Notas del episodio
Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., president of Kaufmann's department store in Pittsburgh, wanted a country home at Bear Run in the Laurel Highlands, where his family had a rustic, unheated cabin they called the Hangover and where his store employees once had a summer retreat. He ended up with Frank Lloyd Wright, then in his late 60s and seen as washed up after designing only two buildings in six years, because his son Edgar Kaufmann Jr. had become an apprentice at Wright's Taliesin studio. Wright demanded a map of every boulder and tree, then went months without drawing. When Kaufmann called to say he was two hours away, Wright sketched the whole design before he arrived, having worked it out in his head.
Instead of a house facing the falls, Wright put it on top of them, telling Kaufmann he should live with the waterfall, not just look at it. Pittsburgh engineers Metzger-Richardson found at least eight structural problems, and extra steel was secretly added to the main terrace, which enraged Wright into threatening to quit. The house was finished in 1937 and hosted Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Diego Rivera, but it leaked, warped, and flooded in 1956. Kaufmann Jr. later gave it to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and Fallingwater revived Wright's career, leading to over 200 more structures.
- How compression and tension work in a cantilever, and why Wright's minimal steel alarmed the engineers
- Wright's angry letter saying he had given more of his genius than Kaufmann had a right to expect
- East-facing headboards, a dining table hiding a structural pier, and a hearth built on the site's own boulders
- Local laborers paid pennies an hour and a reopened quarry supplying the stone
- Terraces that sagged seven inches by the 1990s and the post-tensioning cables that saved them in the early 2000s