FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S ART HOUSE

ZOOM-ZOOM MAGAZINE

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S ART HOUSE

WE GO ON A ROAD TRIP FROM NEW YORK CITY TO PENNSYLVANIA IN A NEW MAZDA6 TO SEE CELEBRATED AMERICAN ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S MASTERPIECE, FALLINGWATER

Some stories simply sound too good to be true, like Newton and his apple, Bradman discovering in retirement that he would have been better at batting if he’d worn glasses or McCartney waking up one morning with ‘Yesterday’ fully formed in his head. When it comes to the art of architecture — the field of human endeavour with perhaps the largest canvas — the tale of Frank Lloyd Wright and his Da Vinci-like house, Fallingwater, is one such legend.

Fallingwater, an edifice propped on a precipice that looks impossible and feels even more so when you stand in it, was an idea well ahead of its time in the 1930s, and is a feat of imagination and engineering that seems to hover between beauty and disaster. Yet, incredibly, it took him just two hours to sketch out the whole thing.

Wright had been in regular dialogue with Edgar Kaufmann, the owner of a stunning piece of land in a deep, green forest on the Bear Run river in Pennsylvania, who wanted a weekend house built at the perfect location, offering a view of his favourite waterfall. After a single site visit, Wright told Kaufmann, the owner of a department store in Pittsburgh, that he had a better idea. He would build him a house that didn’t just look at the waterfall, but which encompassed it.

The Kaufmanns would live in, on and around their favourite, fluid, falling water. Kaufmann quite probably thought he’d gone mad and said he was driving over to Wright’s office to see him, a journey of two hours. So the architect sat down and drew the plans for Fallingwater, finishing them — from three different aspects — before he arrived. Apparently the great man was an even greater procrastinator and liked to work under pressure, according to the director of Fallingwater, and student of Wright lore, Justin W. Gunther.

“It seems incredible. It’s a story Wright shared and his apprentices confirm that it happened; they sat there and sharpened his pencils for him, and watched,” Gunther says. The house is now a National Historic Landmark in the US and attracts as many as 180,000 visitors a year to its rather remote location. That sounds like a lot of people, and it is, but you need to remember the house has been here since 1936, and was then donated to the public by Kaufmann’s son, Edgar Junior, in 1964.

“FALLINGWATER’S LOCATION SPARKED WHAT WOULD BE THE FIRST OF MANY DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN THE ARCHITECT AND HIS CLIENT”

We’ve set out to see this work of art that has many touches of Japanese influence — Wright was a fan of design from the Far East — so it seems appropriate that we’ve chosen the shapely new Mazda6 to make the journey in. We’re also keen to see another very special element of this remarkable property; it marked the creation of what Wright called a “minimalist automotive shelter”, which he dubbed a “carport”.

That’s right, Wright — a huge car nut who owned more than 80 vehicles in his lifetime, and apparently drove them all with great flair and enthusiasm — invented the humble carport. You might think he loved the idea of a shelter for cars that still allowed them to be seen, as he was an appreciator of their beauty, but actually it was his hatred of disorder that inspired him. Kaufmann very much wanted a garage at Fallingwater.

But Wright refused, pointing out that cars weren’t horses and couldn’t run away, so they didn’t need a barn, and arguing more forcefully that if he gave the house a garage it would just fill up with clutter. As far as Wright was concerned, clutter was a sure sign of a diseased mind, and he never gave his houses attics, or basements, for the same reason.

Our drive to Fallingwater’s driveway starts some distance away, though, in New York — a city with a few spectacular buildings of its own. We pick up our gleaming Soul Red Crystal Metallic Mazda6 from JFK Airport and shake our heads in disbelief when the sat-nav informs us that the 15 kilometre-drive to Manhattan will take over an hour. A radio DJ complains that, on an average day, when the car parks at JFK are at 50 per cent capacity, it still takes two hours of queuing up to get in.

Our 6, arguably the perfect size for a family car in most countries, feels like a kitten running among lions, as bigger, more aggressive vehicles attempt to boss us out of the way. Manhattan may be laid out in a simple grid pattern and its streets as wide as canyons, but it still feels like there is no room to move, so it’s good to be sitting in a car that’s so comfortable and quiet. It’s a veritable haven from the madness surrounding us.

What strikes me quite quickly is that Manhattan is not a place I should ever drive. Sure, most of the people brave enough to attempt to thread a car through its traffic have developed a kind of violent contempt for their fellow men, but it’s not the aggression of my fellow drivers that’s the problem. It’s me. I love the place so damn much that I can’t keep my eyes, or mind, on the road, because I am constantly oo-ing and ahh-ing at everything, my neck as fluid and bouncing as the bobble-head Donald Trump dolls that litter the gift shops.

