The namesake waterfalls were gushing a little too dramatically at Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater this weekend. On Saturday, the official Facebook page for the property, a National Historic Landmark in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, alerted fans than Bear Run, the waterfall that runs beneath Fallingwater had overflowed due to flooding, damaging the plunge pool beneath it and Jacques Lipchitz's sculpture, Mother and Child, that stood there.
The sculpture, featuring a woman cast in bronze, was hand-selected for the site by Wright and installed following the completion of Fallingwater, one of his most recognizable and highly visited buildings, created for Pittsburgh's Kaufmann family in 1939. Lipchitz, a Lithuanian-born artist best known for his Cubist sculpture, was living in Paris at the time of Fallingwater's construction but fled to New York following Nazi occupation of France and completed Mother and Child there in 1941.
Representatives for Fallingwater, which is now open to the public for tours and operated by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, assured concerned fans that no damage was done to the building's interiors. They are working with experts to assess the damage to Lipchitz's sculpture, a familiar and beloved sight at the house. With yearlong festivities on the docket to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Wright's birth, the Conservancy is sure to complete repairs as swiftly as possible.