Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter is a “house muse­um,” first designed as a res­i­dence, and now open to the pub­lic. In fact, as the insti­tu­tion’s direc­tor Justin Gun­ther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of the mod­ern move­ment to open as a pub­lic site,” hav­ing begun offer­ing tours in 1964. The open­ness of Falling­wa­ter owes a great deal to the efforts of Edgar Kauf­mann Jr., the son of the Pitts­burgh depart­ment-store mag­nate who com­mis­sioned the house in the first place. The fam­i­ly hap­pened to own a piece of land in south­ern Penn­syl­va­nia that was once an employ­ee retreat, and Kauf­mann fils, high on a read­ing of Wright’s recent­ly pub­lished auto­bi­og­ra­phy, knew just who should design a week­end home for the site.

Not that it was a sim­ple process, even for the son of a tycoon. But luck­i­ly, “Frank Lloyd Wright had just estab­lished an appren­tice­ship pro­gram at Tal­iesin.” The young Kauf­mann applied, “and of course, Frank Lloyd Wright, know­ing who the Kauf­manns were, could sniff out a good poten­tial client.”

Soon accept­ed, Kauf­mann spent about six months study­ing under Wright, dur­ing which time his vis­it­ing par­ents also became “enam­ored with Wright’s ideas of organ­ic archi­tec­ture.” No oth­er liv­ing archi­tect, per­haps, could deliv­er on the promise of a house ful­ly inspired by its nat­ur­al con­text, which in this case includ­ed a water­fall. Still, one won­ders if even his most eager clients under­stood just what they were get­ting into.

“The Kauf­manns thought that they were going to have a house that was look­ing at the falls, and then, of course, Wright had dif­fer­ent ideas. He thought that if you put the most dra­mat­ic part of a land­scape in your view con­stant­ly, it would become some­thing that’s tire­some. You would just become used to it.” But “if you were forced out into the land­scape to see it, then it would always have an impact.” Built atop the water­fall instead, by local labor­ers and using stone quar­ried right there at the site, the house makes a unique impres­sion, and one that makes per­fect aes­thet­ic sense: as Gun­ther puts it, “the water­fall can’t live with­out the house, and the house can’t live with­out the water­fall.” Nor, these near­ly nine decades after the main build­ing’s com­ple­tion, is the course of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture quite imag­in­able with­out Falling­wa­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

An Ani­mat­ed Tour of Falling­wa­ter, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Finest Cre­ations

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Most tourists in Rome put the Colos­se­um at the top of their to-see list. (My own sis­ter-in-law, soon to head out on her Ital­ian hon­ey­moon, plans to head to that sto­ried ruin more or less straight from the air­port.) Even those with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in ancient Roman civ­i­liza­tion, step­ping into the space that was once the are­na — from the Latin hare­na, refer­ring to the sand laid down to absorb blood shed in com­bat — fills the imag­i­na­tion with images of glad­i­a­tors, lions, sen­a­tors glow­er­ing from their court­side seats, and the bay­ing mass­es behind them. But their visions may not include oth­er such true-to-his­to­ry details as trap doors, staged naval bat­tles, and a sub­ter­ranean sys­tem of tun­nels and ele­va­tors, all of which are explained in the new Decon­struct­ed video above.

Even casu­al Rome enthu­si­asts all know that com­peti­tors and oth­er per­form­ers, both human and ani­mal, made their offi­cial Colos­se­um entrances through the floor. (Announce­ments were made some years ago to the effect that the mech­a­nized floor that made such the­atrics pos­si­ble would be rebuilt by 2023 — a project that seems not to have made much progress as yet, though whether it will end up being put off as long as the Strait of Messi­na Bridge remains to be seen.)

But only the most obses­sive already have a clear under­stand­ing of exact­ly how it worked, which this video clear­ly explains in both words and 3D ren­der­ings, restor­ing ele­ments of not just the build­ing itself but also its imme­di­ate urban con­text that have long since been lost to time.

Take the velar­i­um, a retractable awning con­sist­ing of “long strips of fab­ric wound around drums, which were mount­ed on a wood­en frame and sup­port­ed by 240 masts fixed into sock­ets along the amphithe­ater’s upper cor­nice.” With each of its 240 strips oper­at­ed by a sep­a­rate winch, it required at least as many human oper­a­tors to deploy or retract at speed — a greater speed, per­haps, than the oper­a­tion of some of the retractable roofs incor­po­rat­ed into sports facil­i­ties today. Not “just a feat of engi­neer­ing, but also a pre­cur­sor for mod­ern sta­di­um design,” the velar­i­um addressed a prob­lem that will hard­ly escape the notice of mod­ern tourists today — espe­cial­ly those who vis­it the Colos­se­um in the mid­dle of a sum­mer day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Build­ing the Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

What Hap­pened to the Miss­ing Half of the Roman Colos­se­um?

How Much Would It Cost to Build the Colos­se­um Today?

When the Colos­se­um in Rome Became the Home of Hun­dreds of Exot­ic Plant Species

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: the Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.