Fallingwater

Kaufmann expected a house looking at his favorite waterfall; Wright, visiting the site in 1935, decided the house should stand over it instead, cantilevering reinforced-concrete trays out from a rubble-stone chimney mass anchored into the rock of the stream bank. Local masons laid the sandstone, quarried from the same outcrop the house rests on, while the terraces themselves were an engineering gamble: Wright's own engineers, uneasy about his figures, secretly doubled the reinforcing steel he had specified, and the main terrace still crept downward for sixty years until a 2002 restoration threaded post-tensioned cables through the beams to arrest it. Wright set the main living space low and dim, its stone floor waxed to look wet, so that stepping out onto the sunlit terrace above the falls reads as a release rather than an approach; a stair descends from the living room straight down to the stream. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who helped run the Taliesin fellowship, gave the house and its grounds to a conservancy in 1963, and it opened as a museum before the decade was out.