Sunday June 28, 2026
Our Fallingwater Weekend
On Friday, Derek and I visited the Fallingwater home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and hit a couple other sites around Pittsburgh on the way home.
We left Akron for Mill Run, Pennsylvania at around 8:00 in the morning and arrived at the visitor center at 11:00. I booked our tickets online a couple weeks ago for a 12:30 slot, but we both like to be good and early. It gave us a chance to check out the gift shop and gallery room. Tour groups of about 14 people were departing in regular 10-minute intervals.
Fallingwater was completed in 1936 for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., his wife Liliane, and their son Edgar Jr. as their weekend home away from their main home, a mansion in Pittsburgh. Edgar Sr. was the owner and director of Kaufmann’s Department Store.
Our tour guide was a lovely woman with a calming voice named Theresa. Before taking the quarter mile hike to the house, we were each given an earpiece so we could hear what Theresa was saying without her needing to shout. There’s so much background noise in the surroundings, so I was really grateful to have it!
I wasn’t prepared for the sheer number of rhododendrons growing everywhere on the property! I thought to myself seeing them all around the visitor center that they must have been planted when they built the house. But, as Theresa told us, they are in fact native to the land. Wright had the terraces of the house painted tan to reference the color of the fallen rhododendron leaves (seen near my feet).
The word that comes to mind for me is calming. The white noise from the stream and the falls under the house was a constant. Wright didn’t use any curtains in the home. He wanted to blur the boundary between the interior and exterior space. It would be a really wonderful place to stay for a week as a getaway. A weekend to me wouldn’t have been enough!
I didn’t want to take too many photos (we weren’t allowed to take photos on the upper floors of the house anyways due to the small amount of room). However, I did want to take a couple of the guest house pool, which was one of my favorite features. Theresa explained that it is a freshwater pool which fills on its own due to the runoff from the stream. The bright green color is caused by the algae, which forms about two weeks after the pool is drained and cleaned. A “minor inconvenience” for Wright, who didn’t have to use it.
On Saturday, we moseyed our way to Pittsburgh to check out the Mattress Factory, a museum of contemporary experimental and installation artwork.
The museum consists of three separate buildings in the Mexican War Streets of Pittsburgh.
I had missed the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art when it came in 2018, but I’m glad to finally experience a couple of her infinity rooms here.
Before departing for home, we paid a quick visit to Randyland. This is the creation of Randy Gilson. He has turned two buildings on this block into a rainbow-colored maximalist collage of found and painted objects.
We would’ve lingered longer to take it all in if the rain hadn’t started picking up. And by this time, we were both feeling the pull to get back home.
As we were leaving, we passed Randy the artist himself. The man, shirtless, had been talking to some other folks. And then he said to all passing:
“Don’t let the clouds and rain bother you. Remember, behind them the sun is still there, unchanging.”
