Donald Hoffmann

We recently got to visit Fallingwater! This home is an architectural icon, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was built in the 1930s for Edgar Kaufmann (a wealthy Pittsburgh merchant) and his family as a second home, and is perched above a waterfall. Visiting Fallingwater has long been on my bucket list (ever since seeing a photo of it in a college textbook back in the 1980s).

This book was purchased at the gift shop, and covers how the seed was planted for Fallingwater and the trials and tribulations of it being built. It includes excerpts of letters between Wright and Kaufmann, among other correspondence between others concerning the build. Fallingwater was a challenge to build -- its design and locale specifically above water caused a lot of fits and spurts and occasional changes in plans and techniques in its development.

My only complaint about this volume is that the numerous pictures of Fallingwater before, during, and after are all in black and white (understandable for while it was being built, but would have been nice to have color pictures showing it is as it is today). But this quibble is actually what makes this book a reasonable price ($19.95) -- it's a Dover edition.

A very good book that provides a good feel of what it was like to build it, and to live in it once completed. It's easy to see why Fallingwater, and Wright himself, are iconic.… (mais)

Fifteen years after Edgar Kaufmann Jr. announced his intent to donate the house to a conservancy and therefore make it accessible to the public, Dover released what is considered the house's definitive account. If I had to choose only one book to keep on Fallingwater (I've had three at some point in my life), it would be this one. The details of Hoffman's deeply researched book have yet to be matched, though I have not read Franklin Toker's "Fallingwater Rising" from 2003, which is also considered definitive.… (mais)

Frank Lloyd Wright is probably still America's best known and iconic architect with 433 projects listed in Storrer's work catalog. FLW's buildings all share a common look of Japan/Pueblo meets Hobbit romanticism.

In this unassuming booklet with plenty of B/W photos and illustrations, Hoffmann distills the essence and principles of FLW's architecture: the horizontal lines hugging the ground, the cantilevered roof freeing walls from structural duties, the integration of buildings in their natural surroundings.

While Hoffmann dwells on the importance of the prairie on Wright's style, he neglects in my opinion the influence of Japanese buildings (a culture rediscovered shortly before FLW's birth). A discussion of his near contemporary Walter Gropius who also discovered many of Wright's lessons might have served to illustrate Wright's closeness to the 19th century with his focus on craftmanship and uniqueness. Overall, an excellent primer on Wright.… (mais)