“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.  It will never fail you”.  Frank Lloyd Wright.

It snowed the night before I visited Fallingwater for the first time.  The rhododendrons that surround the house had a fine coating of snow when I arrived on a sunny and cold morning for the first guided tour of the day. Approaching the house down the long driveway, I saw the paradox that lies at the heart of this beautiful house and Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius as an architect: that something made of steel, concrete, and glass should celebrate the natural world and remind you of its central significance in our lives.

The family that commissioned the house in the late 1930s, prosperous store owners from Pittsburgh, was surprised when it first saw the designs because they offered no view of the waterfall at the center of the site.  Wright patiently explained that his intention was that his houses should allow people to live in the natural world,  not to offer pretty views of it.

So much of the construction we see around us every day seeks to obliterate, marginalize, or smother the natural world.  Fallingwater represents the opposite viewpoint: a building that celebrates the integration of people into the environment.  Nearly 80 years after the Kaufmanns moved into their “modest cabin by the falls”, Wright’s gift to the world is much more than a house.  It’s a message about how to live.