On the House: Iconic Wright house fascinating but not a home

A second visit recently to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater home in Pennsylvania reinforced my first impression: It is enjoyable more as a curiosity than as a home.

Fallingwater is justifiably famous for its setting.

The home rests immediately on the Bear Run stream in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, tucked into the woods like a bear's den. The home’s terraces famously perch directly over the stream and its falls. For many visitors, the thrill of standing on a balcony with a river rushing a few feet below is worth the trip.

If nothing else, Fallingwater remains an engineering feat, although ultimately a costly one, because millions had to be spent shoring up Wright’s cantilevered terraces after they started badly sagging.

But for all its spectacular setting, Fallingwater remains a cold, damp, sterile and oddly claustrophobic house. Like many architectural landmarks, Fallingwater is celebrated for its aesthetic appeal at the expense of its functionality.

The home’s setting is a liability and a virtue. The proximity of rushing water leaves the home perpetually damp. (On our recent tour, the guide explained how dehumidifiers had to be placed throughout the home each night when tours ended.)

Fallingwater, in fact, lacks just about everything that makes Wright’s great prairie homes so inviting — warmth, ornamentation, color, wood and flowing layouts. Compared with the rich beauty of Wright’s Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago, for example, Fallingwater seems less a masterpiece and more an indulgent eccentricity.

Beyond the open living and dining room, Fallingwater slips quickly into a cramped maze. Ceilings in the home are famously low — at some points dropping to 6 feet, 4 inches. Hallways are likewise uncomfortably tight, with some passageways as narrow as 2 feet.

Fallingwater is celebrated for its harmony with nature, but being in the home feels less like being in nature than in peering out to nature from a cave.

While visiting Fallingwater a few weeks ago, my family also stopped by another Wright home nearby called Kentuck Knob. The home is far more modest in size and ambition, but, in some ways, more appealing and well worth a visit. (A third Wright building, the Duncan House, is also nearby.)

Kentuck Knob was built in the early 1950s as one of the last great examples of the “Usonian” homes Wright pioneered in the 1930s. The homes were designed as downscale versions of his prairie homes — simplified enough to be affordable for everyday Americans.

Although the Usonian homes lack the lush ornamentation that characterized many of Wright’s large prairie homes, they have charm that Fallingwater lacks.

Fallingwater might illustrate Wright's singular genius, but Kentuck Knob illustrates that he could also build homes to live in.

jweiker@dispatch.com

@JimWeiker