Fallingwater Visit

Mike and I spent the last week on the east coast visiting family, and made a special stop on our drive between his home town of Selinsgrove, PA and Pittsburgh, PA where his brother and his brother’s wife live. We took a guided tour of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece built over a waterfall 90 minutes southeast of Pittsburgh.

The home is breathtaking, daring, and timeless all at once.

At the end of our one hour tour, an employee of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy asked for donations. I thought maybe our relatively expensive tickets were enough, but I just read this passage from the Wikipedia article about Fallingwater:

“In 1995, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy commissioned a study of the site's structural integrity. Structural engineers analyzed the movement of the cantilevers over time and conducted radar analysis to locate and quantify the reinforcement. The data proved the contractor had indeed added reinforcement over Wright's plan; nevertheless, the cantilevers were still insufficiently reinforced. Both the concrete and its steel reinforcement were close to their failure limits. An architectural firm was hired to fix the problem beginning with the installation of temporary girders in 1997.

In 2002, the structure was repaired permanently using post-tensioning. The living room flagstone floor blocks were individually tagged and removed. Blocks were joined to the concrete cantilever beams and floor joists; high-strength steel cables were fed through the blocks and exterior concrete walls and tightened using jacks. The floors and walls were then restored, leaving Fallingwater’s interior and exterior appearance unchanged. Today, the cantilevers have sufficient support and the deflection has stopped. The Conservancy continues to monitor movement in the cantilevers.”

That must have been very expensive!