Genius Gets Some Help

Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest house strikes a bracing balance between opposites. It seems to be soaring through the air even though it’s firmly anchored to the ground. It evokes our instinctive need to seek shelter in caves, yet it recalls our equally strong desire to peer off the edges of cliffs. It appears to be in complete harmony with nature, yet it also appears distinctly man-made.

But the most precarious of all the balances associated with the structure known as Fallingwater has more to do with physics than with aesthetics: Six years ago, it became clear that if nothing was done to shore up the house’s heroic projecting terraces, they eventually would collapse into the tumbling stream below.

To anyone familiar with the house, now 64 years old, the news came like a thunderclap, the equivalent of learning that Beethoven had gotten the harmonies wrong in his Fifth Symphony or that Picasso’s hand had faltered as he painted “Guernica.”

Geniuses aren’t supposed to make mistakes.

Yet geniuses probably are more prone than the rest of us to push things to--or beyond--their limits. Now with an $11.5-million, five-year renovation nearly concluded, that seems to be precisely what has happened at Fallingwater. It has taken the latest structural technology to rescue Wright’s masterpiece from the architect’s stupendous overreaching.

Masterminded by New York City engineer Robert Silman, the structural fix has corrected the problems that threatened to destroy Fallingwater and renewed the house that the American Institute of Architects in 1991 voted the best work ever designed by an American architect. The project is scheduled to be completed in October.

“The house won’t have looked this good since it opened,” promises Lynda Waggoner, Fallingwater’s director and vice president of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the nonprofit group that has owned and operated the house since 1963.

It is an extraordinary time to visit Fallingwater, 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh and three miles south of the nearest town, Mill Run. In early August, the woods around the house were lush, and Bear Run, the stream it stretches over, was moving smartly. Enough of the house was back in place that it looked like Fallingwater. Yet there were spots where the underlying structure remained exposed, like a life-size cutaway diagram.

Plainly visible on the house’s east terrace, for example, was a concrete beam almost big enough to carry a bridge over an expressway. Except, of course, Fallingwater isn’t a bridge. It’s based on the structural principle of the cantilever, in which a horizontal beam extends beyond a vertical support. Think of a diving board on steroids.

At Fallingwater, the cantilevered portion of the main floor, which rises directly above the waterfalls that give the house its name, weighs 75 tons, according to John Matteo, Silman’s project manager. The master bedroom terrace weighs nearly 50 tons. Ironically, all of this heavy lifting creates the impression of incredible lightness.

It is no accident that a visitor feels compelled to applaud this structural drama. Long before the current crop of “spectacle” buildings--such as Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum addition, which flaunts a moving sunshade that is wider than the wings of a 747--Fallingwater had the market cornered on gravity-defying, jaw-dropping architecture.

Although the structural undergirding of the terraces is one of the house’s big surprises, the other shock, paradoxically, is that Fallingwater turns out to be far more intimate than it looks in the pictures of the mid-20th century photographers who were all too eager to emphasize its monumental form.

Anybody who walks through the big but cave-like living room, the tiny kitchen or the ample but hardly sprawling bedrooms will come away with a distinctly different impression: Fallingwater is a house--a grand house, to be sure--but not a palace. It’s 5,330 square feet, and nearly half of that, 2,445 square feet, is the floor space of the terraces.

The house is filled with artful contrasts, like the one between the smooth, sleek terraces and the highly textured walls of Pottsville sandstone, which was quarried just downstream. And while Fallingwater thrusts horizontally through space, Wright also reveled in the vertical dimension with elements such a stairwell that leads from the living room to a landing just upstream of the waterfalls. The stairs poetically underscore the house’s grand theme of uniting man and nature.

Wright designed Fallingwater for the family of Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., whose son, Edgar Jr., was one of the apprentices in the architect’s Taliesin Fellowship, the school Wright invented to give him a source of income that would him see him through the Depression.

“The Kaufmanns fell at once under Wright’s spell,” Brendan Gill wrote in “Many Masks,” his 1987 Wright biography, “and to do so was, of course, inevitably, to spend money.” According to Waggoner, the Kaufmanns’ budget for Fallingwater was $45,000. The actual cost of the house, she adds, was $155,000, excluding Wright’s fee of $8,000.

For years, the Kaufmanns had camped at the site, swimming in shallow pools beneath the waterfalls, sunning themselves on a large, smooth boulder that overhung the falls and enjoying views from a spot on the opposite bank. So they were taken aback when Wright showed them a design that put the house over the falls, following the example of a cantilevering rock there.

