Fallingwater Celebrates Its 70th Birthday

"E. J., we’ve been waiting for you!” was Frank Lloyd Wright’s greeting to Edgar Kaufmann, Sr, upon arriving at Wright’s Wisconsin studio — Taliesin — on September 22, 1935. Kaufmann had also been waiting — more than nine months — to see Wright’s ideas for a new country lodge at Bear Run. Since Wright’s site visit the year before, both architect and client had been dreaming about what kind of house could grace this forest property with its cascading mountain stream. Wright’s dreams were large, and the result surprised and delighted the forward-thinking Kaufmann: a house perched OVER a 20-foot waterfall.

Seventy years have passed since America’s highly celebrated architect — nearly 70 years old himself — produced the design for Fallingwater. For many years, Wright’s apprentices have described the “birth” of this major commission as surprisingly fast. According to Edgar Tafel, Kaufmann was already on the road from Milwaukee to Taliesin before Wright actually sat down at the drafting table. “The design just poured out of him. Pencils were used up as fast as we could sharpen them,” he has recalled. In about two hours, Wright drew at least two preliminary drawings, ready when Kaufmann arrived. Although less detailed than in Wright’s subsequent drawings, the basic design ideas expressed in these early sketches changed little, from conception to construction.

In a 1940s essay for the Museum of Modern Art, Edgar Kaufmann described his fascination with the early drawings, confessing he did not readily understand Wright’s intentions. It was only as he walked the site later with his family, drawings in hand, that “a new vision of the house grew upon me.” For Kaufmann it was his “first lesson in organic architecture,” and the beginning of a long relationship with the architect, best summarized in the essay’s title: “To Meet - To Know - To Battle - To Love - Frank Lloyd Wright” available at Fallingwater’s museum shop in the book, The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Museum of Modern Art, 1940.

Above Photo: Wright and his apprentices at Taliesin, from the January 1938 issue of “Architectural Forum.” To the far right are the apprentices who worked at Fallingwater: Bob Mosher (at right) and Wes Peters (both leaning on drafting table) and Edgar Tafel (standing behind Mosher).

Photo courtesy of Chicago Historical Society, Hedrich-Blessing, HB-04414-H.

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