Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Fallingwater’ is too iconic for a logo

Fallingwater, the iconic Pennsylvania home architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed to sit over a running stream, just rebranded. But it doesn’t have a logo, and that’s intentional.

“A logo’s purpose is to provide a cognitive shortcut to brand essence—but Fallingwater’s iconic elements, the cantilevered house and its landscape, are too rich to compress graphically, yet too essential to abstract,” says Amy Blackman, founder of L.A. design firm Fruition Co., that worked on the rebrand which went live last week, said in a statement.

The new brand also comes with updated fonts and an expanded color palette that was inspired by nature and the natural materials used to build the house. But Fallingwater was “un-logoable,” she says, because the house itself is one.

“That iconic view of the house floating over the falls is the power of our visual identity,” Fallingwater director Justin Gunther said. “When you try and distill that image into a graphic depiction, it doesn’t do it justice.”

Wright designed the home in 1935 for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a Pittsburgh department store owner, and today it’s a museum and UNESCO World Heritage List site that draws about 140,000 visitors annually and runs a gorgeous, calming livestream on YouTube of its iconic falls all year long.

Past Fallingwater logos used the distinctive shape of the building’s rectangular block facade over the falls to depict it literally. Some used more realistic representation of the home while others were abstract, like one made from brush stroke lines.

Instead of trying to represent that famous POV of the house over its namesake falling water in a new way, the solution was a wordmark. The new Fallingwater logo spells out the home’s name in a customized version of Aldus Roman, a serif typeface designed for books. It was also used on the 1986 book cover for Fallingwater: A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., about his family’s home. There’s also a shorthand “FW” favicon to make it more adaptable for small spaces like browser tabs.

The wordmark was adapted from the book cover, according to Fallingwater, and some letters were subtly edited to make them look more flowing, like the Ls, which received curves on their tails, and the added tilt to the W.

“When shown together with the house, it serves to reinforce the qualities of the design,” Gunther says. “And when alone, it serves to evoke that image in our minds.”

Fallingwater is just the latest Wright-associated group or property to abandon a visual identity based on a building. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy recently abandoned a representative logo that depicted a single building in Buffalo for a square logo that symbolized Wright and the importance of preserving his work.

Fallingwater’s new wordmark stays out of the way and let the famous architecture speak for itself.

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