MASSARO VERSUS WRIGHT

“A House Without a Care in the World”

Fallingwater Rising by Franklin B. Toker
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
ISBN 1-4000-4026-4

Reviewed by Peter Reidy

You know that isn’t true. It was in trouble structurally before it was built, and chronically ever since, almost fatally in the 1990s. This last was one of the architectural stories of the decade, and historians have often enough chronicled its earlier troubles. Just the same, you know what Toker means. By contrast to earlier writers on the house, most notably Donald Hoffman and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the clients’ son, Toker focuses on social history and convinces us that the story and its characters are worthy of the architecture, almost the matter of a novel or a movie. Will the aging architect, once the cynosure of his profession in America, Europe and Japan, come back from years of idleness, or will he remain a has-been, his creative peak decades behind him? Will the client show himself once more the master reader of public taste, or will he be expensively wrong for once? Just what is the story with father and son, so different but rivals just the same?
While some of the book’s conjectures are silly (more on this later), others are intriguing. Placing Fallingwater in architectural history, Toker notes, as others have, a kinship to Neutra’s Health House for the Lovells in Los Angeles, which Fallingwater supplanted as the world’s most famous modern residence. The difference he points out is that the later building does what its predecessor only pretends to do. Its cantilevers are real, not hung from the frame on invisible cables. Its bolsters hold up the house itself and not just a detached swimming pool. He finds references not only to the International Style of the day, as others have, but to the area’s industrial and hydroelectric past.
Toker’s central quest is to rescue Edgar Sr., the colorful retailer, from what he considers unjust neglect. For over forty years his son has gotten credit as the de facto client who discovered Wright and delivered his parents to him, whereupon they provided the money but otherwise stood aside. Kaufmann père was, to the contrary, an enthusiastic, hands-on builder who had been putting up buildings and publicizing them for years. This leads to the question, why did he choose Wright after cruising through neoclassical as a philanthropist, neo-Norman for his home and art deco in his store? “He was a merchant, and that is what merchants do: jump from style to style as the market demands.” He made his fortune by seeing where public taste was going and getting there first. He hyped Fallingwater more energetically at first than Wright himself. (Toker makes an interesting distinction between hype, which one can orchestrate and buy, and buzz, which happens spontaneously or not at all.) A decade later The Kaufmanns wounded Wright by switching to Neutra for their Palm Springs house, just in time for the ascendancy of mid-century modernism. He was an esthete, but he was first and always a showman, never forgetting the the publicity value of his own life. In yet another interesting background story, we learn that department stores once did many of the jobs that museums and movie theaters have subsequently taken over. The Armory Show, which introduced modern art to the United States, toured retailers’, as did Wright’s Broadacre City model. Art had been a means to the end of advertising long before the 1930s.
Wright had built almost nothing in over a decade when the Kaufmanns approached him. One big, public commission after another had fallen through in California, Arizona and New York. The action, so everyone else thought, was with the Europeans rather than with a man who had made his mark by 1909 and not done much since. In the annus mirabilis of 1936, with this house, Johnson Wax and the the first Usonian, for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, Wright came back to the top and has been there ever since.
This is one received story Toker doesn’t challenge; he retells it enthusiastically. Some of the others, though, he recounts in a new light. Students of Wright will have heard the story of his doing the drawings in a few hours, after inviting Kaufmann out to Taliesin to see them. Having tracked down several eyewitnesses, finds this true in outline, but by examining the drawings and their erasures, he has come to the conclusion that the architect had been drawing privately for months. He even reconstructs what the first scheme might have looked like. It’s a handsome house that would make any client and almost any architect proud, but, in Toker’s phrase, it doesn’t sing. Wright only later had the insight to extend the upper balcony a few feet beyond the one beneath it, turning a weekend house into an icon.
A few inaccuracies manage to get through. The “ugly pier” (two of them, actually) that marred the appearance of the Tomek house Illinois for so long is not there “to this day.” They both came out in 1992, a welcome change evident to anyone who drives by. The underlying point, though, is sound: Wright’s structure, not for the last time, was inadequate to the weight he put on it. Brendan Gill speculated in Architectural Digest, not that Edgar Jr. was expelled from the Fellowship for his homosexuality but rather that he left because of an unappily-concluded love affair. The fact that the book cites the infamously inaccurate Gill at all is a symptom of the its problems.
A bigger issue than the occasional inaccuracy is Toker’s overeagerness to reach the conclusions he wants. He leaps over too many inferential gaps and cantilevers his conclusions beyond what the underlying data will support. If a conjecture might be true, it becomes so for the purpses of the story; if the evidence doesn’t contradict a theory, it counts as evidence for it. For example, he sees the elder Kaufmann’s efforts to make his house famous as a reaction to the genteel but pervasive anti-Jewish prejudice of the day. Old-money Pittsburgh was happy to cut mutually-profitable deals with the Jews, but they couldn’t enter their clubs. Tennis matches were a special case, because guests didn’t actually go inside. This is an interesting speculation, but the book presents no hard data to make us think it’s anything more. The Kaufmann it presents is in any case a man too busy, and having too good a time, to pursue even a justified grudge. On pp. 114 – 115 alone are five occurrences of “would have” and one each of “could not miss,” “might have,” “was surely,” “probably knew,” “is a safe bet,” “may well have” and “chances are excellent.” All of this comes of an attempt to summon up an imaginary social connection to the patrons of modern architecture in Los Angeles – Aline Barnsdall and the other Wright clients, and Phillip and Leah Lovell. Once again, we see nothing like a letter, photo or eyewitness account, nor does Toker quite say that he has such evidence, but he loves the idea. The most egregious psychologizing comes in his treatment of the steps that lead from the top floor of Fallingwater (Junior’s rooms) down to the west terrace one floor below. In an elaborate and quite undocumented account, Toker reads these steps as Wright’s symbolic attempt, hopeful but in vain, to promote closeness between the son upstairs and his father below. To do this he has to ignore a much simpler explanation: the steps are there to give the top floor access to the terrace. The alternative is to go down an interior staircase to in the opposite direction, double back along the gallery and cut through Edgar Sr’s room. If one insists on bringing Freud into it, the point of the floorplan is exactly to the contrary. The stairs enabled young Edgar to get to the terrace without meeting his father.
The inconsistencies inaccuracies Toker finds in the son’s recollections are the kind that might creep into anyone’s over the decades, not proof of a systematic campaign of deception. The fact that a researcher as diligent as Toker has no other explanation of the initial connection is a reason to respect Edgar Jr’s version, not to dismiss it.
And so on and on. Read this book for entertainment. Read it skeptically for enlightenment. If you’ve never been to Fallingwater, read it before you go, but don’t throw away your copies of Hoffman Kaufmann Jr.