The proudly juttingand sometimes-imperiledterraces above the cataract that gave the world-famous house its name. Ezra Stoller / EstoIn 1995, when Frank Lloyd Wrights Fallingwater was less than 60 years old, a group of engineers traveled to the rural highlands outside Pittsburgh to inspect the houses iconic cantilevered terraces, thrust out over their waterfall in defiance of gravityand, as it turned out, of good sense. Even before construction was completed in 1937, cracks had appeared in the concrete parapets. By the mid-1990s, the balconies had sagged in some places by more than seven inches. You could feel them bounceit was like a diving board, saysLynda Waggoner, who started guiding tours at Fallingwater as a teenager in 1965 and served as the house-museums director from 1996 to 2018. The extravagant gesture that made Fallingwater the most famous modern house in the United States had nearly brought the entire magnificent structure crashing down.Hailed almost immediately as Wrights masterpiece, Fallingwater was also an uncomfortably apt metaphor for a difficult period in the architects career. Wrights earlier houses, with their open floorplans and horizontal thrust, had helped revolutionize early 20th-century architecture. When images of those so-called Prairie Houses traveled to Berlin in 1910, future godfathers of architectural modernism like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were astounded: Wright had taken the massive structures of the 19th century and exploded them outward, with long, low rooflines that seemed to float free from the walls below. Back in the Midwestern U.S., Wrights caustic approach to clients and his disregard for conventionincluding his choice in 1909 to abandon his family and run off with the wife of a former clientmade him persona non grata among his patrons. Fallingwaters interior offers a startlingly intimate view of surrounding nature, an aesthetic that Wright called organic architecture. Ezra Stoller / EstoSubscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99This article is a selection from the December 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazineBy the 1920s, Wrights hipped roofs and elaborate ornamentation had come to seem almost quaint compared with the glossy, streamlined sophistication of European modernism. When the newly founded Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York mounted its landmark 1932 exhibition on modern architecture, the curators relegated Wright to the role of a half-modern precursor to the real revolution, which theyd dubbed the International Style. Wright, hungry for adulation, and desperate for work, was enraged by the slight. I find myself rather a man without a country, architecturally speaking, he complained in a letter to the architect Philip Johnson, a co-curator of the MoMA show. Fallingwater, commissioned in 1934 as a vacation home by department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann Sr., would be Wrights opportunity to beat the internationalists at their own game, as he reportedly said at the time.There in the Appalachian backwoods, Wright took key elements of modernismlike cantilevers, flat roofs and ribbon windowsand made them organic, privileging forms and materials that drew on, and integrated with, the natural world. Rather than leaving the edges of his cantilevered balconies razor-straight and dazzlingly white, he rounded their edges and painted them the color of Pueblo adobe. He clad the walls with local sandstone and fronted the cabinets with lustrous North Carolina walnut. Fallingwater made modernism seem romantic, lyrical and deeply American. As the historian Franklin Toker wrote in his 2003 book Fallingwater Rising, the house changed Americans view of modernism from something foreign and suspect to something homegrown and patriotic.Fallingwater also resurrected Wrights moribund career. Before long, pictures of the home were everywhere, especially the indelible shot taken from the base of the falls, the house soaring over those rushing cataracts. In January 1938 alone, Wright graced the cover of Timewith Fallingwater in the backgroundand Architectural Forum dedicated an entire issue to his work, with the Kaufmann house as his crowning achievement. That month, even MoMA, the site of Wrights 1932 snub, dedicated a show to the Kaufmann house. Wright was undoubtedly the worlds greatest living architect, the critic Lewis Mumford gushed in the New Yorker. He can swing a cantilever across space, using the method of construction not as a clich of modernism but as a rational engineering solution of a real problem. Of course, Mumford had only seen the house in pictures and had no idea that those glorious cantilevers were the real problem. The sagging, cracking parapetsan engineering error on Wrights partnever prevented the Kaufmanns from using the house. They did, however, concern Edgar Kaufmann Sr. enough that he measured them regularly from 1941 until his death in 1955. In any event, cracks and deflections are hardly visible in photos, and Fallingwater, perhaps more than any Wright building, makes for an iconic, unforgettable image, says architecture historian Barry Bergdoll.The engineers who turned up in 1995 did manage to rescue the house from its builders dazzling, flawed vision. But to judge Fallingwater based solely on its engineering is to miss the point. Durability alone would never have satisfied Wrights ambitions, nor would it have won Fallingwater its singular place in American architectural history. In 1963, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., a Wright acolyte, donated the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which opened Fallingwater to the public the following year. Over the past six decades, some 6.3 million have visited, mainly laypeople, who tend to love Wright more than architects do. Unlike a lot of modernist buildings, Fallingwater is a visceral and emotional experience more than an intellectual one, Waggoner says. It evokes the American desire to exalt nature and dominate it, to claim modernity and reject it. It is an imperfect house, and a perfect expression of the American landscape it inhabits: fragile and well worth saving.Wright-HandWomanToo often forgotten, Marion Mahony Griffin was an inventive and remarkable architectBy Michael Snyder Marion Mahony Griffins rendering of the front of a stately residence designed in Calcutta by her husband, Walter, circa 1936. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversityMarion Mahoneygraduated with a bachelors degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894only the second woman in the schools history to do so. A year later, the Chicago native became Frank Lloyd Wrights first employee at his upstart architecture firm in her hometown. A brilliant graphic artist with a deep interest in Japanese printmaking, Mahony created the signature aesthetic of Wrights perspective drawings, bursting with exquisite detail. She also made the drawings for fully half of the 100 lithographs in the 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio, a compendium of Wrights creations that inspired a generation of European architects, changing the course of 20th-century design. Never quick to cede credit, Wright rarely acknowledged his enormous debt to his brilliant young colleague. The architect pictured circa 1935, just before she left Australia to design buildings for the University of Lucknow in India. National Library of AustraliaIndeed, Mahony took over some projects entirely, as when Wright abandoned his family and practice to move to Europe in 1909, leaving Mahony, along with her colleague Hermann V. von Holst, to complete the designs for several houses in Illinois and Michigan. For the landscape designs of some of those projects, she collaborated closely with a former Wright employee named Walter Burley Griffin. The two married in 1911 and, shortly after, submitted a winning plan for Australias new federal capital city of Canberra. From 1914 to 1936, the Griffins lived and worked in Australia, dedicating much of their time to town planning and an architecture that could capture and cultivate a spirit of democracy. Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.Filed Under: Architects, Architecture, Rituals and Traditions