It’s the sort of thing you always want to do, but for one reason or another, keep putting off. On a picture-perfect autumn day in mid October, we drove to Fallingwater. It was a chilly Saturday morning, and the turning leaves were in full display. The ride there was magnificent; the return trip, with the sun behind us, would be even better.
Ever since I first heard the name, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I learned of the futuristic home he’d designed that would rest on top of a waterfall, I’d wanted to see it. The very idea was crazy - like the mile-high skyscraper Wright had once proposed for the City of Chicago. While that plan remained an idea on paper, the house often referred to as “Wright’s Masterpiece” was real, had been lived in, and was only an hour’s drive away.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the emotional connection I felt with the family. It began with the tour guide, who casually listed the rules we were to follow, and then in an almost off-hand manner, lowered her voice and said, “As we enter the house, we will enter through the same door the family would have.”
More than a house, it is the home of the Kaufmann family, and you arrive at a snapshot in time decades ago, where personal possessions lie about. It’s as if you’re walking through the home of your grandparents after they’ve passed. Photographs of smiling friends and family taken out on the terrace, or laughing in oddly dated bating suits as they swim in the water that ceaselessly runs under the house, lend a sweet sadness to the experience. And although there are dozens of other people at different stages of the tour throughout the house, a respectful silence remains, amidst the ever-present soft background music of the waterfall.
A visit to Fallingwater is an emotional experience unlike anything I’ve found when visiting museums or the buildings where the rich and famous have lived. I’m sure we’ll visit again, perhaps in spring time, when the Rhododendrons are in bloom.
