Exploring Fallingwater's Sense of Place
By Cara Armstrong
Fallingwater Curator of Buildings and Collections

Students from Miami University of Ohio had the chance to experience Fallingwater up close and personal this winter and spring. Focusing not only on the architecture, but also on the natural and cultural heritage of western Pennsylvania, this first-year, graduate studio explored site interpretation and design processes.

To enable the students to understand Fallingwater at multiple levels, Professor John Reynolds, an architect, Professor Kimberly Hill, a landscape architect, and I had the students design a site-specific interior—a furniture environment for the Servants’ Sitting Room—and a series of speculative interventions along the walking trails on the Bear Run Nature Reserve, on which Fallingwater is located. These exercises were meant to reveal site context and extend the ecological mission of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

Wood conservator Victoria Jefferies, Kerwin Miner (who lived on the Fallingwater site when his father was a caretaker for the property when it was owned by the Kaufmanns), and Fallingwater education and interpretive staff all helped to put Fallingwater in context at diverse levels historically, spatially and temporally.

The studio included two field trips and allowed Fallingwater to serve as our “laboratory” for the discovery, exploration and extension of site relationships. We began the studio in the traditional research arena, with several weeks of extensive reading pertaining to the intellectual experience of Fallingwater.

Design Team Miami University Faculty: John Reynolds Kimberly Hill Miami University Students: Troy Lowell Emily Fernambucq Todd Douglass Scott Later Mauricio Barrera Neil McManaway Brian Green Brandon Guyer Carl Giometti Marcus Knoll Collaborating Consultants: Bill Duerksen, Cabinet Maker Christian Kandzia, architect and photographer, Behnisch & Partner Alfonso Montouri, specialist in collective creativity

Contradiction, anomaly, aberration and the unexpected emerged from group discussions the first evening, which centered on their encounter with the house. Students found themselves at a loss to comprehensively express their experience of site and house. To facilitate their analysis and integration of the sensual and the intellectual, they were encouraged to “play” through a series of interpretive drawings.

Each student used their drawings to create a collage that began to extract a conception of the site “DNA.” This then prompted their preliminary furniture design proposals.

Back on the Miami campus, students worked to further comprehend the connection of architecture and landscape, of object and site, through the conception of a Chinese wedding chest design process problem—an object whose “function” was to reveal the site relationships at Fallingwater through tectonic expression.

The Chinese wedding chest also informed the continued development of individual furniture proposals begun at Fallingwater. Following a critique with members of the Fallingwater staff, students were re-engaged with emotive drawing in a collaborative drawing exercise that established three design teams on the basis of “shared DNA” ideologies. Collaborative furniture proposals were then developed in a team “shared DNA” organizational structure. During a second visit to Fallingwater in March 2004, the three teams coalesced toward the development of a single furniture proposal distilled during reviews with administration, staff and collective reflection.

While on site, students also began the design process for theoretical pavilions “located” on the Bear Run Nature Reserve. Three sites were selected and the student teams were once again engaged in emotive drawing. These interpretation exercises brought site relationships discovered in the earlier design process and furniture design together with the specific content of each pavilion site. This exercise extended the site “DNA” from drawing to object, to furniture and, finally, to the pavilion, while respecting the nuance of site, program and situation.

At the conclusion of the semester, students presented a single, collaborative furniture proposal along with team proposals for each of the three sited pavilions. The successful design work was rooted in place [Fallingwater], expressed the process of making through drawing and material studies, and revealed the identity of the maker through synthetic interpretations of site memory and experience.

Students are now detailing the final working drawings for the furniture piece, which we anticipate installing next year.

I am hopeful that this design method can foster in students an increased sensitivity to the design process and its resulting artifacts, leading us, in small steps, on a path to a more humane, comprehensive understanding of “good design.”

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