Students Design Furniture in Accordance
with Fallingwater’s “Site DNA”

Fallingwater has always been about growth and transformation. In his book, Fallingwater, A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House, Edgar Kaufmann, jr. (sic) says, “Fallingwater grew and still grows ... it is rooted in the idea of living relationships.” Fallingwater transformed Frank Lloyd Wright’s lagging career, landing him on the cover of Time magazine in 1938.

A retreat from an industrial city, Fallingwater provided the Kaufmann family with the rejuvenation of time spent in nature. As it evolved into a museum, Fallingwater grew from playing host to Kaufmann family and friends to welcoming nearly 135,000 annual visitors with its four millionth guest arriving in August 2006.

To deal with its changing roles, rooms have taken on different functions. Kaufmann, jr. was the first to make such a change when he turned the area that was intended for his bedroom into a study. He also encouraged the Servants Quarters to be used as office space and the carports to be transformed into the Membership Theater after he entrusted Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

The Servants’ Sitting Room, an addition added to the Main House kitchen in the
1940s for a staff of four, now acts as a waiting room between tours for up to 16
guides per day. To better accommodate this staff, the Servants Sitting Room got a transformation of its own.

Furniture designed specifically for the room by a group of ten graduate students from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, was installed in September. The students
interviewed guide staff and explored the site in terms of its codes or “Site DNA” and the house as a constructed landscape that critically and experientially responded to sites codes or “DNA.”

“Working with the students really gave us insight into the process of design,” says Fallingwater guide and Education Coordinator Jennifer Heibert. “We got to see how the design evolved through intuition and logic and how they, the students/designers, responded to us, the client.”

When Kaufmann jr. donated Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963, he envisioned the site not only as a place where visitors would come to experience Fallingwater, but also as a place where a deeper experience could occur. The graduate students’ in-depth interaction with house and landscape allowed them to do just that. Through their intimate site experiences, they created new forms, sensitive to the site’s changing needs. Looking at the furniture, we see Fallingwater’s site codes through the students’ eyes; in it, we can sense delight in the tactility of materials, explorations of rootedness and extension, and interest in the intersection of materials and ideas.

Students worked collaboratively with each other and cabinet-maker Bill Duerksen in constructing and detailing the pieces that included a bench element with integrated glass surfaces and two organically conceived freestanding chairs. Like some of Wright’s furniture in the house, such as the extending dining table, this furniture can transform as well. Modular seating units from the bench can be removed to use as seating in other areas of the house, such as at fireside for intimate gatherings, and the bench may be used as a staging area for caterers during special events.

“We didn’t want to mimic Frank Lloyd Wright, but we wanted to make sure the
work intersected with the spirit of the house and its relationship to the land,” says Professor John Reynolds, the students’ studio instructor. He believes what the students learned while working on the project, includes “a love for the land, how to trust themselves and each other, how to make something and take it through budget and construction, how to work in a group, how to work on an object of great profile with professionalism and care, how to make something of high quality specific to its site and user.”

“This experience was a transformation for us; it gave us an increased sensitivity to the nuances and narratives of the design process and the artifacts that result from it,” says Reynolds. “The design process we undertook where the hand becomes, as Alvaro Malo reminds us, an ‘organ of knowledge’ leads us, in small steps, on a path to a more humane world.”

Bill Duerksen’s Fallingwater reproduction furniture is available through the Fallingwater Museum Shop at www.wpcshop.com.