One might say that Robert Silman is the man who saved Frank Lloyd Wright’s seminal work of organic architecture, Fallingwater, from literally falling into the water beneath it.
In 1995 the building’s owner, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, was alerted to the possibility of trouble with some of the cantilevers, the very design feature that had made the dramatic building one of the most famous of the 20th century. The conservancy commissioned Robert Silman Associates, consulting structural engineers, headquartered in New York, to evaluate the situation. Warner Free Lecture will host Silman Friday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. in Volunteers Hall, when he will talk about his firm’s assessment and subsequent restoration of the iconic house. Silman assures us that an engineering background is not required to understand his story of “fixing Frank.”
Robert Silman. (Courtesy photo)
To judge by his resume of impressive experience and outstanding professional qualifications, Silman was the perfect choice for saving Fallingwater. He had founded his own structural engineering firm in 1966, with equal emphasis on projects of new construction, alteration, renovation, and preservation. The firm had a proven record of particular expertise in historic preservation.
Fallingwater, the iconic Pennsylvania house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. (Courtesy photo)
What must it have been like for Silman to identify a flaw in a work by Frank Lloyd Wright? In an email, Silman said, “I will tell the story of how a mistake was made in the original structural design of the house that is very intriguing and revealing in some ways about Mr. Wright’s genius.” Was it a problem Wright knew about? Was it discovered during construction? Was it a limitation of the materials or technology of the time? Would the house have eventually fallen into the water below it? How was the house stabilized without interfering with its appearance? Silman will address these questions and more and show slides as he talks about the options and decisions made in the process of repairing the house, a project completed in the winter of 2001–2002.
Fallingwater, finished in 1937, captured the world’s imagination and became one of the most recognizable houses in the world. According to its website, “It is a stacked grouping of cantilevered concrete ‘trays,’ each anchored to a central stone chimney. Although 30 feet up, the strong horizontal lines and low ceilings reinforce the safe, sheltering effect Wright sought to achieve.” The house blurs the boundaries between outside and inside, between humans and their natural environment.
A critical time
The commission to build the house came at a critical moment for Wright, 67 years old at the time and struggling to recover from a series of scandals—murder, fires, divorces—at Taliesin, his retreat and studio in rural Wisconsin. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., only child of a wealthy Pittsburgh couple known for their distinctive sense of style and taste, began an apprenticeship at the Taliesin Fellowship, a communal architecture program founded two years earlier in 1932 by Wright and his wife. It embodied Wright’s belief that art has a humane and noble task to serve man in harmony with his natural surroundings.
Edgar Kaufmann Sr. and his wife, Liliane, visited their son and met Wright, whose work was known to them by reputation. On the spot, they asked Wright to design a weekend home for them in rural Pennsylvania. Edgar Sr. continued a correspondence with Wright, the men sharing a passion for new ideas, aesthetic beauty, and the relationship between man and the natural world. In Edgar Sr., Wright found a patron who would change the course of his life, his career, and modern architecture itself.
The Kaufmanns chose to site their family weekend house along forested Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania, and probably imagined it across from the rushing waterfall they loved. But Wright, whose early reverence for the changing natural landscape became the cornerstone of his pioneering theories of “organic architecture,” imagined a residence cantilevered directly over the waterfall, where the Kaufmanns would live in the midst of nature. Reportedly, the design for Fallingwater was produced in a matter of hours (could that account for its structural error?), as was the name.
In the 1960s Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who had inherited the house, became concerned with ensuring Fallingwater’s preservation, and, following his father’s wishes, he entrusted the home and about 1,500 acres to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Guided public tours there began in 1964. In 1976 it became a National Historic Landmark. Today, the annual number of visitors exceeds 180,000.
As well as speaking at the Warner Free Lecture, Silman looks forward to visiting with his daughter Ruth; her husband, Tim Clark; and granddaughters Phoebe and Jay, as he has done often over the past 18 years or so that they have lived here.
