Fallingwater’s place in American culture

“FALLINGWATER Rising” is a big, messy jumble of a book that despite itself keeps the reader engrossed and wondering what will happen next.

“Fallingwater” is the name that department store magnate E.J. Kaufmann gave to the horizontal stone and concrete house that he had Frank Lloyd Wright build for him cantilevered over the waterfalls of Bear Run in the woods southeast of Pittsburgh in 1937. It is -- as author Franklin Toker, an excitable writer, says over and over in his new book -- a house without parallel in the history of architecture.

“We could call Fallingwater architectural manna,” Toker writes. “We respond to it eagerly because it reminds us of those buildings or styles we love most. Depending on our own taste, it attracts us as rational or romantic, abstract or representational, old-fashioned or high-tech. This makes Fallingwater one of the few buildings to be authentically beyond fashion.”

The University of Pittsburgh art historian embraces his subject with the gusto of a popular, not an academic, historian. Leaping from close examination of the documentary record to freewheeling speculation, he tries and mostly succeeds in putting this house, its architect and his patron into the context of U.S. cultural history.

Start with the patron. Kaufmann was the scion of a great merchandising family that created Pittsburgh’s largest department store during the years in which the city was becoming an industrial powerhouse. It is said that in 1917 during World War I, Pittsburgh’s iron, steel and coal output was one-sixth of the world’s gross industrial product.

Imitating the style of previous immigrant families that rose to riches in the city -- like the Fricks, the Mellons and Andrew Carnegie -- Kaufmann built himself a series of spectacular dwelling places, first Georgian, then Norman, then, in Fallingwater, aggressively modern. The relationship between Wright and Kaufmann was odd, for Kaufmann was Jewish and Wright was notorious for his “anti-Jewish invective,” Toker says.

The author devotes much of his book to demonstrating that it was Kaufmann -- not his son, E.J. Jr., as the son later claimed -- who pressed for the selection of Wright to design a weekend house in the woods. The son, something of an architect himself, claimed his father never really understood modern architecture. Toker acknowledges the elder Kaufmann’s apparent fickleness of taste, but he argues that is exactly what merchants do: “jump from style to style as the market demands.”

As evidence of the elder Kaufmann’s importance as a taste-making patron of architecture, Toker cites the elegantly severe Palm Springs house Kaufmann commissioned from architect Richard Neutra in 1947. In a little more than a decade, Kaufmann went from the romantic, organic “American” style Wright favored to the Bauhaus-influenced International Style represented by his former proteges, Neutra and the other preeminent Los Angeles emigre architect, R.M. Schindler, both of whom the egomaniacal Wright despised.

If Toker’s disputations with the younger Kaufmann’s claims grow wearisome at times, he is compelling in his account of the importance of Henry Luce and his publications Time, Life and Architectural Forum in fostering the reputations of Fallingwater and its architect. More than once, Luce put Wright on Time’s cover and called him “the greatest” architect -- an emblem of Luce’s power over U.S. taste and thought. Wright’s career was faltering until Fallingwater -- and Luce -- put him securely on the map again.

Toker discusses the eventual failure of the cantilevers to support the house and the complex and costly repairs needed to stabilize them. The house, given to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy by the younger Kaufmann, is now open to visitors who can marvel at its setting and sometimes quail beneath its low ceilings (typically 6 feet, 4 1/4 inches). That’s OK, says the ever-upbeat Toker, you’re supposed to look from the interior of the house through its bright but low windows as if from a cave.

“There never was a house like Fallingwater before,” Toker concludes lovingly, “and there will never be a house like Fallingwater again.”