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Quick, before Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece falls down!
To visit the house voted "the best all-time work of American architecture," you set out on foot through a wooded ravine. You pass moss-covered boulders resting among rhododendrons and rock ledges that jut out of the hillsides. You smell moisture in the air and hear the distant rush of a mountain stream.
You round a bend and there, among the trees and boulders, you see it: a house that seems to grow out of the hillside, with a waterfall pouring underneath.
It is Fallingwater, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece. When it was built in the 1930s, it was a house like no one had seen before. Modern in design, it is made of just four materials-concrete, glass, stone, and steel-with wide concrete terraces that jut over a waterfall on lively Bear Run. With no supports under them, the terraces appear to float over the creek. In 1938, before construction was even complete, Wright made the cover of Time magazine.
But Wright's design, though bold and innovative, was also flawed. By the end of the 20th century, Fallingwater was in serious danger of falling down. What went wrong? And could the house be saved?
A House on a Waterfall
Fallingwater's wooded ravine was once the centerpiece of a vacation retreat for the family of Edgar Kaufmann Sr., owner of Kaufmann's Department Store, an elegant place to shop in Pittsburgh in the 1930s. The family-Edgar Sr., his wife Liliane, and their son Edgar jr.-lived in Pittsburgh, but like many wealthy families of the time, they often retreated to the nearby mountains to escape life in "the Smoky City." At their mountain property, the Kaufmanns stayed in a cabin with no heat and no indoor plumbing.
The family decided to build a modern vacation home. At the time, Edgar jr. was a student at Wright's architecture school in Wisconsin. The Kaufmanns hired Wright...