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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134544 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-19
• Released on: 2005-04-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 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

In no way just another another book about Wright!
This book was a gold mine of originality and creativity. Franklin Toker scrupulously examines the intriguing chronicles of this architectural icon and those most responsible for its rise to international prominence with unprecedented accuracy and lively narration.

As I have told several people who cringed at the notion of another book regarding Frank Lloyd Wright and his architectural "genius"...this is in no way just another book about Wright!

The book meticulously clarifies the relationships that came to be, as well as the importance of each character and their role in the creation of the house. The author fittingly applauds the architect and patrons for there successful progeny, but brilliantly points out the houses returned value to them.

I, for one, questioned the rationale of another book about Fallingwater; perhaps the most published house in American history. The book captured my attention from the onset, and I felt obligated to rethink my position. This is an ideal first-read for readers who may be virgin to the topic and a fail-safe favorite for the Fallingwater-educated.

Meticulous scholarship, a real page-turner
That Franklin Toker has tended to all the scholarly details is evident in the footnotes and photo captions, and it comes through on every page of the narrative itself. Fallingwater Rising is the story of an iconic house, designed by America's greatest architect for Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., a Jewish merchant whose own fascinating story is told here for the first time. Toker manages to deliver even more than that. Within these pages is a memorable portrait of the clannish and provincial power elite that ran twentieth-century Pittsburgh. Anyone interested in architectural history, the modernist movement, business history, academic ambition (that of Edgar Jr.), or urban history will want to own this riveting and lavishly illustrated book.

Structure, Architect, Client: A Fine History
Fallingwater is quite out of the way. It was a country house, a weekend retreat, and as such was placed way in the Pennsylvania woods. Yet every year, 140,000 people visit it, and Franklin Toker demonstrates in _Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House_ (Knopf) it is the most-visited home in the United States except for those visited for history or for an association with a personality. People come to see Fallingwater because it is an architectural masterpiece. And yet, as Toker says, "Visiting Fallingwater has only a little to do with architecture and engineering: the quality we perceive here is essentially spiritual." Because of the deep allusions to nature (the most common remark is that the house seems to have been part of the surroundings or to have grown out of them naturally), every visitor from every culture, even one who has no love for modern architecture, finds something appealing in the building. Toker, a professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, obviously loves his topic, but more importantly, he knows not only twentieth-century architectural history but specifically the history of one of the main commercial builders of Pittsburgh.

There is plenty to read about Wright here, but the world knows him well already (though the book does puncture myths, some complimentary and some not). E. J. Kaufmann, however, if known at all is known as the man who built Fallingwater. He was an astute businessman, a Pittsburgh department-store tycoon and philanthropist. Wright needed the house because at the time his reputation had stalled and he had no clients, and Kaufmann needed the house to redress the anti-Jewish snobbery of Pittsburgh. It worked for both sides wonderfully. That does not mean they had an easy relationship. Wright demanded loyalty of his clients, worshipful obedience, and got it much of the time. But Kaufmann was not worshipful, and could not be bullied. After the unalloyed success of Fallingwater, he continued to build personal and commercial structures, sometimes dangling the commission in front of Wright, sometimes getting plans but never building with him again. They were the city Jew and the Midwestern isolationist, and as Toker reflects, it is amazing they accomplished anything at all.

Toker tells all about the most memorable aspect of the design, the overshoot balcony, which was a late addition to the plan. Toker makes plain that Wright had a brilliant and intuitive sense of form and structure, but he was not an engineer, and Fallingwater was imperiled by the start. Only recent reinforcement cables have kept it from falling down. Toker includes a fascinating chapter about the "hype" and the "buzz" that surrounded the house from its beginnings. Wright's friend, Henry Luce, got the building into his own magazines and into newspapers all over the world. Ayn Rand took details of the Fallingwater story and included them transformed into fiction for her novel _The Fountainhead_. A final chapter is devoted to Kaufmann's son, Edgar Junior, who was briefly a student of Wright's (not a happy time for either). He was "an important American aesthete of the twentieth century," but he also cultivated the idea that he was the real spark that got his dad to erect Fallingwater. He may have been deluded or lying, but he did take loving care of the place, donating it to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy which makes it accessible to the public. He was himself one of the many sources consulted for this big and well-illustrated volume. Toker is an obvious fan of the house, and of Wright, and of Pittsburgh, and his enthusiasm shows in richness of detail and anecdote in a volume that shows architecture to be surprisingly exciting.