Fallingwater - Recreating an Architectural Icon with Arckit

I was fortunate enough to visit Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright over 30 years ago and its profound impact has remained with me until today. I stayed in a quirky 'half-way house' type hostel in Pittsburg the night before getting the bus playing cards with some very unusual 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ type characters. Truth is, I couldn’t sleep with the excitement and anticipation of seeing the masterpiece that I had only read about and studied all through my uni days. There was something wonderful about that in itself, the pre-mobile phone imagining and wondering era, I mean. And remember, this was the Mecca for any architectural student. 

 In 1932 Wright established Taliesin Fellowship, a sort of apprenticeship-cum-works programme run out of his remote Wisconsin studio. In 1934, art student Edgar Kaufmann Jr. enrolled. Kaufmann was the son of a Pittsburg department store magnate and, following his son’s involvement with Wright’s practice, Kaufmann Sr. approached the architect to design a new family summer home on Kaufmann’s country estate in the Appalachian mountains of western Pennsylvania. The rest is history. 

The house forms a series of interlocking floating planes of terraces and overhangs that cantilever above Bear Run water fall and set within a lush forest. Seen from the river, it’s as though it has grown out of the ground and at one with its natural surroundings. 

From its masterful play of lines, delicate corner windows, gleaming interior stone floors to resemble river stones, open plan layout and phenomenal feat of engineering, Falling Water could literally have been designed and built today.

In homage to this utterly iconic structure and because we have received so many requests to do so, we have combined a series of components to enable you to build your very own miniature Arckit model representation of Fallingwater House. Happy Building!

Build an Arckit model representation of the Fallingwater House