Nothing is what it seems in the hills between the last two ridges of the Allegheny Mountains where Fallingwater rests. It is terra magnus and an epidermal topography of whorls and loops that represent a series of wooded moraines and open savannas. A competition for visitor cottages at Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork considers the landscape and a nature preserve’s inheritance.

Rising Ground. Published by Competitions Magazine, 2010. Unavailable online, but reprints available for purchase; full text reproduced below.

By William Richards

Frank Lloyd Wright’s work continues to occupy top spots in surveys of popular architecture. He remains, without exaggeration, the best-known American architect more than 50 years after his death whose buildings have achieved iconic status. Fallingwater, his house for the Kaufmann Family in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, has attracted the most attention and reams of scholarship since its completion in 1935. Thanks to the efforts of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, it remains one of the best-maintained historical properties in the country.

The Conservancy’s efforts within the Bear Run Nature Preserve—nearly 5,000 acres around the Kaufmann House—have expanded far beyond the standard house tour. The non-profit organization operates multiple programs for every age group: lifelong learning initiatives, environmental design residencies, K-12 workshops, and InsightOnsite, an intensive three-day course on Modern art and architecture.

The Conservancy also owns a dozen properties that span 200 years of vernacular domestic architecture, including an antebellum log cabin, a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania farmhouse, a Victorian-era farmhouse, and a 1960s split ranch. But, this motley group of properties became unwieldy for the Conservancy as residential quarters for visitors. Spread throughout the meadows and thickets to the north of the Kaufmann house, they are too small, too far, and in some cases, simply not up to par for, say, a couple investing nearly $2,400 in a signature study tour.

A competition to design and build visitor cottages for the property had to be about programmatic growth. But it also had to be about legacy—and not necessarily Wright’s. “Architecture has to grow,” says Fallingwater’s director Lynda Waggoner, “and we were hoping that the cottages could be a protagonist to encourage people to think about how we live and build through conservation and good design.”

“We have a polyglot of houses here,” reports Waggoner, “and the challenge for the cottages was, ‘what next?’”

The Conservancy identified 30 firms for a limited competition for a suite of self-sustaining housing units that could accommodate a range of users. Of the original 30, the Conservancy invited six including Marlon Blackwell Architect, Wendell Burnette Architects, MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, Olson Kundig Architects, Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, and Patkau Architects.

Scholars, architects, and conservationists comprised the all-star jury, which included David DeLong, Edward Feiner, Reed Kroloff, Raymund Ryan, Lord Peter Palumbo, Joshua Whetzel, and Waggoner. During deliberations, jurors were charged with assessing each entry’s ability to create a sense of community, achieve a high level of energy efficiency and a low level of maintenance, and serve as a viable option for small-scale green housing. In a larger sense, the jury had to satisfy the “what next” criterion set forth by Wagonner. What could “good” design mean in the context of Fallingwater and, more importantly, for an arguably unimprovable landscape?

The jury awarded first place to Patkau Architects, an award-winning Vancouver firm known for its programmatic range and attention to materials and detail. Like the other entries, Patkau proposed to construct the cottages at grade through the site, a gently sloping meadow that runs east to west along a quarter mile stretch north of the Kaufmann House. Unlike the other entries, however, Patkau “buried” each cottage by pulling the land up around it. From one side, the meadow still appears to be a rolling cavalcade of reedy grasses. From the other, precision cuts into each mound reveal life inside.

But nothing is what it seems in these hills between the last two ridges of the Allegheny Mountains. It is terra magnus and an epidermal topography of whorls and loops that represent a series of wooded moraines and open savannas. One navigates not by the sun, but by tracking bifurcations in the land with the hope of finding a road or stream.

“It’s a landscape of great density and great openness,” says Waggoner, “and the topography is about pronounced drama.”

Within this drama, Patkau’s additions are intentionally subdued. Covered with dredged mud from a nearby pond, each cottage will appear an earthen frons with openings for air, light, and passage. From their doorsteps, visitors will be able to observe the meadow’s descent into the Youghiogheny River while retaining the sense of refuge that scholars have noted in Wright’s work. Each cottage will have common space and a community pavilion will occupy the lowest position on the meadow.

Structurally, each cottage is essentially a corten steel highway culvert, which can be assembled on-site or at a factory off-site, allowing the Conservancy two options to keep costs low. As pieces of time-tested civil engineering, the culverts will also be able to carry a good deal of soil with a minimal amount of material. After that material is built up around the semi-circular forms, the footprint of each cottage will taper off to either side—making the site plan a series of staggered diamonds. Six of these moguls will be cottages and six will be merely landforms.

“We adopted the same response as Wright,” says John Patkau, AIA. “Fallingwater is an intensification of the rock ledges and what we wanted to do is follow the meadow, a powerfully undulating form. That is the premise of the cottages.”

Patkau’s cottages will take advantage of the constant ground temperature to keep energy consumption low. A bank of solar thermal collectors will be tied to in-slab radiant heating and each cottage’s orientation to the south packs additional, passive solar benefits into what will purportedly be a zero-energy set of residences.

Wendell Burnette Architects’ second place entry addressed the “edge-condition” where the meadow meets the forest line in a series of low-slung pavilions. Burnette, a former Taliesin fellow, proposed shade louvers and the surrounding tree canopy to control energy consumption and on-site Norwegian Spruce to keep sourcing costs low. Olson Kundig, the Seattle firm, also positioned its cottages in the eco-tone between meadow and forest. In the cottages, which also resemble low-slung pavilions, sliding screens and movable walls were to provide optimal circulation and adaptable interiors to satisfy changing programmatic needs. “This project considers flow of people as well as flow of land,” noted one juror. “The unit is a response to how people gather and suggests how landscapes can be gathered and bridged.”

Ultimately, Patkau’s innovative response to site in the spirit of Wright held the line on both the landscape’s needs as well as the Conservancy’s work at Bear Run.”This shows that the juxtaposition of the project to Falling water is not as important as the juxtaposition of the project to the landscape,” noted another juror, “and it is of the hill, not on the hill.” The same can be said, to different effect, of Wright’s intervention on a rocky ledge 75 years ago.