On this West Virginia Morning, an experimental apple orchard in the state is helping to fight pollution, improve food scarcity and some hope even heal veterans. Briana Heaney has the story.
Fallingwater One of "10 Homes That Changed America"
Listen
Share this Article
Southwestern Pennsylvania’s famous Frank Lloyd Wright home Fallingwater will be featured in a new PBS program called 10 Homes That Changed America. The crew out of Chicago started production there last week.
“Part of our goal here is to start a conversation about architecture. We’re not trying to be the final word,” said Dan Protess, the PBS program’s producer.
Protess put together a panel of advisors from academia to help decide which homes would be featured on the show. Fallingwater was a natural choice since Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America’s most famous architects.
The show’s host, Geoffrey Baer, said when Wright built this house in 1937, he blew up certain ideas about Modern Architecture: “One of the tenants of Modernism was that you could take a glass box and put it anywhere—it was ‘universal’ architecture. And Frank Lloyd Wright utterly rejected this idea. This house could not be anywhere but here.”
Baer said it’ll be a challenge to compress the story of the house into a 5-minute segment for their program. 10 Homes That Changed America is slated to be broadcast in 2016.
Final cost: $155,000 (Included $8,000 architect’s fees, and $4,500 for installed walnut furnishings) equivalent to about $2,656,744.60 today.
Square footage: The main house uses 5,330 square feet. (2885 sq. ft. interior; 2445 sq. ft. terraces) while the guest house uses 1,700 square. feet.
Paint Colors: Wright’s desire to create a unified and organic composition limited the color palette at Fallingwater. Only two colors were used throughout: a light ochre for the concrete and his signature Cherokee red for the steel. PPG Pittsburgh Paints has worked with Fallingwater to develop eco-friendly paints that withstand the environmental challenges of the site. They have also created a series of colors inspired by the building and its surroundings. For more information click here.
Visitation: 4.5 million people since opening our doors in 1964, with 160,950 in 2011.
Preservation: The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has preserved Fallingwater since 1963, with a major structural repair in 2002 strengthening Fallingwater’s cantilevers to prevent collapse and future deflection.
Surroundings: Surrounded by the WPC’s 5,000 acre Bear Run Nature Reserve.
On this West Virginia Morning, an experimental apple orchard in the state is helping to fight pollution, improve food scarcity and some hope even heal veterans. Briana Heaney has the story.
This week's broadcast of Mountain Stage is a special episode featuring songs that represent the four seasons of the year. You'll hear live performances by Doc Watson, Bruce Hornsby, Susan Werner, Molly Tuttle, Taj Mahal, Norah Jones and many more.
Across the nation, more than 390,000 children rely on foster care. However, a shortage of licensed foster homes is creating a national crisis. While official foster care cases are carefully tracked, many informal examples of kinship care aren’t part of the data. For this Us & Them episode, we hear the experiences of those who’ve been part of the foster care system.
Stock car racing’s roots run deep in Appalachia. Our twisty roads and dark hollers were home to moonshiners — and moonshine runners, who became known for their driving skills. And they became some of NASCAR’s first stars when it formed in 1948. But NASCAR’s oldest continuous racing team had nothing to do with moonshine.