I spent many wonderful hours Sunday wandering the Art Institute of Chicago, and one of the paintings there that caught my eye was “The Rock,” by Peter Blume.

According to the information card up on the wall to the right of the painting, it was commissioned by the Edgar Kaufman family for their Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home Fallingwater.

I’ve been to Fallingwater. I didn’t much care for it, at least not the inside, but I’d been there. And I wondered … on which wall could such a painting possibly have hung? I could picture the claustrophobic interior of Fallingwater clearly, and so I asked the employees in adjacent rooms (I could find none in the room containing the painting) whether they knew. They did not.

Enter the Internet. (more…)

If there’s one thing we all know about the TARDIS, it’s that it’s bigger on the inside. But what I was horrified to learn recently when Irene and I visited two famous Frank Lloyd Wright buildings is that whatever the man designed was smaller on the inside.

Irene and always wanted to see Fallingwater, and so last week we took a vacation day and traveled there, also taking in the nearby Wright home Kentuck Knob. Up until our tours, we’d only known of these places from their beautiful exteriors. So we were stunned on Friday to discover how uncomfortable, unfriendly, and positively inhuman the interiors of these properties were.

What first disconcerted me when we moved inside Fallingwater was that there wasn’t a single spot in which I would feel comfortable simply sitting and reading a book … except outside on one of the terraces, and then only during daylight hours. Inside, all of the lighting was indirect and of low wattage. In one of the bedrooms, the tour guide actually told us that it was Wright’s intention that when you entered that room, you’d feel closed in, and your gaze would immediately be drawn outside. So these rooms were being made intentionally uncomfortable in some insane bid to bring one closer to Nature.

The interior of Kentuck Knob was, depressingly, even more unfit for human habitation. Dark, dreary, with some of the corridors only 21″ wide. While a few of the rooms in these houses were bearable, none of them seemed warm or inviting. I continually felt a sense of oppressiveness as the walls and ceilings pressed down upon me. (more…)