As Wright had planned, the two of us could hear the bubbling of the stream as we made our way up the winding, tree-lined road before we ever caught sight of the home itself. When the property was finished in 1937, this gradual unveiling is precisely what his customer, retail mogul Edgar J. Kaufmann, would have witnessed.
At the end of the lengthy road, the structure appeared, and even to a Wright fanatic like myself, it was almost unrecognizable. The masterwork Ben and I thought we knew so well from images left us feeling more dordle than a little lost. The structure seems to teeter and tower above the falls in pictures of the home, beginning with the cover of Time magazine in 1938, when a sketch of it was featured in the backdrop of a portrait of Wright, with its terraces pinwheeling out from a four-story column. However, when seen from a distance among the trees, Fallingwater seemed to be very elongated and diminished in height. Its piled sandstone walls and its soaring, concrete terraces stretched outward in all directions. The impression was of something that was tucked into the slope rather than rising upwards toward the sky.

Wright, like the current caretakers of the property, was too astute to give away the best view in the house so soon (and have since 1964, when it became the first house from the Modernist movement to open as a museum). On our tour, Ben and I discovered that this trick was just the beginning of a long list of sleights of hand Wright used in the construction of his building.

As Wright had planned, the bubbling murmur of the stream accompanied our first steps into the winding, tree-lined lane leading up to the home. When the property was finished in 1937, this gradual unveiling is precisely what his customer, retail mogul Edgar J. Kaufmann, would have witnessed.

At the end of the lengthy road, the building sprang into view, and it was nearly unrecognizable, even to a Wright fanatic like myself. Although Ben and I believed we were familiar with the masterpiece through images, we were left feeling quite lost. The structure seems to teeter and tower above the falls in pictures of the home, beginning with the cover of Time magazine in 1938, when a sketch of it was featured in the backdrop of a portrait of Wright, with its terraces pinwheeling out from a four-story column. However, when seen from a distance among the trees, Fallingwater seemed to be very elongated and diminished in height. Its piled sandstone walls and its soaring, concrete terraces stretched outward in all directions. The impression was of something that was tucked into the slope rather than rising upwards toward the sky.

Wright, like the current caretakers of the property, was too astute to give away the best view in the house so soon (and have since 1964, when it became the first house from the Modernist movement to open as a museum). On our tour, Ben and I discovered that this trick was just the beginning of a long list of sleights of hand Wright used in the construction of his building.