About a decade ago, I got to spend a week at a residency centered on immersion and design, provided by the Fallingwater Institute. My group of about 12 people stayed at High Meadow, which is an educational complex the Institute operates and is also an award winning piece of architecture. My wife was insanely jealous. Visiting FLW works has been a minor travel hobby for us over the years.

Being only a short walk from Fallingwater, we spent some time there every day, including one day when we had the whole house to ourselves and had dinner on the terrace. We each tried to gain a sense of what it was like to live there, rather than just be a museum tourist. A couple of folks played card games sitting at the kitchen table all night. One person curled up with a book in one of the tall, narrow bay windows. I laid out on the floor of the living room and stared at the ceiling, something I do at home sometimes. I thought laying on the floor would give me a feeling of ownership, of doing whatever I wanted with a place, because you couldn't do that as a regular tourist.

It... kinda worked. Not really. It was too surreal. I don't know if I'd ever be able to feel like Fallingwater was home.

My wife and kids and I visited Taliesin West last summer as part of a Grand Canyon trip. I had much the same feeling there, while listening to the tour talk about FLW and his apprentices living there, that I couldn't imagine it as a real living space. Also, I started getting real cultish vibes from the stories of some of the stuff the apprentices went through. Of course, Scottsdale, AZ wasn't any cooler back then than it is today and they built the place themselves, by hand, without any air conditioning. More than one apprentice's marriage ended in divorce over the place because their wives couldn't stand living in tents in the desert without power and running water during the construction years. I was also struck by how I would not expect anyone to even be allowed to bring a spouse on any similar apprenticeship in the modern day, but that's a different issue.

Between all of those experiences and also hearing the stories of how much the wives of FLW's clients would fight with him over kitchens, my own career as a consultant, not being able to imagine telling a client they couldn't have the kitchen they want, and other issues, in recent times I've lost some respect for FLW.

I don't think his Usonian concepts have had much impact on society. For one thing, most people don't even know Usonian is a word, as evidenced when I see them try to come up with a word for a North American who isn't Canadian or Mexican (USian has to win a prize for finding an even more awkward term than Usonian).

That leaves all of his contract work, which was frequently deeply flawed in construction. Some of that defectiveness was due to him experimenting with new construction techniques that eventually got perfected and are no longer so flawed, but there are still many core issues. I would come home from visiting his works and I would wrack my brain over how to employ his ideas of incorporating nature into living spaces before I finally remembered I live in Virginia: nature here is primarily composed of mosquitoes a this breathable water we call "air".

His designs are all-or-nothing, it must be employed as a unified whole. It doesn't look right if it's a single piece of furniture or a window treatment in an otherwise normal house. Putting a 50" flat screen in Fallingwater would ruin the place. Got walls at 90 degree angles to each other? Sorry about your luck! It ends up looking like wearing cargo shorts and a Fedora. If you have a regular ass house like every other "impoverished" slob with a quarter acre lot in suburbia, FLW-style design does not work. I say "impoverished" because FLW-style designs are exclusively the purvue of the ultra rich. To have a house that coordinated, that put together, takes "I make people work overtime for me and I don't even know their names" kind of money.

In 2024, I spent $750,000 on a 1200 sqft rancher built in 1962. Less than a decade before that, Kentuck Knob had been completed for about $96,000. My house may not be as pretty, but at least the roof doesn't leak and the stove can fit a cake.