Students Design for Wright Homes

Images of the Fallingwater furniture proposals provided by John Reynolds

BY MEGAN MILSTEAD

NOV. 6, 2007

Balanced on the edge of a natural waterfall, the nearly camouflaged walls of stone and beige concrete appear to grow out of the sandstone and surrounding forest. The setting sun is reflected in the mirror-like windows that face the beauty of the Pennsylvanian mountains. The house, named Fallingwater, is a Frank Lloyd Wright design considered a leading example of organic architecture. Visited by approximately 140,000 people a year, the house has been named one of the 12 landmarks that will change the way you see the world, America’s most favorite historic home, and a building of the century among other accolades. It is also where Miami University architecture students have been both inspired and inspiring for the past four years.

Miami architecture professor John Reynolds launched the Fallingwater work at the invitation of Cara Armstrong, a former student and the curator of education at Fallingwater.

“Be kind to your students because you never know where they’ll end up and they may end up giving you a job,” Reynolds said.

The Beginning

Armstrong had a vision to make the house more accessible to the public.

“I’m interested in how people and museums can be more inclusive and used for more interactive experiences beyond a house tour,” Armstrong said.

The first Miami graduate students who worked on the house, in 2003, benefited from this inclusiveness by designing furniture for Fallingwater’s Servant’s Sitting Room, now used as the tour guide break room.

According to Troy Lowell, one of three students who saw the furniture project through to completion over three years after graduating from Miami, visitors and tour guides to Fallingwater are not allowed to touch anything in the home.

“It’s so homey that you want to [touch things],” Lowell said. His design for the seating area sought to make the tour guides “…not feel so separate from such a warm environment.”

Armstrong said she liked the attitude Miami students brought to Fallingwater.

“They were more about understanding Fallingwater but not about, ‘How can my work be a part of Fallingwater,’ ” Armstrong said.

Lowell said that this philosophy comes from Reynolds’ teaching.

“Our challenge was to extract the DNA of the site and build from that,” Lowell said.

That required walking around the home and property, observing the wind and sun, sketching the structure and grounds, and generally getting a feel for how the home was built and constructed. It is an organic, evolutionary experience for the students who tease out the miniscule details of a building like scientists decoding the secrets to human life.

The Present

Bill James, a Miami student who is currently working on Fallingwater in an undergraduate studio, uses the same process.

“It’s made me a lot more careful in how I approach a site before I just plop a building down on it,” James said.

James and fellow students are creating master plans for the renovation of a farmstead adjacent to Fallingwater as well as working with a second Frank Lloyd Wright home called Westcott.

“We started at the very small scale with the furniture, then at the level of the landscape and now at the scale of the individual homestead,” Reynolds said.

Three Miami architecture studios have worked with Fallingwater since the initial project. The second looked at how to restore and extend the programming of the farmstead itself. The third explored more of the 4,000 available acres of land and the possibility of bringing in new housing. The fourth and current studio is bringing all these ideas together in a master plan to develop housing prototypes for the 19th century farmstead.

The students are in the process of securing funding for the six housing plans. Armstrong said Fallingwater hopes to expand its educational and residency programs, but needs more space to do so.

As far as real experience goes, Reynolds said the students are in the middle of a wonderful opportunity.

“Students are excited because they see themselves engaged in real world projects. They’re seeing real outcomes,” Reynolds said. “They don’t have to wait for permission. They don’t have to wait to graduate. Their work has real meaning and value now.”

Though James’ studio has undertaken a large project, he feels that the house has many opportunities, big and small.

“I think anything associated with Fallingwater is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

Lowell, who now works as a mechanical engineer and also has an architecture license, said that working with Fallingwater impacted how he approaches projects and other aspects of his career.

“It has changed the way I do things,” he said. “It has changed the way I interact with the owner, architect and engineer. I see the benefit of communicating across the board.”

Current Miami students, meanwhile, are honing their communication skills in a second Frank Lloyd Wright project, the Westcott House in Springfield, Ohio. Armstrong made the project possible by introducing Reynolds to Marta Wojcik, curator of interpretation at Westcott.

While the Westcott House has worked with some student groups before, Miami’s students have taken their work with the house to a new level, Wojcik said.

“We never really had a class dedicated to our house, our museum,” she said. “The amount of time they are spending on it is really amazing.”

Similar to Fallingwater, the Westcott House is hoping to expand and reinterpret its facilities to accommodate spaces for more education, administration and housing among other things.

Students are creating different design ideas for ways in which the Westcott House could be used.

“With their fresh input and fresh perspectives they can offer new concepts,” Wojcik said.

The Future

As for the future, the work of past and present Miami students will be receiving both local and international recognition through exhibition. The furniture created for Fallingwater was first exhibited in a barn on the site from March through June of 2006. In 2009, it will be joined with new work in a bicentennial exhibition at Miami University’s Art Museum called “Towards New Conceptions of Organic Architecture: Learning from the Experience of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Westcott Houses.” The museum is giving the architecture students $2,250 to help set up the exhibition which will run from January to May of 2009.

After its time at the art museum, the exhibit will travel throughout the United States to places such as the Boston Architectural Center, the California Institute of the Arts, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. It will then be entered in an international design competition aimed at getting architects to think about living close to the land and sustainable design.

Reynolds will also journey to Florida this spring to attend the Miami Alumni Association’s Winter College. He will showcase what the students have done thus far and where their work will go in the future.

Over the years the students’ involvement with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpieces has been centered on relationships—relationships between a professor and his students, students and their organic discoveries in architecture, and all humans with nature. Reynolds’ enthusiasm for his students and their success is an undertone to every project undertaken at Fallingwater and Westcott House.

“Anything is possible. We have students who are so completely full of life,” Reynolds said. “I’d put my last name after any of their first names—I’m that proud of them.”