New cabins built for Fallingwater Institute

In 2010 Patkau architects won a competition to build six sustainable cottages for the Fallingwater Institute. They quoted Frank Lloyd Wright:

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

It was a lovely scheme of semi-underground cottages but apparently was never built; instead, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ) that is very much above ground. Curbed describes them:

Perched above the ground on a network of “nimble” steel columns, the High Meadow residency includes minimal decoration and furniture, with each abode containing just a desk, closet, bathroom, and two twin beds.

“The building’s main entry welcomes visitors into a central screened porch, which joins the new architecture to an existing cabin and serves as the outdoor gathering and dining space,” Bill James, project architect from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s Pittsburgh office, notes in a press release. “A horizontal screen, made of Norway Spruce harvested and milled on site, extends from the main cabin and continues along the walkway leading to the dwellings.”

It is certainly a more modest intervention than the Patkau scheme, sitting lightly on the ground rather than under it. And given what Frank Lloyd Wright did to the hills at Fallingwater, his architectural modesty can be taken with a bucket of salt.

More images in Designboom and at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

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