Fallingwaters 43rd Season:
New Ways to Experience a Masterwork

Fallingwater may already be a favorite  destination, but this season, there will be more ways to enjoy this Commonwealth Treasure. New tours have been developed that will give visitors time to linger and reflect. Architect Paul Rudolph saw Fallingwater as, so real, so tangible, so
palpable, so wrought of permanent materials, and yet, simultaneously, it has a mythical quality, as if it exists only in ones dream. This stream of consciousness quality causes it to pulsate, to come and go into focus as one walks in and around, up through, out beyond, turns, looks down upon, and through it.

The Fallingwater Landscape Tour is a 90-minute guided walk around the house and
its immediate setting. Available on Saturdays in May and September, guests are treated to a birds-eye view from above, the iconic southwest view, and see the building form its own cascade down the hillside when viewing the masterwork from the east. Its clear how the house grows from the ground (we even see the old quarry from where Fallingwaters stones were hewn), but from the different viewpoints, one can see how it hovers.

The Sunday Brunch Tour and the Fallingwater Nocturne Tour allow one to almost imagine inhabiting Fallingwater, after spending nearly two hours in the house on a guided tour, limited to 10 people. Photography is permitted and the tour includes time in rooms not included on a regular tour, such as the Kitchen and Servants Quarters. The tour concludes on the covered terrace as guests join their guide for a either a late brunch or dessert. Bear Run flows beneath, its sound creating the perfect accompaniment. The Brunch Tour is offered once a month on Sunday morning. The Fallingwater Nocturne Tour takes place on the night closest to the full moon in July and September and allows guests to see Fallingwater as Edgar Kaufmann jr. once described it, a great lantern in the forest, giving shape to the dark.

With the Picnic and Poetry Trail Tour, guests are armed with the necessary resources (a gourmet picnic from the Fallingwater Cafe and a copy of the book, Poetry of Nature), to take a fresh look at Bear Run Nature Reserves Poetry Trail and how we observe nature in general. Like the trail, this small book was created in the spirit of Fallingwater as a guide to contemplating our physical and spiritual connections to the natural world. Award-winning poet, essayist and amateur naturalist Jeff O’Brien provides the text that offers us suggestions on how to pause and appreciate the subtleties of nature. Blank pages encourage writing, drawing and sketching and the picnic gives yet another reason to hang back, explore and discover the western Pennsylvania woods.

The new tours are not about architecture with a Big Message, but about how lives can be affected by good design and how architecture responds to the human condition. There are few higher compliments you could pay a building.

For more information on these tours and other new programs, visit www.fallingwater.org or call the Visitor Services office at 724-329-8501.