Holding Back Tears

I don't usually talk about this, but there were times when, although often in the presence of visitors (and maybe partically because of it), I felt moved to tears during an average working day at Fallingwater.

It tended to happen most often after stepping from the cavernous second floor hallway into the vast, sunlit master bedroom opening up to the terrace outside.

There was something that I understood deeply, yet at the same time didn't understand at all, about how it felt, what it meant. Maybe I could sense that others felt it too.

So I would do my best to talk about the room, then release people to explore the terrace outside. During this time, I would try and collect myself.

There's a truth this space expresses that parts of me knows and other parts want to know. There's a beauty that dips down deep and touches something in us, if we're open to it. There's a revelation to it that never stops unfolding.

Taking Love of a Place to Horrifying Heights

I realize the recollection of one of the key designers and builders of an American architectural masterpiece requesting that I disrobe is hard to follow--and I confess I let that post ride for a while--there's really so much more. So much.

Many of us who spent our days at Fallingwater loved it with a passion normally reserved for great romances, for spiritual pursuits--and of course that doesn't preclude us from those passions either--that we went to extreme lengths to engage with it, to learn its every secret.

One secret that it held of which few had real, practical knowledge was its nocturnal life. There was something so intimate about the idea of being there at night, of knowing what it felt like, of having that privileged experience, even though the privilege was, in our case, self-created.

One night watchman was a good friend, and one who, sadly, died not long after in an accident at home. He suggested a couple of us, including a couple architectural interns who were staying nearby, to take a walk there one night. He didn't let us in the main gate--that would have been too bold--but rather offered a route by which we could hike in. We didn't mean any trouble. We just wanted to feel it, to know it in a different way. And the interns wanted to snap a few night shots. And that's what we did. We never even went in the house, just walked around outside, reveling in our adventure.

But our friend, the guard, had a sense of adventure that went far beyond our nighttime hike. Telling us he had done so several times before to entertain himself at night, he climbed the stones of Fallingwater's massive chimney and stood on top, arms outstretched in the darkness, high above the waterfall and jagged sandstone boulders below. It was almost a ghostly image, and I marveled that his fear of death seemed hauntingly absent. All he felt was exhilaration.