Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{10. Falling Water, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936–9); architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). It must have taken a great leap of faith to be persuaded that this house could be viable — hovering with breathtaking audacity over a waterfall in the depths of a forest — but even the wealthy businessman who commissioned it as a holiday retreat baulked at Wright’s idea of covering the faces of the overhanging balconies in gold leaf. The living rooms feel close to the natural landscape, partly because the sound of the waterfall is inescapable, and partly because rocky outcrops erupt in the main living room. When approached by way of the front door, the house seems to grow out of the landscape, but it is the view from below that is best known. Wright took the reinforced concrete beyond its limits, and the building has sagged and needed substantial restoration work to keep it looking good. It remains a dazzling exploration of the possibilities of what a house can be.}

The precise ways in which we respond to buildings are variable according to our prior experiences of buildings. Depending on our acculturation, we might be impressed or dismayed by different things, but cutting across all considerations of style and taste, we respond also to the kind of life that we suppose to be implied in a building — whether it feels wholesome or dispiriting, sordid or dangerous, whether it opens up new possibilities, or reminds us of places where we have been happy in the past. We respond to these aspects of buildings, which are not intrinsic in the buildings themselves, as well as to the abstract set of shapes that we see.

Chapter 2 Growth of the Western tradition

Some places are special