Fallingwater Rising

Description

Some books are biographies of people. Franklin Toker's Fallingwater Rising is a biography of a house — the most famous house of the twentieth century. Published by Knopf in 2003, it tells the full, riveting story of Fallingwater: the Pennsylvania country house Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1937 for department-store magnate E. J. Kaufmann, and the collision of genius, money, and ego that brought it into being. Toker, an architectural historian, reconstructs the drama in delicious detail: the mercurial Wright, 68 and supposedly washed up, sketching the entire design in a single legendary sitting; Kaufmann, the client who dared his architect to do the impossible and then nearly broke with him over sagging concrete; and the house itself, cantilevered impossibly over a waterfall, becoming an icon of modern architecture.

At 496 pages, this is a rich, deeply researched narrative that reads like a novel — part architectural history, part family saga, part character study of two titanic personalities. You will learn how Fallingwater was actually built: the engineering gamble of its concrete terraces, the waterfall at Bear Run that dictated every decision, and the long fight to keep the house standing as its famous cantilevers began to droop. You will also meet the Kaufmann family, whose wealth, taste, and complicated relationship with Wright shaped the house as surely as any blueprint. Toker explains the architecture in plain language, so you do not need any technical background to follow the stakes — only curiosity about how a weekend house became a monument, and eventually a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by people from all over the world.

For lovers of architecture, design, or great American stories, Fallingwater Rising is essential: the definitive account of how a weekend house became a monument. It is equally rewarding for readers planning a visit to Fallingwater and for readers who simply love a well-told story about difficult people doing extraordinary things. Get the ebook edition here at a discount from Tellebook.