Master. Genius. Revolutionary. Admirers of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright seem to be unable to speak of him without resorting to grandiose labels. Even Wright himself fell into the groove, maybe even outdoing them all, when he reportedly called himself the World's Greatest Architect.
But Wright didn't limit himself to grand designs for rich families and foundations. Over the course of his 91-year life, he designed hotels, museums, office buildings, churches, a synagogue and even a gas station. But perhaps most of all, in keeping with his idealistic views of democracy and the middle class, Wright designed homes. Nestled deep in the forests and hills of western Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands region are two of his creations—the famous Fallingwater and its lesser-known neighbor, Kentuck Knob. When I was at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Pittsburgh this October, I decided to combat my architectural illiteracy by going on a field trip to the two Wright houses.
The tour, titled "Origins of Environmental Architecture: The Wright Stuff," was intended to show some of the ways in which Wright worked with the environment, including building with local materials and using design and orientation as climate controls. Our tour leaders, freelance journalist Judy Ostrow and Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Chuck Quirmbach, made the connection to the modern-day green-building movement by including Jennifer Constable of the Rocky Mountain Institute in the program. But despite the wealth of information and story ideas our able leaders provided, it was the houses themselves, and their stunning location, that stole the show.
Our day started with a 90-minute bus ride through the western Pennsylvania countryside. As Route 381 wound past white clapboard churches, roadside stands hawking pumpkins and apple cider, ramshackle houses with school buses parked in the front yards, and fields of dried corn stalks, we chatted and exclaimed about the fall foliage. But our trip leaders had more in store for us.
Keiran Murphy of Taliesin Preservation, Inc., which operates Wright's estate in Spring Green, Wis., opened the program with an overview of Wright's life and artistic influences. One of the biggest influences on the young Wright, Murphy told us, was a toy his mother brought home from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.
"I call Froebel Gifts 'Legos with a purpose,'" she said.
She described The Froebel Gifts—which are usually preceded with "The," as if to distinguish them from all those froebel gift knock-offs—as wooden balls, toothpicks and pieces of yarn designed to get more complicated as a child ages. The concept was sufficiently vague that some of us doubted their existence, until a dusty box of The Froebel Gifts turned up later that day in Kentuck Knob, the Wright-designed home that was the second stop on our trip.
I don't know much about Frank Lloyd Wright, but if he was half as obsessed with The Froebel Gifts as his admirers seem to be, you might say he was a "Lego-maniac." Still, the man grew up to design the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and the Guggenheim in New York, so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
At Fallingwater, the first stop on our trip, the word of the day was "cantilever." As far as I have been able to figure, a cantilever is a horizontal structure that sticks out beyond its vertical supports, seeming to defy gravity. When cantilevers are thick slabs of poured concrete, as they are at Fallingwater, they seem to me like a Very Bad Idea. Wright must have known what he was doing, though, because the only problem so far with these particular cantilevers has been water damage. Water, which is abundant in this damp, mossy forest, tends to pool on the flat rooftops. Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the home's owner, had to reinforce the roofs and terraces last year because they were starting to bow under the weight of all that water and concrete. Without reinforcement, the cantilevers may one day have given "Fallingwater" new meaning.
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| Fallingwater (Photo/Harold Corsini) |
The house was commissioned by the Kaufmann family, friends of Wright and owners of a successful Pittsburgh department store. They had a huge chunk of second-growth, primarily hardwood and rhododendron forest in the gorgeous Laurel Highlands region. In 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Kaufmanns asked Wright to build a home they could escape to on weekends and holidays. The house, which at more than 5,300 square feet is hardly a rustic cabin, literally straddles a waterfall.
"They simply asked to be near the waterfall," quipped Katy Kifer, our tour guide, explaining that the Kaufmanns imagined their home on the adjacent hillside with a view of the falls.
Despite the audacity of its placement, the house was designed to blend in with the vertical rock outcroppings and horizontal ledges that appear here and there among the trees. Its ceilings are low, and the walls on the first floor are made almost entirely of glass. Strangely, all those windows allow no view of ground or sky, which is extremely disconcerting. Several members of my group complained of claustrophobia. It takes a master to make people feel claustrophobic in a house with 180-degree views, but Wright is nothing if not a master.
Upstairs, the bedrooms are small and cave-like, which Kifer explained was because Wright "felt very strongly that architecture first and foremost will shelter." Each bedroom has its own bathroom, complete with what I am certain are The World's Shortest Toilets.
"There was a health fad at that time," Kifer told us enigmatically, leaving us to imagine exactly what sort of health fad would require a person to squat over a knee-high toilet.
Apparently it was a fad that Wright believed in deeply. Kentuck Knob, designed about 20 years after Fallingwater, differs from its cousin in many ways, but one thing both houses have in common is their ridiculous toilets.
Kentuck Knob, located about 7 miles south of Fallingwater, is an example of Wright's Usonian architecture. Marianne Skvarla, our tour guide at Kentuck Knob, said the term "Usonian" was probably coined by Wright from "United States of North America." In essence, Skvarla told us, Usonian means "universal homes to serve the masses."
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| Kentuck Knob (Photo/Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau) |
Wright felt strongly that the United States needed to create its own brand of architecture, and if "Usonian" sounds suspiciously close to "utopian," that might be no accident. Skvarla said Wright's Usonian homes were meant to herald the dawn of an idealized society in America, which apparently would include middle-income families living in geometrically-shaped homes designed by Wright.
Kentuck Knob is, at least in some ways, not a particularly good example of Usonian architecture. At 2,300 square feet, it is unlikely the masses could afford to live there. In fact, the house is now owned by Lord Peter Palumbo, a British gentleman who picked up the house in 1986 to add to his collection. Still, Lord Palumbo isn't stingy. He opened the house to the public in 1996, and although he and his family still come to western Pennsylvania several times a year to visit their Usonian home, they now stay in another estate nearby so they don't have to disturb the daily parade of tourists.
Kentuck Knob was built for the allegedly middle-income Hagan family in the 1950s, for the immodest sum (in the 1950s, remember) of $95,000. The hexagonal house, wrapped around a rather utilitarian gravel courtyard, looks like a cross between a modern art museum and the Brady Bunch house. Inside, the rooms seem strung together like a series of train cars. Several rooms are connected by hallways that are only 21 inches wide, a design that forced some visitors to walk through sideways.
"Mr. Wright did say if it was good enough for a boxcar it'll work in your home," Skvarla said.
But the hallways aren't just a close approximation of a mine shaft; they're also an illustration of Wright's concept of "compression and release." Simply put, it means that after you've squeezed through one of those hallways, the rooms will feel spacious by comparison.
Outside, it's a short walk to The View, which everyone in my group was encouraged to check out. Wright refused to design the Hagans' house for the top of the hill (the "knob" that gave the house its name). "You will lose your hill," he told them. As we walked away from the bustle of tour groups and out to the clearing that overlooks the foliage-covered hills, hay fields and a big red barn, our group hushed. That's when Wright's genius suddenly came home to me.
I may not really understand the concept of a cantilever, or the benefits of a midget toilet, but a man who refused to build a house on a hilltop—who nestled it back in the shade and slanting sunlight of a western Pennsylvania wood and left the view, and its silence, alone—that man is someone I feel I can relate to.
For more information:
Fallingwater: www.wpconline.org/fallingwaterhome.htm
Kentuck Knob: www.kentuckknob.com
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: www.franklloydwright.org
Frank Lloyd Wright Web site by PBS: www.pbs.org/flw
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