Category Archives: Travel

Beautiful ice, part 2 – December 25, 2010

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I wanted to go see Upsala Glacier by boat, along with some of the other glaciers that are part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Unfortunately, a large part of the glacier’s front broke off several years ago, and the channel is now blocked with icebergs. And so the boat traveled to view, not the glacier (that comes in a later post, my friends) but the icebergs. Can you say, “Titanic?”

It turns out that icebergs are just as beautiful and perhaps even more surreal than glaciers.

At first, we saw just a few icebergs here and there in the lake, like ships on their own courses.

But as we headed up the channel, we got much closer to them. And they were bigger.

And yes, in case you’re wondering. They really do look blue. Depending on the light, sometimes glistening white but at other times, in the shadows, a blue so intense it hurts to look at and yet is impossible to look away from.

Soon the glaciers filled the channel.

Each, more beautiful than the next.

The landscapes and seascapes of this excursion were particularly magnificent. Next, I’ll post some seascapes (with mountains), and then we’ll move to the views on land.

Beautiful Ice, Part 1 – December 24, 2010

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Besides for its jagged peaks and spires and startling crevasses, the most amazing thing about the ice is its color. Wherever it folds in on itself, the ice is blue–often the stunning aquamarine of the clearest tropical waters, but also in places a rich deep blue that wants to hold onto your eyeballs and never let go. Here are some pictures of glacial ice, as true to shape and color as I could get them.

The next post will talk about icebergs. Which, it turns out, are also beautiful.

Fun with crampons – December 24, 2010

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Let me just say, for the record, that I don’t like ice. I don’t like walking on ice. I especially don’t like walking uphill and most especially downhill on ice. (See walkers below, tiny compared to the ice.)

So what am I doing here, crampons strapped to my rented hiking boots, preparing to set out on the ice of this glacier?

That’s me, second from the right, back to the camera, contemplating death via uncontrolled slide into the frigid waters of the lake below.

No, actually, what I’m doing is preparing to have some serious ice-stomping fun. Crampons are great. For an hour and a half, the group marches firmly (this is how you have to walk, wearing crampons) across a landscape of ice that seems to be part of another planet.

We edge around bottomless sinkholes, ford rivers flowing over ice, gape at overhangs of vivid cerulean.

The ice is beautiful, and ultimately, that’s why we’re all here. But more on the sheer beauty of it in the next post.

Big Ice – 12/24/2010

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The thing that neither words nor images convey adequately is the sheer size of the Perito Moreno glacier. But of course I’m going to try.

First, the words. Perito Moreno’s front on Lake Argentina is three miles wide, with an average height of 240 feet. That’s about the height of a twenty-story office building. It’s also about twenty miles long, one arm of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest reserve of fresh water on the planet (after Antarctica and Greenland). And Perito Moreno is one of only a small handful (three?) of glaciers that are growing. It advances about six to ten feet a day.

Distances are large here under the Patagonian mountains and sky. So the glacier may not look like much from a distance.

But when you’re on a tour boat in front of the glacier, you feel small. Really small. The whole boat full of fifty (more or less) people feels small.

Well, actually, compared to the glacier, the boat *is* small. Here’s a photo from the shore, with the boat about halfway across the lake in front of the glacier. I circled the boat in red. I had to, because otherwise you might miss it.

This is A WHOLE LOT OF ICE.

Next post: Trekking on the ice, or fun with crampons.

Jagged Mountains – 12/24/2010

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“I’ve been cut by the beauty of jagged mountains…”

“…and cut by the love that flows like a fountain from God.”

Thanks for the lyrics, Bruce Cockburn. They surely apply to the ice mountains of the Perito Moreno glacier. More in later posts.

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.