Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House
An oddly "spiritual" agglomeration of rectilinear glass, concrete and stone masses set on a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, Wright's Fallingwater house made America fall in love with modernist architecture, according to this engrossing study. Architectural historian Toker (Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait) approaches the building as a tense but fruitful collaboration between Wright's genius and the encouragement given it by his patron, Pittsburgh department store magnate E. J. Kaufmann, whom Toker credits with being "almost... the coarchitect" of the house. He gives a detailed, sometimes hour-by-hour account of Wright's planning process, the engineering hurdles surmounted in realizing his structurally daring design, the critical and public acclaim the house has elicited through the years and its impact on American culture in everything from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead to motifs in suburban tract housing. He sets the story against an erudite but accessible history of the rise of modernism and Wright's antagonism toward the German Bauhaus and International Style architects, whose austere, mechanistic stylings he denounced even as he was adapting and humanizing them to suit American tastes. Toker sometimes makes too much, with little but speculation to go on, of Kaufmann's contribution to the project, at one point comparing the relationship between Wright and Kaufmann to Christ's bond with St. Peter. But the trenchant analysis of Wright's character and creativity, the often lyrical evocations of his buildings, and the opinionated but insightful overview of the modernist intellectual milieu of the 1930s make the book a wonderful exploration of the psychological and social meaning of architecture. Photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.