Fallingwater The Model

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (built in 1934) in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, is one of the great masterpieces of modern architecture. In discussing how the model was built, the design of the famous house itself is also analyzed, shining a new light on many intricacies of its complex construction. I constructed this model in 1984 and it is still regarded as a masterpiece in model making and a high point in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Excerpt from Amazon’s Review by Timothy Murphy

Bonfilio walks you through the process of re-creating on a Lilliputian scale this most complicated and beguiling of modernist houses--a job he completed for the MoMA in the early 1980s, only to do it again a few years later for a private commission. His painstaking narration, black-and-white photographs of each stage of the model's creation, and Ted Spagna's excellent photographs of the real house (shot expressly for Bonfilio to use in planning out his work) all work together splendidly here. Anyone who ever found satisfaction in the minutely focused process of assembling a model car or airplane will be completely absorbed by Bonfilio's quest to reproduce with unstinting detail and realism the diverse textures of Wright's masterpiece, from the complex stonework of its inner and outer walls to the dazzling sheen of the waterfall over which the front of the structure so famously perches.

But even better than that, Bonfilio's loving chronicle of taking Fallingwater apart and putting it back together again, as it were, accomplishes something that dozens of other books on this iconic house fail to do: it gets us to look at the house and its complex topography, its every elevation and surface, corner, and detail--as well as the choices, inspired and imprudent, that Wright made in designing it--with a fresh new eye. It's almost like having an investment in its original creation, figuring out step by step how to build a house around a boulder, cantilever it over a waterfall, build half the furniture right into it, and somehow make the whole thing work structurally and look drop-dead gorgeous at the same time. Oh, and the book's end papers are matched to the same Cherokee-red paint that Wright used in the house--the perfect swaddling for this unexpectedly delightful little volume's embarrassment of riches.