The Harmony of Wright S Fallingwater House

Wright's Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater at HOUSE FOUR: The House on a Waterfall (1935-37) is an architectural work that is harmonious with its natural surroundings. Wright uses space, materials, context and structure to effect this harmony. For instance, its cantilever balconies jut out over the rocks within the waterfall in a way that makes it look as though the house were a part of the natural structure in the wild. Yet it also possesses that Frank Lloyd Wright style -- the emphasis of lines and flats in a kind of minimalist fashion that exudes simplicity of soul as well as modern sophistication, allowing the house to hold its own and have its own identity even in these woods where it is also a part of the discourse between wild and civilization.

The house is literally situated over a waterfall in the woods. The beauty of the landscape is preserved and in a Frank Lloyd Wright home, landscape and surroundings are as significant and vital as the building itself. The two should be harmonious. Thus, the trees are still standing and shoot up perpendicularly from the horizontals that jut out at uneven lengths and directions at the front of the home that overlooks the waterfall. These horizontals, whether balconies or roofs are like the limbs of the trees overhead -- and the trunks of these same trees are reflected in the perpendicular, trunk-like structure of the core of the home, which even has a bark-like faAade, perfectly mirroring the wooded surroundings. The home, in other words, is like an architectural tree, its core acting as the trunk, and its floors and sections acting as branches reaching out into the wild.

This is Wright's signature or trademark style -- his instance upon the use of horizontals, line and perpendiculars to give off a geometrical yet harmonious faAade that reflects the landscape, the environment, the setting -- and at the same time that transcends the viewer of the work towards a more spiritual enlightenment by adhering to the directive of Sullivan (1896): that "form ever follows function" (p. 408). For Wright, the function of architecture was not simply to house but also to illustrate a fundamental principle of imagination -- the driving force of life and creativity -- a participation in the spiritual enlightenment of the world. Wright viewed it as "the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods and men, to put man into possession of his own earth" (Pfieffer, 1988, p. 48). Nowhere is this better reflected than in the Waterfall House, which sits atop the waterfall as though owning it, indicating that the architect of this work is truly in possession of the earth.

In this sense, the home can also be viewed as a means of getting back to nature. Indeed, the materials used reflect nature as well: Wright used rock quarried from the same woods to reflect the rock base and the rocks jutting out of the waterfall below the house; Wright also used ochre-colored concrete to reflect the color of the backs of leaves. He used steel that was painted red to indicate that iron came from the earth and was transformed into this material by way of fire; and he used large sections of horizontal, clear glass to make the home as see-through and communing with nature as possible, so that the inhabitant could feel that he was one with his surroundings everywhere he went inside the home. The waterfall could also be heard below the home as well, which completed the effect of unity and harmony.