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"FALLINGWATER Rising" is a big, messy jumble of a book that despite itself keeps the reader engrossed and wondering what will happen next.
"Fallingwater" is the name that department store magnate E.J. Kaufmann gave to the horizontal stone and concrete house that he had Frank Lloyd Wright build for him cantilevered over the waterfalls of Bear Run in the woods southeast of Pittsburgh in 1937. It is -- as author Franklin Toker, an excitable writer, says over and over in his new book -- a house without parallel in the history of architecture.
"We could call Fallingwater architectural manna," Toker writes. "We respond to it eagerly because it reminds us of those buildings or styles we love most. Depending on our own taste, it attracts us as rational or romantic, abstract or representational, old- fashioned or high-tech. This makes Fallingwater one of the few buildings to be authentically beyond fashion."
The University of Pittsburgh art historian embraces his subject with the gusto of a popular, not an academic, historian. Leaping from close examination of the documentary record to freewheeling speculation,...