Product Description

Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.

When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store mogul–“the smartest retailer in America”–and a philanthropist with the burning ambition to build a world-famous work of architecture. It was an unlikely collaboration: the Jewish merchant who had little concern for modern architecture and the brilliant modernist who was leery of Jews. But the two men collaborated to produce an extraordinary building of lasting architectural significance that brought international fame to them both and confirmed Wright’s position as the greatest architect of the twentieth century.

Fallingwater Rising is also an enthralling family drama, involving Kaufmann, his beautiful cousin/wife, Liliane, and their son, Edgar Jr., whose own role in the creation of Fallingwater and its ongoing reputation is central to the story. Involving such key figures of the l930s as Frida Kahlo, Albert Einstein, Henry R. Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Ayn Rand, and Franklin Roosevelt, Fallingwater Rising shows us how E. J. Kaufmann’s house became not just Wright’s masterpiece but a fundamental icon of American life.

One of the pleasures of the book is its rich evocation of the upper-crust society of Pittsburgh–Carnegie, Frick, the Mellons–a society that was socially reactionary but luxury-loving and baronial in its tastes, hobbies, and sexual attitudes (Kaufmann had so many mistresses that his store issued them distinctive charge plates they could use without paying).

Franklin Toker has been studying Fallingwater for eighteen years. No one but he could have given us this compelling saga of the most famous private house in the world and the dramatic personal story of the fascinating people who made and used it.

A major contribution to both architectural and social history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #563614 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-30
• Released on: 2003-09-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An oddly "spiritual" agglomeration of rectilinear glass, concrete and stone masses set on a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, Wright's Fallingwater house made America fall in love with modernist architecture, according to this engrossing study. Architectural historian Toker (Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait) approaches the building as a tense but fruitful collaboration between Wright's genius and the encouragement given it by his patron, Pittsburgh department store magnate E. J. Kaufmann, whom Toker credits with being "almost... the coarchitect" of the house. He gives a detailed, sometimes hour-by-hour account of Wright's planning process, the engineering hurdles surmounted in realizing his structurally daring design, the critical and public acclaim the house has elicited through the years and its impact on American culture in everything from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead to motifs in suburban tract housing. He sets the story against an erudite but accessible history of the rise of modernism and Wright's antagonism toward the German Bauhaus and International Style architects, whose austere, mechanistic stylings he denounced even as he was adapting and humanizing them to suit American tastes. Toker sometimes makes too much, with little but speculation to go on, of Kaufmann's contribution to the project, at one point comparing the relationship between Wright and Kaufmann to Christ's bond with St. Peter. But the trenchant analysis of Wright's character and creativity, the often lyrical evocations of his buildings, and the opinionated but insightful overview of the modernist intellectual milieu of the 1930s make the book a wonderful exploration of the psychological and social meaning of architecture. Photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
When a house becomes a celebrated work of architecture, it tends to be treated as if it had sprung full-grown from the brow of its creator. Probably no house has been more subject to this myth than Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's extraordinary essay in horizontal space, which is perched above a waterfall in southwestern Pennsylvania. According to legend, Wright dallied for months after receiving the commission, then drew up the plans in just two hours, as his client, the Pittsburgh department-store magnate E. J. Kaufmann, was en route to Wright's studio to check on his progress. Toker makes quick work of this fiction, tracing the long, careful evolution of Wright's brilliant design. Most important, he tells the story of Kaufmann and his wife, and shows that the house was equally a reflection of these two strong-willed clients and their complex marriage.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Fallingwater, daringly cantilevered over a waterfall near Pittsburgh, may well be "the most famous private house in the world," as Toker asserts. Conceived and built in the years 1935-37, this stunning weekend retreat's high-profile owner (department-store tycoon Kaufmann) and celebrity architect (Wright) guaranteed it would never be a well-kept secret. Fallingwater has already been the subject of numerous books, but Toker adds important new scholarship in debunking or clarifying four myths: that E. J.'s son, Edgar Jr., was father to the project; that Wright drew the complete plans in a two-hour burst of creativity; that Wright demonstrated engineering genius in his design; and that the world "spontaneously acclaimed it as the crowning achievement of modern architecture." If these points seem like insider quibbles, Toker also provides histories of the site, the men (Wright was in desperate need of a comeback when he got the commission), the house's chaotic construction, and the manner in which it became a byword even to architecture neophytes. A must-read for Wright fans, it will also intrigue architecture buffs. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Regrettably, I shared Mr. Lupp's experience
The binding on my paperback copy also fell apart half-way through the book. While I found some of the writing less than crisp and the organization sometimes left me confused as to sequences of events, overall it's a wonderfully detailed history of how a great house came to be. I wish I had read it before I visited Fallingwater; it would have greatly increased my enjoyment of the house.

Hard to put down - twice, already
I have now read FALLINGWATER RISING twice, and I think it is one of the most well-written, readable, and engrossing books about any subject. What I like most about it is that even though Fallingwater is an inanimate object, we feel that it is a living thing; this is our emotional response to it. This book makes it clear that people made the building happen. People with all of their strengths, foibles, desires and aspirations. Each of these people come to life on the page, and Toker's delightful spirit of inquiry illuminates the writing and makes it sing.

Architect's Review:
I must say that as an architect who has been practicing for over 25 years, I have not read any book quite like this before that reaches so deeply into the creation of a master work such as Fallingwater. I have always "appreciated" FLW work but only recently have more fully understood what he has accomplished and created in built architectural works that to me borders on magical and genius at the same time. The glossy pictures alone only begins to reflect him as the gifted craftsman he represented. Living in Chicago I get to enjoy much of his work all the time. I'm still enjoying the book and must say your work here is amazing and a fitting tribute to an increbible individual and architect. Thanks for the experience. Jack Svaicer