Listed among Smithsonian‘s Life List of 28 places “to visit before you die”. Fallingwater opened a new chapter in American architecture, and is perhaps rightly considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest work.
The home was built partly over a waterfall on Bear Run in the Mill Run section of Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains. The house was designed as a weekend home for the family of Liliane Kaufmann and her husband, Edgar J. Kaufmann, owner of Kaufmann’s department store
The structural design for Fallingwater was undertaken by Wright in association with staff engineers Mendel Glickman and William Wesley Peters, who had been responsible for the columns featured in Wright’s revolutionary design for the Johnson Wax Headquarters. For the cantilevered floors, Wright and his team used upside-down, T-shaped beams integrated into a monolithic concrete slab which both formed the ceiling of the space below and provided resistance against compression.
The original estimated cost for building Fallingwater was US$35,000. The final cost for the home and guest house was $155,000. The total project price of $155,000, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of about $2.7 million in 2016. The cost of restoration was estimated to be $11.5 million in 2001.
Fallingwater was the family’s weekend home from 1937 until 1963, when Kaufmann, jr., donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. In 1964, it was opened to the public as a museum.