Fallingwater, perhaps the most famous private home in America, has a new visual identity. Or, more exactly, a 40-year-old one.
The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy unveiled a wordmark to change the UNESCO World Heritage website’s 2006 logo, which had abstracted the Frank Lloyd Wright– developed house’s balconies into a brushstroke graphic. The new identity was established by the Los Angeles– based firm Fruition Co. throughout a yearlong procedure led by designer Amy Blackman, who got to the conclusion: Fallingwater is “un-logoable.” No sign, Blackman argued, might take on the structure’s own image– typically portrayed as the picture of a concrete house floating above a cascade.
“A logo design’s purpose is to provide a cognitive faster way to brand essence,” Blackman stated. “But Fallingwater’s renowned elements are too rich to compress graphically, yet too necessary to abstract.”
What the team proposed rather was not a new mark however an acquired one. The wordmark is adjusted from a typeface that Edgar Kaufmann jr. customized for the cover of his 1986 book Fallingwater: A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House. Kaufmann jr.– designer, author, and kid of the family who commissioned your house– studied painting in Florence before becoming one of the nation’s leading scholars of architecture and Wright’s work in particular. Working from the Aldus Roman font, he extended the G to echo the house’s horizontals, slanted the W, and added streaming curves to the tails of the L’s. Kaufmann jr. contributed your house to the Conservancy in 1963 and checked out two times a year up until his death in 1989. His ashes were scattered on the grounds.