Frank Lloyd Wright put the house on the waterfall so you couldn't see it.
The Kaufmann family expected their weekend house to face the falls on Bear Run. Wright built it right on top of them instead: 'I want you to live with the waterfall, not to look at it.' Engineers warned against the design, the terraces sagged from day one, and the house became an icon anyway.
Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a Pittsburgh department-store owner, hired Frank Lloyd Wright in late 1934 to design a retreat on land his family owned in the Pennsylvania woods. Wright was 67 and had built only two buildings in six years. The Kaufmanns assumed the house would sit downstream, looking at the waterfalls. But that would have faced north, with poor light, so Wright set it over the falls, with concrete terraces cantilevered out like rock ledges, supported only at one end.
A popular story says Wright ignored the job for nine months, then dashed off the design in the two hours it took Kaufmann to arrive. The fuller account is more careful: the sketches were indeed finished when Kaufmann turned up that day in September 1935, but Wright had already worked the plan out in his head and described it in letters.
Construction was fraught. Engineers in Pittsburgh, asked to check the experimental plans, advised against building at all, listing at least eight structural problems. When Kaufmann had contractors add extra steel reinforcement, Wright was furious, believing the added weight would overload the terraces, and wrote that without the client's confidence it could all go 'to hell'. The builders also failed to angle the formwork to allow for settling, and when it came off the first-floor terrace sank about 4.4 centimetres. At first, the house leaked in 50 places.
The sag kept growing for decades, reaching about 18 centimetres at the terrace ends, and computer models suggested a risk of collapse. From 2001 engineers post-tensioned the slabs, threading high-strength steel cables through the beams to stop further movement. Opened to the public in 1964, Fallingwater is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing of Wright's 20th-century works, and one of the most discussed houses ever built.
Source: Wikipedia — Fallingwater · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
