See This Now: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater House

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  04.02.09 | 12:16 PM ET

Photo by pablo.sanchez via Flickr, (Creative Commons)

Will T.C. Boyle’s new novel, The Women, and Nancy Horan’s novel, Loving Frank—both about Frank Lloyd Wright and the women in his life—boost interest in Wright’s architecture and visits to the houses he designed? Perhaps, but Wright’s buildings are hardly hurting for visitors.

Wright’s Fallingwater house, which Time magazine declared his “most beautiful job” shortly after it was completed in 1937, has seen millions of visitors over the years. Located 50 miles from Pittsburgh, it’s worthy of adoration, spanning a waterfall and still somehow blending nearly seamlessly into the landscape. By all accounts, it was the inspiration for Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The New Yorker once called it “Wright’s extraordinary essay in horizontal space.”

See it now: The house is open to visitors six days a week from mid-March through Thanksgiving.

Architecture connoisseurs have another option. The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is offering an All-Access Fallingwater tour April 25-28. It takes in the Fallingwater house and other highlights of Pittsburgh-area architecture, including a couple of Lloyd Wright-designed Usonian homes, Kentuck Knob and the Duncan House. At $1,795, which includes accommodations in a four-star hotel, it’s not cheap, but it could be well worth it for Wright aficionados. They get more time than the average visitor to explore the house—especially the dramatic living room.

“It’s the first room you enter and it’s over the falling water,” the Preservation Trust’s Patti Bigelow told me. “There’s almost like this glass enclosure you can roll back and then there’s a staircase that goes down to the waterfall. It’s everyone’s first awe experience once they get inside the home.”



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