Frank Loyd Wright's Creative Masterpiece

My oldest son heard about this cool piece of architecture called Falling Water and wanted to visit it, so we put a pin in the map in southwest Pennsylvania and made the stop a priority. Our whole family visited the home but only Blake and I paid for the indoor tour.

Falling Water is a house designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright that sits over a thirty foot waterfall! He built the house in the 1930s for just over $150,000 for a local couple who were Pittsburgh area department store magnates. Today I hesitate to even imagine who much the home would cost to build.

Of course the home could never be built today, with all the codes, permits and government regulations blocking the path of any creative juices that would seek to build such a structure. It makes one pause and consider how could our nation, whose greatness is built partly on the dreams and creativity of a million different visionaries, is choking the life out of this very entrepreneurial spirit that once gave us all a sense of national pride?

While certainly we need to have things like codes, regulations and protective government agencies, I wonder if we have gone to far and have put a higher priority of bureaucracy and paper work over creativity and vision.

Falling Water

Unfortunately my experience around churches has shown me that churches can also fall into the same trap. We begin to value our systems, forms, procedures and curriculums more than we do creative juices and divine inspiration. I wonder if Noah’s ark would have passed through the red tape many churches have set up? Once again safeguards and policies are valuable resources for churches and ministries, but they should be a means to facilitate creative thinking, not dampen it.

I felt as though our whole family got an extra dose of creative wonder as we walked around the art work that is Falling Water. Not only is it a wonderful piece of organic architecture, blending in with the natural environment, it is a testimony to the fact that there are some individuals who should never be told they cannot do something!! Frank Lloyd Wright was one of those types of people.

One our way home we stopped by another covered bridge, one of my favorites and the seventh covered bridge I have personally visited. We renewed our family traditions by having a couple of covered bridge races!! We were really racing through history class on that day!