It was the perfect autumn afternoon in Southern Pennsylvania: bright blue sky, the ombre wooded hills fading from ochre to gold to scarlet. My boyfriend James and I rolled off the Pennsylvania Turnpike onto the back-road country highways undulating through the Laurel Highland hills and into the valley of the Bear Creek Run branch of the Youghiogheny River.
We turned right at a spindly stone monument, which marks the entrance to Fallingwater, a summer house Frank Lloyd Wright completed in 1937.
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I pinned Wright’s Fallingwater on my Google Maps. But I know that for the past three years, whenever we passed its highway exit, returning from some Midwest destination to New York City, I felt a small tug of yearning to see the house suspended over a waterfall.
The occasion of this long-awaited visit was my birthday. Birthdays, when you are a child, are all about wishes fulfilled. Adult birthdays, of course, can’t live up to that: Desires and their fulfillment are not so simple anymore. But now, as we walked through the thick fall foliage, I felt that childlike birthday delight bubbling up, grinning ear-to-ear, party hat strapped in an invisible cone to my head: a kid in a candy store, making out like a bandit with birthday loot.
The entrance hall for Fallingwater is an open-air wood canopy above a walkway, suspended in the woods like a spiderweb, without walls, letting the leaves and afternoon wind blow through. A café, education center and gift shop, connected by thin walkways, spin out from a central, circular reception hall and ticket booth.
The only heir of Pittsburgh’s wealthy Kaufmann family donated Fallingwater and nearly 470 acres of the woods surrounding their summer home to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963. Paul Mayén, the partner of Edgar Kaufmann Jr., built Fallingwater’s welcome pavilion in the late 1970s.
As we waited for our tour to begin, I was practically bouncing up and down in my seat, a small concrete cylinder — one of many that lined the perimeter of the central reception hall — sprouting up organically from the floor, like sanded-down stumps.
The tour guide manufactured a bit of drama into her prologue as we walked the quarter mile to the house, but it certainly wasn’t necessary. As you approach, the drama of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture expands, envelops you and intensifies the further up and further in you go.
Fallingwater is suspended above a waterfall. Although its cantilevered balconies, extending over Bear Creek Run, hover several feet above the falling water, several features connect the house to the streambed below. One, a slender steel staircase, leads from the living room down to a platform just above the waterfall that appears to be floating in the stream.
And water does not just fall outside, but throughout the house — in a curved, cantilevered roof over a staircase walkway; in a wall of curtain glass that falls down the side of the house; in the waxed stone floor that flows like a river away from the granite of the fireplace and in a small stream that falls over a natural boulder preserved in a hallway. The shapes of the waterfall are echoed throughout the house, and the terraces and open windows let in the sound of the falls and the smell and feel of the stream. The whole house is falling water.
In, 2019, Fallingwater and seven other Frank Lloyd Wright properties were placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site List. I can understand why: given it is both in nearly total harmony with the landscape and yet so clearly manufactured, a strange fruit of human invention. It is preternaturally natural, reminiscent of Rivendell from “The Lord of the Rings” films and clearly made of a manic sort of genius — like the hideout of a James Bond villain.
But even more than either Elrond’s or Goldfinger’s house, Fallingwater reminded me of my grandmother’s house, The Rancho, where I spent six months last winter, following her death.
I felt that way, not because The Rancho looks anything like Fallingwater (fewer cantilevered balconies and objets d’art from 700 B.C., for starters), but because a place where you’re from is magic. It’s a place that is not just beautiful, but that makes you a part of the beauty.
Whenever I opened the doors of The Rancho to welcome others during my brief tenure there, I did feel as though I was welcoming them into a marvel of the 20th century. It was my heritage: a place whose beauty I had been knit into like a waterfall. My visitors would see the beauty I saw too: They would ooh and ahh appropriately as they walked into the flagstone sunspace, with windows running the length of the house, and look out into the backyard clearing where deer wandered through at dusk. They would sit on the screen porch, watching the birds, sink into the quiet of the pine woods, let the joy of really being a part of the world — being a creature, living, breathing, hearing, feeling — sink into their bones.
As we drove away from Fallingwater, back into the sea of Pennsylvania trees on fire with autumn, I began to weep. The visit was just as beautiful as I had hoped it would be. And how often does that happen as we grow older? It is not every birthday we feel so full of gratitude — that our desires and our childlike yearning for magic has been met.
In his old age, Edgar would don an anonymous tour guide jacket and lead tours of Fallingwater. At the tour’s conclusion, he would ask: “How did you like my house?”
I think many of us have places like Fallingwater or my grandmother’s house — places where we are from, whose beauty permeates us and shapes us. They may not feature grand architectural coups or make a global heritage list. But they are places where the grandeur of God shines through clearly, both in their beauty and in the love that has made us a part of them. I imagine that is what Edgar hoped I might feel visiting his house: the consolation of being a part of a creation that is so deeply in dialogue with creation, to not just see something beautiful, but be a part of it for an afternoon.
Edga gave his home away and, in turn, received the joy of welcoming millions of guests into a place that communicated a beauty that was not just important to him but part of him. To behold the same beauty — to even understand it together — is, as the poet says, a joy forever.
Photos by Renée Darline Roden