Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House - Softcover

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Franklin Toker, a professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, has published books on church architecture in French Canada, the ancient cathedral of Florence (which he excavated), and the architecture and urbanism of Pittsburgh. He has won both the Porter Prize and the Hitchcock Award. Born in Montreal, he was educated at McGill University, Oberlin College, and Harvard University. A past president of the Society of Architectural Historians, Toker lives with his family in Pittsburgh.

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"Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.
When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul-"the smartest retailer in America"-and a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture. It was an unlikely collaboration: the Jewish merchant who had little concern for modern architecture and the brilliant modernist who was leery of Jews. But the two men collaborated to produce an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance that brought international fame to them both and confirmed Wright's position as the greatest architect of the twentieth century.
"Fallingwater Rising is also an enthralling family drama, involving Kaufmann, his beautiful cousin/wife, Liliane, and their son, Edgar Jr., whose own role in the creation of Fallingwater and its ongoing reputation is central to the story. Involving such key figures of the l930s as Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Ayn Rand, and Franklin Roosevelt, "Fallingwater Rising shows us how E. J. Kaufmann's house became not just Wright's masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life.
One of the pleasures of the book is its rich evocation of the upper-crust society of Pittsburgh-Carnegie, Frick, the Mellons-a society that wassocially reactionary but luxury-loving and baronial in its tastes, hobbies, and sexual attitudes (Kaufmann had so many mistresses that his store issued them distinctive charge plates they could use without paying).
Franklin Toker has been studying Fallingwater for eighteen years. No one but he could have given us this compelling saga of the most famous private house in the world and the dramatic personal story of the fascinating people who made and used it.
A major contribution to both architectural and social history.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE DEAD MAN OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE PLANS A COMEBACK

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.   -Oscar Wilde

A history of Fallingwater must begin with Frank Lloyd Wright, because he conceived a house sailing over the waterfall on Bear Run long before E. J. Kaufmann dared contemplate building it. But the Wright of our story is not the bombastic "greatest architect in history" that he became. Rather he is a Depression-era edition, a chastened architect who would draw life from his most famous building fully as much as it drew life from him.

When he died in 1959, still active at the age of ninety-one, Wright was the most famous architect in the world, literally. He had by then been practicing his craft for more than seventy years, during which he completed over four hundred buildings and worked on twice that many projects that were left unbuilt. His career is without parallel in the history of architecture. Painters can finish a thousand times more works than architects because a canvas demands little time and less money. Architects by contrast devote endless amounts of their energy and their clients' dollars to produce a significant body of work.

Because Wright lived so long, we think of his career as unidirectional, always going up. But what is fascinating about the career are not the heights of success but the fallows during which he produced few buildings but incubated the ideas he would use to brilliant effect later. The longest of these droughts stretched from the completion of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo in 1922 to the design of Fallingwater in 1935. Particularly galling to Wright was the second half of the drought, during which he completed just two buildings: a house for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones in Tulsa in 1929, and another for Malcolm Willey in Minneapolis four years later.

While Wright served as the model for the architect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead, in the 1930s his difficulties were far greater than those facing his fictional counterpart. Roark had enemies, but he was still young and had fine prospects before him. Not so Wright. By the mid-1930s Wright was nearing seventy (he was born in 1867, although he claimed 1869), and his promise was as spent as his youth. He retained a certain notoriety among architects and laypersons, but that was mainly as an outrageous character who was good for quotes on a slow news day, not as the trailblazer of modern architecture he had been decades earlier.

John Cushman Fistere, writing in the December 1931 Vanity Fair, was typical of the critics who saw Wright as finished:

Nevertheless there are many who believe that Mr. Wright is more genius than architect, and who justify their opinion by pointing to his characteristic idiosyncrasies, and to the still more significant fact that he has designed comparatively few buildings to support his manifold theories. Even his most zealous disciples have difficulty in listing his actual achievements: the Larkin factory, "that hotel in Japan," and the glass and steel apartment house for New York that has never been built. As an architectural theorist, Mr. Wright has no superior; but as an architect he has little to contribute for comparison.*

By the 1930s even many of Wright's admirers were resigned to his disappearance from the central stage of modernism. In 1936 the New York architect Harold Sterner was forced to admit:

In Europe the names of Sullivan and Wright are famous and respected, but both of these men were given relatively few opportunities to practice their genius, and now Sullivan is long since dead and Frank Lloyd Wright [is] approaching the end of his career.

Nothing irked Wright so much as the way historians and critics praised his early work but ignored what he had built later. To the critic Fiske Kimball, who refused to put Wright's recent work in his American Architecture survey, Wright wrote in 1928: "I have been reading my obituaries to a considerable extent over the past year or two, and think, with Mark Twain, the reports of my death greatly exaggerated."

Wright's troubles in the 1920s and 1930s constituted what seemed like a tragic end for the man who thirty years earlier had been acknowledged as the world's leading modern architect. But what did it mean to be "modern" in those early days? The pioneers of modern architecture had not consciously sought to invent a new style any more than the engineers of the twelfth century intended to invent Gothic. Modern and Gothic both started as technical innovations that were later fleshed out into systems of design. Creating the early structural triumphs of modernism was comparatively easy: London's Crystal Palace of 1851 and the thousand-foot-high Eiffel Tower of 1889 in Paris showed architects how to exploit iron and glass. Tempering iron into steel, using steel to reinforce concrete, achieving transparency through glass, applying prefabrication and the interchangeability of parts to architecture-these adjustments to building technology would soon follow, and so, eventually, did a matching aesthetic.

But the core problem of modern architecture was neither technological nor aesthetic; it was how to harness the new materials to create a humane environment. Here lay the special achievements of Wright and his master, Louis Henry Sullivan. Both Wright and Sullivan sought to reconcile the two most influential architecture theorists of the nineteenth century: John Ruskin, with his plea for a sensuous, tactile, emotion-based architecture, and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, with his vision of architecture as structural rationalism. Having dropped out of engineering after two terms at the University of Wisconsin, Wright jump-started his career in 1887 as head draftsman to Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in Chicago. Sullivan's severely rational but richly decorative Wainwright skyscraper of 1890 in St. Louis (with Wright assisting) achieved an ingenious synthesis of the opposing philosophies of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc. Sullivan's slightly later Carson Pirie Scott Department Store in Chicago drank more deeply of the richly decorative Art Nouveau, but even there, in contrast to the Europeans, Sullivan insisted on obeying and not subverting the logic of his industrial building components.

In 1892, Wright emerged from Sullivan's shadow and began working on his own. In the first decade of the new century he produced a trio of works so singular that they would have assured him lasting fame had he put up nothing else. The 1903 Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo was a radical restatement of the form and social environment of the office tower; Unity Temple of 1904 in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park marked a no less radical change in the concept of sacred space; while the Frederick Robie house of 1909, in Chicago, is the ancestor (directly, or via Fallingwater) of half the postwar suburban houses in the United States. Wright capped the decade with a stunning publicity triumph in the publication in Germany of two sumptuous portfolios of his buildings and projects, the Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright (Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright). Wright always claimed that everything significant in modern architecture had come from him. Allowing for his usual boastfulness, there is no question that Wright's two volumes hit European architecture like a shock wave. As late as the 1920s, Dutch and German architects were still improvising on themes that first came to light in the pages of the Ausgefürhte Bauten.

But then, just as the modern movement began to flex its muscles in Europe, Wright fell into a tailspin at home. In 1909 he entered a radicalized lifestyle and ran off to Europe with a client's wife, then lived openly with her at...