Fallingwater Update_December 2024

December 2024 Thank you for your leadership support of Fallingwater! We are so grateful for your generosity and all it helps accomplish year after year. This season, Fallingwater has been full of activity, from welcoming approximately 140,000 people onsite through the public tour program and other educational offerings to the World Heritage Preserved preservation initiative currently underway that has provided the opportunity to see “preservation in action.” I’m happy to provide this update on the work that you made possible.

Education In the time since Edgar Kaufmann, jr. donated Fallingwater to the Conservancy in 1963, it has evolved into the hub for learning he had hoped. This year, 5,070 students toured Fallingwater through a program aimed at engaging local schoolchildren, and an additional 1,224 students participated in virtual field trips. These students were located all over the country and the world, with the furthest being from Wales. Additionally, we had 1,540 eight-to-13-year-olds participate in the Gnome House Design Challenge, a program that lets children design a house for their unique gnome “client.” Our virtual summer camps for students also continue to grow in popularity. Our 2024 sessions sold out within weeks.

In addition to immersive public tours and school group experiences, Fallingwater offers an extensive array of programming through the Fallingwater Institute. People of all ages can participate in workshops, residencies, virtual programs, convenings and other intensive offerings that encourage big thinking and deepen their understanding of Fallingwater.

1,540 budding architects and designers designed tiny homes for gnomes.

One highlight of this year’s Fallingwater Institute programming was Ron Donoughe, artist-in-residence, who held a series of educational workshops called Fallingwater En Plein Air for the general public, school students and Fallingwater staff. Donoughe documented Fallingwater’s changing seasons through a series of landscape paintings. In May of 2025, Donoughe’s work will be presented in an exhibition at Southern Allegheny Museum of Art in Ligonier, alongside the work of his many students of all ages.

An example of one participant’s work in Donoughe’s plein air workshop

Another program of the Fallingwater Institute is Insight/Onsite, which are weekend-long programs that combine unfettered access to Fallingwater with discovery and observation, group exercises, technical explorations and in-depth discussions. In October, Insight/Onsite: The Geology of Fallingwater was led by Fred Zelt. Zelt conducted a comprehensive geological study of Fallingwater and shared his findings during guided tours, exploratory hikes and scholarly discussions at Fallingwater and nearby Kentuck Knob and Ohiopyle State Park. This program followed a webinar hosted by Zelt in April, which can be found on Fallingwater’s YouTube channel and website. Since this Insite/Onsite was so popular, we will be offering it again next October.

Offering interesting and immersive opportunities for high school students is another focus of the Fallingwater Institute. One of our partners for 2024 was the ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) Mentor Program, a nationwide career exploration program, which generously provided scholarships for 12 of their students to participate in a residency. Our weeklong high school residency programs provide opportunities for students to participate in architecture and design exercises with hands-on drawing and design projects inspired by Fallingwater, in-depth discussions and applications of Wright’s principles of organic architecture and career exploration. Our partnership with ACE Mentor Program was a natural one as their mission is “To engage, excite, and enlighten high school students to pursue careers in architecture, engineering, and construction.”

A special session of our High School Residency: Drawing and Model-making, was held exclusively for ACE Students, pictured here, in July.

We also continue to make accessibility improvements at Fallingwater to enhance the visitor experience. One of the ways in which we were able to combine this with our education work was through a program with the Pennsylvania State Modern Language Association, a statewide professional organization for language teachers. We hosted 36 language teachers for a workshop, tour of Fallingwater and professional development course. In return, they worked with their language students to translate our Fallingwater visitors map into seven different languages.

Preservation and Conservation As you know, Fallingwater is in the midst of a preservation effort to repair its major building systems, which include stone walls, reinforced concrete, flat roofs, flagstone terraces and steel window and door frames. It is the most comprehensive preservation initiative since we stabilized the deflecting cantilevers in the early 2000s, and one that had to be undertaken to protect the integrity of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic design. Our most recent Friends of Fallingwater newsletter details the Conservancy’s work over the last year, which has primarily been focused on the Guest House. Over the next few months, while the house is closed to visitors, we have a busy schedule to complete essential work that will impact the iconic views of Fallingwater. Our hope is to minimize the time those views will be impacted. Our preservation team has work scheduled in in detail through June of 2025 in an effort to keep the work on schedule.

After completing extensive waterproofing repairs to the Guest House’s roof, addressing The latest issue of Friends of Fallingwater. deteriorating concrete and injecting grout into the voids between stone walls, preservation efforts moved to the main house in early November. One of the first projects at the Main House is the injection grouting at the north facade. During the month of November, our preservation team has been injecting grout in the north wall of Edgar Kaufmann Sr.’s Study. Then, starting in December, work will be progressing to the section of wall above in Edgar jr.’s Study. The injection grouting at the main house will continue around the tower and chimney mass through the winter, to be completed in the spring.

In the new year, our preservation specialists will also replace the roofing membranes over the west side of the house and Edgar jr.’s Study, as well as waterproofing at the West Terrace. Much of this work requires our maintenance staff to build special temperaturecontrolled enclosures, which will enable our contractors to complete their work at required temperatures, allowing materials to remain dry and cure properly. For more information and to follow along with World Heritage Preserved work, please visit our blog at https://fallingwater.org/projects/world-heritage-preservation/.

Thank you for making this work – and much more – possible. If you are interested in more information about any of these efforts, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jgunther@paconserve.org. I hope you have a happy and healthy holiday season.

Sincerely,

Justin W. Gunther Vice President and Director, Fallingwater