For me, New York is mankind’s greatest achievement, a city of seemingly endless choices and rapacious ambition, a place where even the sky itself is seen as something that should be filled, bought and profited from. The drive to our sumptuously splendid and ageless hotel, The Plaza, right on the corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue, takes us past arguably an even more audacious Wright masterpiece, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum. With its spiralling, spectacular construction and other-worldly aura, it stands out against its surroundings, even today, like a robot in a nature documentary.

“WRIGHT IS JUSTLY INFAMOUS FOR REGARDING HIS OWN HEIGHT OF 5’8” AS THE ‘HUMAN SCALE,’ MEANING THAT VISITORS WHO ARE OVER SIX FEET TALL WILL FEEL A BIT CRAMPED AT THE ENTRANCE”

It also seems worlds away from the organic, nature-mirroring architecture that defines Fallingwater, and shows the scope of Wright’s incredible imagination. It’s as radical as Picasso painting the ‘Mona Lisa’. The Plaza was dubbed “the most luxurious hotel in the world”, back around the time that Wright, by that stage a national living treasure and a celebrity, had moved, rock-star like, into his own suite, which he then had decorated with furniture of his own design.

He liked it so much he stayed from 1954 to 1959 and, frankly, having tried it for one night, we’d be happy to follow in his well-cushioned footsteps. Luxuriant is too banal a word to describe the Plaza’s louche style. Wright’s suite — where he had meetings with Marilyn Monroe while working on a getaway home for the actress and her then husband, Arthur Miller — no longer takes customers. But you can still sit in the Palm Room, a flower-filled space of verdant luxury under a glowing glass canopy, and the same room where Wright would often hold court.

It’s a long way, in distance and state of mind, to Pennsylvania, most of it on endlessly humming concrete freeways, and our Mazda6 cocoons us perfectly from the noisy outside world, as we entertain ourselves through the eight-hour drive by listening to the madness of American satellite radio, and its talkback stations in particular.

We choose a few back-road detours, of course, keen to try out the Mazda’s handling, which turns out to show plenty of shared DNA with that riotous roadster, the MX-5. At one stage we find ourselves hugely enjoying the car’s sporty steering and roadholding as we climb a winding, wooded mountain range up and over the Mason Dixon line, which theoretically separates the North from the Southern states.

At a filling station so old we honestly take the pumps to be antiques, we meet JR, who finds us fascinating, and largely unintelligible. I’d like to tell you what he says to us, but he seems to eat all his own words as soon as he speaks them, chewing on them along with his tobacco, using his few operational teeth. Happily, the final climb to Fallingwater is a spectacularly windy road through Ohiopyle State Park (I still don’t know how to pronounce that), a haven of towering trees, tumbling rapids and a frightening number of deer. We’re relieved not to see any of the bears the forests also hold.

Our hosts kindly allow us to park the Mazda6 right in front of what were the world’s first carports — four of them — and we’re only slightly disappointed to learn they’ve all been largely filled in to make offices. Sacrilege is not too strong a term.

“IT'S EASY TO IMAGINE THE GREAT ARCHITECT WOULD HAVE DEEPLY LOVED A MODERN MOTOR CAR AS THOUGHTFULLY STYLED AS THIS”

We are far more stunned to learn that, despite his many years of fame — Wright was born in 1867 and was in his mid-60s when he was asked to imagineer Fallingwater — this remarkable and genuinely moving house was the first piece of proper work he’d had in many years. “He was kind of viewed as a has-been architect at the time, so he used this house as his chance to get back on the international scene, and raise his profile again, to be recognised again as a pivotal architect,” Gunther explains.

“Of course, he helped to usher in the Modernist movement, but he hadn’t had a major commission in over a decade. It really was with Fallingwater that he relaunched his career, and became even more prolific from that point on, when he was already 67 years old.” Indeed, his Guggenheim, perhaps his more famous building, didn’t open until 1959, the same year he died, aged 92. Fallingwater was a spectacular and instant success, however, winning its own exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before it was even finished, and putting Wright on the cover of Time magazine.

Visiting it today, it’s easy to see why. Its location, imbued with the voluble burbling and thrashing of water, is incredible enough, but the style, scope and feel of the house are all simply magnificent. It’s hard to pick a favourite feature, but the floating staircase that falls out of the living room into the stream below, inviting you to dangle your feet in the cool water, is hard to beat. And, sure enough, there, in the main living area above, is a roof design that could have been lifted straight from a Japanese home, although it’s on a scale that’s close to some kind of temple. Simple, beautiful and perfectly symmetrical, it sings with oriental synergy (there are several Japanese woodblock prints on the wall, too, gifts from Wright to the Kaufmanns).

That essence, of simplicity and harmony with nature, which is so often found in Japanese design, is mirrored throughout Fallingwater. Looking out through the window at the shining Mazda6 waiting to whisk us back to New York again, it’s easy to imagine that the great architect would have deeply loved a modern motor car as thoughtfully styled as this. Of course, he probably could have come up with it in an afternoon.