strong-willed enough to stand up to him (rightly or wrongly) on some issues.

Good looking too, my mother observes; and I agree.

Views of Falling Water

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Speaking of field details…

I don’t know if Frank Lloyd Wright was being disingenuous in accommodating a tree among the beams of his entry walkway or not. I imagine his respect for the tree was genuine because there’s no mistaking his love of the site expressed in the interaction of the house with the rock boulders in the landscape. Take a look at the natural rock formation in the photo below.

This photo was taken from one of the bedroom decks looking down toward the living room. From the living-room deck looking back toward the kitchen, it is the rock formation on the right.

Instead of blasting the rocks away, the architect accommodated them inside the house in a number of places. You can see them as you head down the narrow stairway to the basement and in the basement itself.

The exterior wall of the kitchen sits directly on the natural rock. Dressed rock is added sparingly to make a good fit.

Windows extend below the counter down to the floor so that from inside the kitchen there is no mistaking the relationship between the house and its landscape. (The copper tray below the counter is sitting directly on the floor–the part of the natural rock that is inside the kitchen.)

In the living room, the part of the rock inside the house is revealed as the hearthstone.

More than any other single feature, I think, the use of living rock as the house’s central hearth reveals the architect’s deep love of the site landscape.

Views of Falling Water

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I can’t say that field details are the best part about Falling Water, but they sure are great.

A field detail is a part of the structure that responds to a particular feature of the site, as opposed to those details drawn up as part of the design. It shows a great tenderness on the part of the architect toward a natural feature–the willingness to bend or alter the building out of pure respect and appreciation for what’s already there.

The walkway to the front door, for example, is shaded by an arcade of non-weight-bearing beams. I can’t be sure, but here is what looks to me like a field detail of one of the beams.

The tree looks a bit young, since the house was built in 1936-39. I’d guess that this detail was built to accommodate some other, older tree that has since passed along to the Great Tree Heaven in the Sky; and the owners ay have replaced it with a similar but younger tree to preserve the meaning and sense of the detail.

Isn’t this in fact the most eloquent evidence of a reciprocal love affair between the building (architect/owner) and its natural environment? The love in this detail moves me to tears.

Views of Falling Water

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Cantilevers

One of the hallmark features of Falling Water is its cantilevered reinforced-concrete decks, which fly with apparent weightlessness over the rushing water.

After Wright completed the drawings, the client–meaning the guy who not only paid the bills but also planned to live in the house–took the drawings to a professor of engineering at, I believe, Carnegie Mellon. The professor studied the drawings and warned that the decks would fall down. Fortunately, Frank Lloyd Wright managed to convince the client otherwise, and the house was built as designed.

In particular, the deck off the living room was the one in question (the lower deck in the first picture). Here are some views of it.

Years later, structural analysis revealed that the decks were in fact deflecting, with the far ends having sagged about eight inches. Post-tensioning was added to stabilize the structure. The deck has come up a little and is no longer sinking.

A graduate student later analyzed one of the upper decks and revealed that it, too, was beginning to deflect. His calculations were confirmed on site, and that deck too has now been stabilized.

Looks like Falling Water is here for the long run. Thank heavens!

Views of Falling Water

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Falling Water is so exquisite, one has to wonder, How did Frank Lloyd Wright ever come up with the idea for it?

I believe that the idea was all around him in plain sight. Horizontal striations dominate the Western Pennsylvania limestone rock that abounds on the site, contrasting stunningly with the vertical trees of the forest and the rushing water.

Wright’s unique genius–which cannot be overstated–was to see how this forested horizontal structure could manifest as a house.

Can you see the likeness? Here’s one little creature that seems to.

Views of Falling Water

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I just returned from a trip with my mom to Falling Water, the well-known Frank Lloyd Wright house in Western Pennsylvania whose decks are cantilevered over a waterfall. You know the one.

Yes, that one. Most people have seen this view, but the amazing thing about Falling Water is that every view of the house, from its setting and relationship with its surroundings down to even the smallest interior detail, is beautiful.

Because I went on the so-called “In-Depth Tour,” which allows participants to take photographs, I am now sorting through and organizing a deluge of photos, and so I’m temporarily suspending the “Views from Golden Grove” series while I plow through these photos. I am truly privileged to be able to share some of them with you over the next few posts.

Enjoy!

Views near Golden Grove

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I thought you might enjoy this photo of a genuine sundog (parhelion) sighting on the island. It’s unusual because the clouds look more like some hybrid of stratus clouds than like the cirrus clouds that usually produce sundogs. But there must have been ice crystals in these clouds, whatever they were, for the sundogs to form.