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Architecture critic Patricia Lowry can be reached at plowry@post- gazette.com or 412-263-1590.
Come Thursday, it will be exactly 70 years since Frank Lloyd Wright first put pencil to paper and gave birth to Fallingwater.
"The design just poured out of him," wrote Edgar Tafel in his 1979 book, "Years With Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius."
The Fallingwater creation myth holds that while Wright carried the design in his head for nine months, he waited until Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. was just 140 miles away and en route to Taliesin before putting it on paper. It's such a great story -- perhaps even a true one -- that Tafel begins his book with it.
"Come along, E.J. We're ready for you," he recalled Wright saying to Kaufmann over the phone while the latter was still in Pittsburgh, much to the astonishment of the apprentices.
Tafel never says that Kaufmann didn't know more of the house's details, and he doesn't record in detail his reactions when Wright showed him the drawings, beyond "Kaufmann nodded in affirmation."
Indeed, one would have expected -- and Tafel likely would have remembered -- a more dramatic reaction from Kaufmann if he'd been learning of the daring design for the first time.
Yet other writers have deduced from Tafel's tale that Kaufmann had no advance knowledge of the design, a notion University of Pittsburgh architectural...