When the elder Kaufmann asked why the family wouldn’t be able to see the waterfall from the house, Wright replied, “E.J., I want you to live with the waterfall, not to look at it.”

It is indeed odd to be at Fallingwater, which Wright (not the owners) named, and to be forced to bend over the terrace walls to see the waterfall below. But you can easily look downstream and see water spilling over another set of rocks. And wherever you are in the house, you can hear the water.

When the last tour ends at dusk, as Harvard architectural historian Neil Levine has written, “the natural reaction is to assume that as the lights are turned off in the house the falls will be shut off with them.” When that doesn’t happen, Levine adds, “one begins to grasp the complex and irreducible reality of Fallingwater.”

But Fallingwater’s structural woes have been all too reducible: Even before the house was finished in 1938, its terraces sagged and cracked. By the mid-1990s, the main-floor terrace was sagging by as much as seven inches. Although other Wright buildings, including Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., have suffered structural woes deriving from the architect’s preference for the cantilever, those problems paled next to Fallingwater’s, which represented Wright’s most dramatic--and risky--use of the device.

The elder Kaufmann apparently never felt certain that the building was structurally sound. Wright may not have either, although he defended his design when engineers consulted by Kaufmann called it dangerous.

“It’s fascinating that Wright didn’t promote the building, especially at a time in his career when he wanted to be out there,” Waggoner says, alluding to the architect’s low status in the 1930s, when many wrongly perceived him as a has-been.

Perhaps Wright overreached in an effort to one-up his rivals from Europe, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the champions of International Style modernism who threatened to relegate him to the ash heap of architectural history. Yet if Fallingwater proved that Wright could beat his rivals at their own game, his sleek terraces exploding into space in a way that was unprecedented, even Wright could not defeat the force of gravity.

In the mid-1990s, a University of Virginia graduate student in engineering, John Paul Huguley, ran computer models that raised the possibility that Fallingwater’s main-floor terrace might be in trouble. That led Waggoner to consult engineer Silman, whose credits include fixing the structural problems associated with the “wigwam” roof at Wright’s Wingspread house in Racine, Wis.

Using radar to perform the equivalent of a noninvasive diagnosis, Silman’s team concluded that although the main-floor and master bedroom cantilevers appear to support themselves independently, they’re actually interdependent, with the main-floor cantilever supporting both. The key clue: T-shaped window supports, known as mullions, were embedded in the walls of the main-floor terrace to support the master bedroom terrace.

“The living room terrace works on its own,” says project manager Matteo. “When you add the substantial load of the master terrace above, it doesn’t.” Simply put, there wasn’t enough reinforcing steel in the concrete beams to support the main-floor cantilever.

After Silman reached that conclusion in 1996, the main-floor terraces were shored up the next year with temporary steel supports and Fallingwater was, in effect, ordered to the gym for a strict regimen of weight-lifting.

Construction workers removed sandstone floors and built-in furniture showing the effects of more than six decades of humidity from the adjoining stream. (The furniture was later cleaned and conserved.) The workers stripped both the terraces and two-thirds of the house’s living room down to their faltering, steel-reinforced concrete beams. Then they placed new steel cables alongside the beams and tightened the cables with hydraulic jacks, giving the faltering old bones the extra muscle they needed to lift the house over the waterfalls. The technique, known as “post-tensioning,” has been widely used since World War II but rarely in historic preservation.

The effort, which stopped the sagging rather than reverse it, was completed in March, and nobody worries about the terraces falling into the stream these days. Thetemporary steel shoring will be removed in the fall after the stairs that lead from the living room to the stream has been repaired.

Even so, visitors to Fallingwater still hear both the whir of construction workers’ drills and “the music of the stream,” as Wright called it. Workers are reassembling sandstone floors like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and installing new waterproofing membranes to plug the leaks that so often plague Wright’s flat-roofed houses. “I won’t guarantee the roof,” Waggoner quips.

Does the renovation diminish Wright’s accomplishment? Perhaps. His design surely exceeded the limits of the technology available to him.

But if he did go too far, think, too, of where he’s brought us. And think of the world without Fallingwater. It’s like imagining life without Beethoven’s Fifth or Picasso’s “Guernica”: which is, of course, unimaginable. Instead of cutting Wright down to size, a visit to Fallingwater merely confirms that he was, and remains, America’s greatest architect. More important, we can see his masterpiece as a living, heavy-lifting work of architecture, not simply as a precious icon floating above a stream.

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Blair Kamin is the architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.