Today we made an exception from our usual rule of never being in charge of the vehicle that took us to our destinations and so we rented ourselves a car to make the epic journey from Washington DC to Mill Run in Pennsylvania.
After heading to Union Station, where the hire car facilities are, we got our car and set of. With our trusty GPS giving me instructions, I managed to only get lost twice. Washington DC has some strange road intersections and it can be on occasion confusing as to where your road goes. Driving on the wrong side didn’t help matters much, but didn’t hinder my progress too much. In fact I only veered on to the wrong side of the road once on the whole trip outside a petrol station on a dead road with no lane markers. No other cars were around and I corrected myself quickly.
Our trip out of the DC downtown was meant to be a 5 minute drive to the first of many interstates (think freeway), but instead ended up being a confused scenic trip past the citadel (Pentagon), and Arlington Cemetery.
Once we got on the interstate system it was quite easy. The whole trip was long and fairly tedious but we made good time and found ourselves on Mill Run Road with plenty of time to spare. Once we got nearby, relatively speaking, we started seeing signage directing us towards the house site. Useful, as without them we would have probably driven past the site without even knowing.
Before you get to see the house you first go through the visitors centre. It’s a small facility with a gift shop, cafe, restrooms and is the departure point for the in depth tours.
Before long we were on the tour, which took us down a meandering driveway down to the house itself. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, it is a stunningly beautiful house built right into the landscape and the Bear Run creek waterfall giving it the name Fallingwater.
The house is built into the landscape rather than just on it, the rocks the house sits in are connected to the house in many places and even present themselves indoors. The use of natural materials, many quarried only hundreds of meters from the house itself, further tie the house to it’s environment.
The house, as a museum, is unique in that it has most if not all of the original furniture.
The tour took us through the entire house, and let us take photos. A lot of the rooms are quite hard to photograph, due to their size. It’s also difficult to translate how well the house is designed to feel as you move from room to room. Corridors are narrow and have a low ceiling, a method called compression. The result is that the room you step into opens up before you, a release. A combination of inbuilt furniture and structural elements draw the eye to the windows, and the view.
The tour started in the kitchen, took us around to the cave-like front entrance, and then meandered through the house visiting almost every room. We then left the main house through the bridge and walked up to the guest house. Because it was raining we then double backed, rather than going out through the guest house terrace, and went to the garage area. The tour ended there after a short presentation from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the group that own and maintain Fallingwater.
After the tour we walked to the ‘view’, the location where the classical shot of the house is taken. We sat there watching the house and the waterfall for a while before deciding that it was getting late and we had to start heading back to DC.
One long drive later we were back at Union Station returning our car and heading back to the hotel. We took the Metro back to Gallery Pl and Chinatown, the same station we went to the other day, but found ourselves stuck there as the trains had just shut down (at 12am). Fortunately we weren’t too far from our hotel so we walked, and on the way I took this photo from the National Mall.
