Home and Away

On a reunion trip to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Andrew Sessa and his brother find surprises-and a surprising sense of familiarity-inside the building's iconic walls.

- Andrew Sessa

YOU HEAR Fallingwater long before you see it. This should come as little surprise, given the house's name and its position over the cascade of a rushing stream, but it surprised me nonetheless. I had traveled to the Pennsylvania home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright with my architect brother Ben. As Wright followers, we'd dreamed of making this pilgrimage since we were kids.

When the two of us approached the house, the sound of the brook bubbled up the curving, tree-shrouded driveway that preceded our first glimpse of the building just as Wright intended. This slow reveal is exactly what his client, the retail tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann, would have seen when the home was completed in 1937.

When the building eventually came into view, at the end of the long path, it was almost unrecognizable-even for a Wright obsessive like me. Ben and I found ourselves more than a bit disoriented by the masterpiece we thought we knew so well from photographs. In images of the house-starting with a cover of Time magazine in 1938, where a drawing of it was shown in the background of a portrait of Wright-the building appears to teeter and tower over the falls, its terraces pinwheeling out from a four-story column. But seen through the trees, Fallingwater at first looked long and low. Its stacked-sandstone walls and the wings of its impressively cantilevered concrete terraces all extended outward. It felt hunkered down in the hillside-reaching horizontally, rather than stretching skyward.

Wright was too smart to give away the perfect view that early, as are the curators who maintain the home today (and have since 1964, when it became the first house from the Modernist movement to open as a museum). This surprising sleight of hand, Ben and I learned on our tour, was just the first of many tricks Wright deployed in his design.