Designed in 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous modernist home Fallingwater is considered by many to be the world’s most iconic modern house. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture Professor Kevin Nute has been appointed as a 2025 Scholar in Residence at the famous rural retreat in Western Pennsylvania.
Nute’s work at Fallingwater will focus on the timeless aspects of the house. The project stems from his recent book Embodied Time: Temporal Cues in Built Spaces (London: Routledge, 2024). The residency is funded by the Fallingwater Institute, an educational non-profit promoting harmony between people and the natural environment.
- Related UH News story: Time in built spaces—focus of architecture professor’s new book, March 4, 2024
“I will be examining the ways in which the house is a suspension in time as well as space, primarily through its inclusion of archetypal human experiences and the perpetual presence of natural phenomena such as the falls,” said Nute.
The Fallingwater residency funds scholars’ travel and provides them with living accommodation on the site for the duration of their research. He plans to make multiple visits to Fallingwater during his 2025–26 sabbatical from UH Mānoa in order to study the house under the contrasting weather conditions of the four seasons in Western Pennsylvania.
His relationship with Wright’s work goes back to his doctoral work at Cambridge University, which won an American Institute of Architects International Book Award in 1994. An expanded and revised edition of that book will be published early next year as Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited: Traditional Japanese Culture as a Source of Modern American Architecture (London: World Scientific, 2025).
