Geologic setting and organic architecture of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fallingwater is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that showcases a unique organic architectural design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Rising from bedrock in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, USA, Fallingwater incorporates large boulders into interior living spaces and is oriented with the geometry of a landscape created by the interplay of mountain and climate. Built to showcase local sandstone, Fallingwater is of the terrain. Building stone was quarried near the house from a 2-m-thick zone of quartzose medium to thin-bedded, fine- to very fine-grained sandstones in the Pennsylvanian upper Pottsville Formation. The building stone has abundant trace fossils and ripple marks, and is interpreted to have been deposited in shoreface environments with some tidal influence, or possibly in tidal flat environments. The house rests on sandstone bedrock of the Homewood sandstone, a Middle Pennsylvanian unit within the upper Pottsville Formation. At Fallingwater, the Homewood sandstone is interpreted to fill an incised valley with coarse, fluvial sandstones common in the lower part of the valley fill and finer-grained fluvial sandstones with possible evidence of marine or brackish influence in the upper fill. The Fallingwater building stone unit overlies the Homewood sandstone, above an interpreted marine flooding surface. Thickening of the Homewood sandstone in synclines suggests that deposition was influenced by Alleghanian deformation. Natural fractures in competent bedrock controlled the orientation of Bear Run at Fallingwater, and the fit of the house within the three-dimensional landscape of the valley, stream, and waterfall. Variation in natural fractures in bedded versus massive sandstone layers appears to have controlled the azimuths of the edges of the waterfalls at Fallingwater. Creation of the Fallingwater sandstone member of the Pottsville Formation is proposed.