The floors of the house are constructed of broad horizontal cantilevered reinforced concrete slabs that appear to float effortlessly over the stream, for the structural beams are hidden between the flagstone floors and plastered ceilings. The house is anchored to the earth by vertical piers of sandstone quarried 500 feet from the waterfall, the stones set to resemble the natural strata of the rock exposed along the streambed. Fallingwater is also the greatest example of Wright’s capacity to draw the spaces and forms of his architecture out of the very ground on which it is built. As a result, it is the sound of the waterfall, not the view of it, that permeates the experience of Fallingwater. However, Wright sited the house to the north of the stream, above the waterfall, so that the house opens to the south sun. Kaufmann had expected the house to be built to the south of the stream, looking north to the waterfall. Wright’s design is first and foremost a brilliant piece of site planning. In a famous story told by his Fellowship apprentices, Wright drew up the design in the two hours that it took Kaufmann to drive from Milwaukee to Spring Green on a Sunday morning in September 1935.
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After visiting the site for the Kaufmann house in 1934, a full nine months passed without any drawings or other evidence that Wright was working on the design of the house. Founded following the Great Depression, the Taliesin Fellowship was instrumental in Wright’s emergence at the age of 70 from 15 years of obscurity, signaled by the construction of the Johnson Wax Building (1939, Racine, Wisconsin), Taliesin West (1940, Scottsdale, Arizona), the first “Usonian House” for Herbert Jacobs (1937, Madison, Wiscon sin), and Fallingwater.
Fallingwater, as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright named the house that he designed for Edgar and Lillian Kaufmann, was commissioned shortly after the Kaufmanns’ son, Edgar, Jr., joined Wright’s newly formed Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, Wisconsin.