Over the last two weeks, I’ve had an assignment to model a piece of architecture that is important to me in some way. I chose to model Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Not only is this a great example of FLW’s design sense, it is one of the first homes that got me interested in architecture. This was a hugely rewarding project for me. I had only basic knowledge of SketchUp prior to this and knew that this project would be an immense challenge. The house you see here was actually my fourth time through the entire project. Once I discovered how to use groups the modeling became much easier. I think the main flaw with SketchUp is that any intersection in a line splits those two line. In other words, two crossed lines become for joined lines. The use of groups eliminates much of the frustration inherent with that issue. The materials are all stock SketchUp materials and the render is a simple export to jpeg.

My project was greatly assisted by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which maintains scale drawings of Fallingwater for use by students and educators. Their pictures and walk throughs were a great help as well.