> But to say that Fallingwater is simply a meditation on nature would miss the point—which, sadly, I did. I walked away from Fallingwater thinking that the hous

> But to say that Fallingwater is simply a meditation on nature would miss the point—which, sadly, I did. I walked away from Fallingwater thinking that the house was a beautiful representation of the juncture where nature and architecture meet and nothing more. Then I emailed Neil Levine, a professor of history and architecture at Harvard University, to ask for an interview. > Levine replied promptly, but to my dismay, he told me he was too busy to talk. Furthermore he mentioned that I would do better not to engage with jargon like “organic architecture.” I was slighted, yes, but also intrigued. > In 2011 Levine published an essay titled “The Temporal Dimension of Fallingwater,” where he argues that time—and not just nature—is crucial to Wright’s design. This temporal element was a direct consequence of the natural setting. The stream, including the waterfall, isn’t only a place where the horizontal meets the vertical, but also where the motionless meets the turbulent, the silent meets the thundering, and the finite meets the infinite. The stream is some combination of both sides. By placing the house above the falls, Wright furthers this juxtaposition. It's worth understanding here that just because Levine has a Ph.D. doesn't mean he's right or the author of the article is wrong. Levine's imperative as a research scholar is to come up with different and novel ideas about the architecture he studies, and as such, when looking at a long-studied work like Fallingwater, it's no surprise he might try to come up with a new opinion. But ultimately, it's just an opinion, and the barrier of evidence for such opinion is pretty low. It's not math where there are proofs, it's hypothesizing about the meaning of something which is experienced subjectively. One could make persuasive statements about the intentions of Wright, or about the experiences of people experiencing Wright's work, but to talk about a building as if it's objectively a temporal work is just wankery. And if Levine wants to argue that point as if it were objective truth rather than an interesting way to view Fallingwater, that makes him a wanker.