In 1995, when Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was less than 60 years old, a group of engineers traveled to the rural highlands outside Pittsburgh to inspect the house’s iconic cantilevered terraces, thrust out over their waterfall in defiance of gravity—and, as it turned out, of good sense. Even before construction was completed in 1937, cracks had appeared in the concrete parapets. By the mid-1990s, the balconies had sagged in some places by more than seven inches. “You could feel them bounce—it was like a diving board,” says Lynda Waggoner, who started guiding tours at Fallingwater as a teenager in 1965 and served as the house-museum’s director from 1996 to 2018. The extravagant gesture that made Fallingwater the most famous modern house in the United States had nearly brought the entire magnificent structure crashing down. 

Hailed almost immediately as Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater was also an uncomfortably apt metaphor for a difficult period in the architect’s career. Wright’s earlier houses, with their open floorplans and horizontal thrust, had helped revolutionize early 20th-century architecture. When images of those so-called Prairie Houses traveled to Berlin in 1910, future godfathers of architectural modernism like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were astounded: Wright had taken the massive structures of the 19th century and exploded them outward, with long, low rooflines that seemed to float free from the walls below. Back in the Midwestern U.S., Wright’s caustic approach to clients and his disregard for convention—including his choice in 1909 to abandon his family and run off with the wife of a former client—made him persona non grata among his patrons. 

By the 1920s, Wright’s hipped roofs and elaborate ornamentation had come to seem almost quaint compared with the glossy, streamlined sophistication of European modernism. When the newly founded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York mounted its landmark 1932 exhibition on modern architecture, the curators relegated Wright to the role of a “half-modern” precursor to the real revolution, which they’d dubbed the International Style. Wright, hungry for adulation, and desperate for work, was enraged by the slight. “I find myself rather a man without a country, architecturally speaking,” he complained in a letter to the architect Philip Johnson, a co-curator of the MoMA show. Fallingwater, commissioned in 1934 as a vacation home by department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann Sr., would be Wright’s opportunity “to beat the internationalists at their own game,” as he reportedly said at the time.

There in the Appalachian backwoods, Wright took key elements of modernism—like cantilevers, flat roofs and ribbon windows—and made them organic, privileging forms and materials that drew on, and integrated with, the natural world. Rather than leaving the edges of his cantilevered balconies razor-straight and dazzlingly white, he rounded their edges and painted them the color of Pueblo adobe. He clad the walls with local sandstone and fronted the cabinets with lustrous North Carolina walnut. Fallingwater made modernism seem romantic, lyrical and deeply American. As the historian Franklin Toker wrote in his 2003 book Fallingwater Rising, the house changed Americans’ view of modernism “from something foreign and suspect to something homegrown and patriotic.”

Fallingwater also resurrected Wright’s moribund career. Before long, pictures of the home were everywhere, especially the indelible shot taken from the base of the falls, the house soaring over those rushing cataracts. In January 1938 alone, Wright graced the cover of Time—with Fallingwater in the background—and Architectural Forum dedicated an entire issue to his work, with the Kaufmann house as his crowning achievement. That month, even MoMA, the site of Wright’s 1932 snub, dedicated a show to the Kaufmann house. Wright was “undoubtedly the world’s greatest living architect,” the critic Lewis Mumford gushed in the New Yorker. “He can swing a cantilever across space, using the method of construction not as a cliché of modernism but as a rational engineering solution of a real problem.”  

Of course, Mumford had only seen the house in pictures and had no idea that those glorious cantilevers were the “real problem.” The sagging, cracking parapets—an engineering error on Wright’s part—never prevented the Kaufmanns from using the house. They did, however, concern Edgar Kaufmann Sr. enough that he measured them regularly from 1941 until his death in 1955. In any event, cracks and deflections are hardly visible in photos, and Fallingwater, perhaps more than any Wright building, makes for “an iconic, unforgettable image,” says architecture historian Barry Bergdoll. 

The engineers who turned up in 1995 did manage to rescue the house from its builder’s dazzling, flawed vision. But to judge Fallingwater based solely on its engineering is to miss the point. Durability alone would never have satisfied Wright’s ambitions, nor would it have won Fallingwater its singular place in American architectural history. In 1963, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a Wright acolyte, donated the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which opened Fallingwater to the public the following year. Over the past six decades, some 6.3 million have visited, mainly laypeople, who tend to love Wright more than architects do. “Unlike a lot of modernist buildings, Fallingwater is a visceral and emotional experience more than an intellectual one,” Waggoner says. It evokes the American desire to exalt nature and dominate it, to claim modernity and reject it. It is an imperfect house, and a perfect expression of the American landscape it inhabits: fragile and well worth saving. 

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Wright-Hand Woman

Too often forgotten, Marion Mahony Griffin was an inventive and remarkable architect

By Michael Snyder

Marion Mahoney graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894—only the second woman in the school’s history to do so. A year later, the Chicago native became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first employee at his upstart architecture firm in her hometown. A brilliant graphic artist with a deep interest in Japanese printmaking, Mahony created the signature aesthetic of Wright’s perspective drawings, bursting with exquisite detail. She also made the drawings for fully half of the 100 lithographs in the 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio, a compendium of Wright’s creations that inspired a generation of European architects, changing the course of 20th-century design. Never quick to cede credit, Wright rarely acknowledged his enormous debt to his brilliant young colleague. 

Indeed, Mahony took over some projects entirely, as when Wright abandoned his family and practice to move to Europe in 1909, leaving Mahony, along with her colleague Hermann V. von Holst, to complete the designs for several houses in Illinois and Michigan. For the landscape designs of some of those projects, she collaborated closely with a former Wright employee named Walter Burley Griffin. The two married in 1911 and, shortly after, submitted a winning plan for Australia’s new federal capital city of Canberra. From 1914 to 1936, the Griffins lived and worked in Australia, dedicating much of their time to town planning and an architecture that could capture and cultivate a spirit of democracy. 

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Michael Snyder is a Mexico City-based journalist specializing in architecture and culture.