January 17, 1938: Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" Is Completed

January 17, 1938: "Fallingwater" is completed in Springfield Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. It is the most famous design of America's foremost architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was born on June 8, 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. He believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called "organic architecture." By 1900, he was already being hailed for his "prairie style" houses.

He fell into a bit of a rut after World War I, and by the 1930s, competitor Philip Johnson was calling him "the greatest architect of the 19th Century." And like a later Chicago-based legend, basketball star Michael Jordan, Wright took that personally. He upped his game, and the 1930s would feature his most-hailed designs.

Among these was a house he was contracted for by Edgar J. Kaufmann, president of Kaufmann's Department Store in Pittsburgh. He and his wife, Liliane, enjoyed outdoor activities like hiking and horseback riding. Their son, Edgar Jr., was a student of Wright's, and he introduced the design giant to his parents in 1934, at Taliesin, Wright's artists' colony in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

The Kaufmann's owned a remote property outside Pittsburgh, a small cabin near a waterfall, which they used as a Summer retreat. In December 1934, with these cabins deteriorating, Kaufmann contacted Wright, and asked him to build them a new house there.

Wright received the results of a survey of the area in March 1935. It took Wright until October 1935 to complete his final design, construction began in April 1936, and the house was completed on January 17, 1938. With its horizontal-dominated design of stone and concrete, built into the rock of a hill, what Edgar Jr. called "broad bands of windows," and an incorporation of the waterfall into the house itself, the construction cost $155,000 -- about $3.2 million in 2022 money. Almost immediately, the house was featured in Henry Luce's magazines Time and Life, and restored Wright's reputation as America's greatest architect -- living or dead.

Fallingwater was the Kaufmann family's weekend home from 1937 until 1963, when Edgar Jr. donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. Liliane died in 1952, and Edgar Sr. in 1955. Edgar Jr. taught architecture and art history at Taliesin and at Columbia University in New York, living until 1989. Wright died on April 9, 1959, 6 months before the opening of his last commission, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Due to the area's unusual patterns of sunlight and humidity, and the presence of the waterfall as part of the design, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has spent a great deal of money to restore Fallingwater. They now operate the house as a museum, with some of the Kaufmann family's art collection inside, including many paintings by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, who was a friend of theirs. The house also has a Museum Store. It is 67 miles southeast of Pittsburgh; and 45 miles north of Morgantown, West Virginia, home of West Virginia University.

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January 17, 1938 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL had no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.