Fallingwater and Pittsburgh: Wright Studies, Volume Two

As series editor Narciso G. Menocal points out in his preface to Wright Studies Volume One: Taliesin 1911–1914, each volume, focusing on a different subject, is envisioned as a “forum for different views and interpretations of Wright’s work.”

In Wright Studies Volume Two:Fallingwater and Pittsburgh, contributors Kathryn Smith, Neil Levine, and Richard Cleary concentrate on two themes: Smith focuses on Wright’s interest in the imagery of water in architecture while Levine and Cleary look at Wright’s relationship with Edgar Kaufmann, the department store magnate, and analyze the results—aesthetic and otherwise—of that relationship. All three deal with Fallingwater, built for Kaufmann in the 1930s, and other projects planned for Pittsburgh, which included a planetarium, a civic center, a parking garage, and an apartment house.

Smith discusses how Wright refined his integration of bodies of water into his designs over the course of his career, the most successful of which is Fallingwater. Levine provides historical background on Fallingwater and analyzes the architectural elements of the design while emphasizing Fallingwater’s temporal dimension. Cleary covers Wright’s Pittsburgh projects and Edgar Kaufmann Sr.’s role in them.     

Wright Studies Volume Two is richly illustrated, with seventy-three halftones and twenty-three line drawings.

Narciso G. Menocal is a professor of architectural history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of Architecture and Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan and Louis Sullivan: The Poetry of Architecture (with Robert Twombly). He is the editor of Wright Studies Volume One: Taliesin 1911–1914 and John Lloyd Wright’s My Father Who Is on Earth.