Fallingwater

Fallingwater is Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece and perhaps the most famous house in American architecture. Designed in 1935 and built over a waterfall on Bear Run in the Pennsylvania mountains, its bold concrete terraces cantilever out above the cascading stream, dissolving the boundary between the house and the wild landscape around it. A definitive statement of Wright's 'organic architecture,' it has been celebrated ever since as one of the greatest buildings ever created in the United States.

In the mid-1930s the Pittsburgh department-store magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a weekend retreat on the family's wooded land at Bear Run. The Kaufmanns expected a house with a view of their favorite waterfall; Wright, then in his late sixties and staging a career comeback, instead placed the house directly atop it, in a design he is said to have drawn up in a burst of work as the client traveled to his studio.

Built between 1936 and 1938, Fallingwater is anchored to the rock beside the falls, with reinforced-concrete terraces that cantilever dramatically over the water. Inside, boulders of the site break through the living-room floor, and walls of glass and stone blur the line between indoors and out. It became an instant sensation, landing Wright on the cover of Time magazine and cementing his reputation as America's greatest architect.

The daring cantilevers, under-reinforced for their span, sagged over the decades and were finally stabilized with a post-tensioning system in 2002. The Kaufmanns' son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., gave the house and its grounds to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, and it opened to the public as a museum. In 2019 Fallingwater was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site among a group of Wright's key works.