Falling Water Analysis

Falling water

An extraordinary house known as falling water designed by Frank Lloyd Wright redefined the relationship between man, architecture, and nature. The house was to be designed across the waterfall, so that the client could have it in their view. Instead all of these Wright integrated the design with the waterfall itself, by placing the building right on top of it to make it a part of the user 's lives. Wright 's admiration for Japanese architecture has mostly influenced the design thinking of this house , along with most of his work. Like the Japanese way of architecture, Wright invented his own design process to create harmony between man and nature, and his integration of the house with the waterfall was successful in doing so.

The 162 room, five star hotel is located at the edge of an ancient tank or reservoir beside a rocky outcrop near Dambulla and the famous cultural site of Sigirya. Originally, the clients had planned to construct the hotel near Sigirya itself, an impressive Sinhalese fifth century palace and fortress built around, into and on top of a giant rock. However, Bawa rejected the site and instead opted for a new location with distant views to Sigirya across the ancient Kandalama . The new site kept Sigirya at a tantalizing distance while offering its own topographic drama. Here, Bawa could more readily explore his own version of the Sinhalese love affair with picturesque planning, combining water and topology with man made insertions in spectacular compositions. Bawa’s concept sought to emphasize his immediate impressions of the site – an impenetrable ridge occupied by an old cave hermitage, opening up to a broad vista across the Kandalama tank to Sigiriya. The drama of the view was to be enhanced by compressing the entrance through a narrow cave-like passage, seemingly tunneling through the ridge (figure 8). On the other side, the visitor would arrive on an upper level of an artificial cliff, separated from but aligned with the contours of the rock face. His proposal was highly sensitive to the landscape in which it was situated, offering a heightened sense of the topography of the site whilst concealing the mass of the building along the cliff edge. The building was also to be masked in a blanket of vegetation so that no trace of it could be seen from afar. Objections centered on environmental issues and the preservation of cultural heritage, but masked deeper and more persistent moral and political concerns. The privately owned ‘Island’ paper raised concerns over the effect on the water supply and the site ecology, but also argued that the project would promote immorality, while the