Художник Майк Симуар представит три люстры из керамики и камня на 90-летии резиденции Фоллингвотер

Vancouver artist’s Fallingwater residency shapes sculptural collection Mike Seymour creates light from stone and water after spending three weeks at Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural icon. We independently select everything we recommend. Buying through us may earn us a commission, which supports our work. There are buildings we know first as images, and Fallingwater is among the most familiar. Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1936 house stretches over a waterfall at Mill Run, in the wooded hills of western Pennsylvania, its concrete terraces appearing to float above rock and water. For Vancouver artist Mike Seymour, the deeper impression came from being inside it, after the visitors had gone. Seymour studied architecture in Winnipeg before moving into an experimental practice spanning ceramics, lighting, glass and metalwork. On Aug. 29, he will present three chandeliers at Fallingwater as part of the house’s 90th-anniversary gala and the completion of a three-year renovation. A Facebook invitation The opportunity came through Facebook, a platform he rarely uses beyond community and farmers market updates. When an advertisement appeared for a residency run by Fallingwater and the nearby Touchstone Center for Craft, it seemed so precisely suited to him that he doubted it was real. “I thought it was a scam,” he says. Seymour called Touchstone, who he’d never heard of, and asked “is this competition real?” They said it was, and applications were closing in two days. Seymour says there were about 10,000 applicants. His proposal set out a simple idea: to reconnect his architectural training with his current work in craft. He was selected and had roughly four weeks to prepare. Alone in the house The three-week residency began with seven days at Fallingwater, followed by two weeks making at Touchstone, about 20 minutes away. Seymour arrived with thoughts of creating stone furniture, but his thinking shifted as he spent time there. Fallingwater receives around 1,500 visitors on a busy day, but at night Seymour could enter the house almost alone. Without the movement and conversation of a tour, its atmosphere became more apparent. Deep overhangs shade the interiors, making the house almost cave like, while polished sandstone floors gather and reflect the changing light. - Getting the most out of every room in your home - Rethinking how luxury homes are built - Advertisement 1Story continues below Those solitary hours also revealed the house as more than an architectural monument. Seymour noticed early Tiffany glass experiments and a collection assembled by a family (the Kaufmann family who Fallingwater was built for) engaged with art and design. Treating Fallingwater as a found site, rather than approaching it only through Wright’s reputation, allowed him to respond intuitively to the objects, materials and landscape around him, he says. The river inside The river, so dramatic in photographs, provided another surprise. In places, Seymour says, it is only about four inches deep. Its bed is formed from compressed sandstone with wavelike contours shaped in prehistory, creating an impression of much deeper water. That texture continues inside. The polished finish was inspired by stonemason Walter Hall, who had used it in his own house. Its reflected light resembled the light on the river, and Wright brought the idea into Fallingwater, strengthening the sense that water and stone continue through the rooms. Seymour has translated that effect into ceramics. He formed very thin sheets of clay over small rocklike shapes, then deliberately overfired them so they softened and distorted into rippled forms. To give them the glistening quality of wet stone, he recreated glossy mid-century glazes, adapting formulas that had originally relied on lead. Flowers in the forest The surrounding forest offered the next layer. The Kaufmann family chose a site filled with rhododendrons, and the grove remains. Seymour arrived in late May, when much of the woodland was only beginning to green but the rhododendrons were full and starting to flower, he says. Their overlapping leaves and petals gave him the structure for a ceiling-mounted chandelier that he’s created for this gala. Around stainless-steel armatures, the glazed ceramic forms will sit like broad petals or low rosettes. Light will move across their uneven surfaces, recalling both the polished floor and the shallow river beneath the house. The other chandelier Seymour is creating is a wood-fired version of his Paean chandelier. Touchstone’s kiln allowed him to try wood firing for the first time. Made for one place The work he’s created for Fallingwater builds on a direction established in Milan in 2023, when Seymour launched his slender ceramic-tube lighting work at Villa Bagatti Valsecchi. The series led to commissions around the world, with new glazes and finishes developed for individual clients. Fallingwater offered something different. “A two-week deadline on making a whole new body of work is pretty nuts. It’s short. The intention behind it was to force decisions really quickly, to think intuitively and respond quickly rather than thinking about it too much,” he says.