GAZETTE COLUMN: THE WATERFALL IN THE WOODS by John P. Flannery

(Photo by Holly S. Flannery)

Perhaps we’d all appreciate what we risk losing in Loudoun if we visited places that are like Loudoun once was.

As a street kid in the South Bronx, the nearby park, away from the swings, in the rolling green meadows, was something like nature. 

A Boy Scout troop hike across the George Washington Bridge to the New Jersey Palisades was better.

The best by far, however, was when our family foursome took a five hour summer drive in my Dad’s Plymouth to the Adirondack Mountains.  Each summer my parents found an affordable rental cabin right on Lake George, just South of Fort Ticonderoga, where Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys still lurked waiting should the British dare to regain the fort; best, James Fennimore Cooper’s “Hawkeye” paddled a dug-out just ahead of you when you swam through the morning mist.

Loudoun shared an identity with nature in 1983 when I bought an historic log cabin called the Janney House in Waterford, Virginia from the Morton family who had restored it. 

In the years since, we’ve lost our way in Loudoun.

The developing theme in this fall election season is about how to exploit and destroy by development the nature that made Loudoun so special.

This past weekend was my birthday and I was hauled off by my wife Holly to an uncertain location in Pennsylvania. 

After about three hours of driving, we reached a stream called Bull Run, a small but fast stream, full of fish, flowing down a ridge called Laurel Hill to join the Youghingheny River.

Over a four mile run, Bull Run drops from about 2,050 feet above sea level to about 1,070 feet, making the water run white near Mill Run, Pennsylvania.

Over the centuries, this water force has shaped and fractured the natural sand stone, forming buff-colored ledges. 

The river is bordered by tall trees, and the floor of the forest is deep with fallen oak leaves. 

Edgar Kaufman bought this land in 1918; his family loved to sit on the rocks and watch the water fall; in 1935, they commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build a home that fit this setting.

Wright wrote how his “visit to the waterfall in the woods stays with me” and the project “has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream.”

Wright designed a home that emerged and extended out of the cliff in three levels with terraces open to the sky above and the water fall below (thanks to cantilevered slabs anchored in that cliff). 

You can walk down from the main room on the first floor family room and sit with your legs dangling in the stream.

There’s not a place in the house, called “Fallingwater,” where you don’t see and hear the calming stream.

Wright believed that what we contribute in architecture to the land should be “organic,” that “form and function are one,” and so we marry the structure to its context.

We could do worse than mimic Wright’s architectural philosophy. 

Indeed, I’m sure we shall do worse – if we continue to build in Loudoun without respect for what’s natural.