August 2020

Kentuck Knob

We began our trek to Michigan with a short stay in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania. On previous trips, we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Flight 93 Memorial. This time, on a friend’s suggestion, we decided to visit Kentuck Knob, another of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural standouts.

The Hagans were friends of the Kaufmanns and greatly impressed by Fallingwater. They approached Wright about this project in the early 1950s. Wright, who was 86 at the time and still in high demand, responded that he couldn’t travel to the site location, but could site and design a home by using topographical maps and information gleaned from interviews with the homeowners.

The site and circumstances were different, but the house has Wright’s Usonian purposefulness and connections to nature woven throughout. It sits unobtrusively low, hugging the hilltop knob. The use of glass-cornered walls, sky lights, and stone flooring that continues from the living space out onto the balcony deck helps to blur the lines between indoors and outdoors. The kitchen and bedrooms are very compact, actually really small by today’s standards, perhaps even for the time when the house was built, but those rooms were of lesser importance to Wright. I think it would be fair to say that he was more focused on the house’s relationship to nature, than the owners’ relationship to their home.

The house was completed in 1956, and then the Hagans lived in it for 30 years. Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959, at age 91. So, this was one of his last residential projects.

Kentuck Knob is currently privately owned by Lord Peter Palumbo of London, who has opened the home for visitation. When they visit from London, the Palumbos stay in another residence on the property. In addition to restoring the house and grounds, they added a sculpture meadow. The garden hosts 30 sculptures and touts some big name artists, such as Claes Oldenburg, Andy Goldsworthy, and Katherine Gili. You discover the sculptures as you take the return walk from the house to the visitor center. I’ve always liked sculpture placed outdoors; it opens the door for the art to take on a relationship to its surroundings and makes it even more interesting to the observer. Kinetic pieces interact with the wind; lighting can change how an artwork looks from one day to the next; and you can take in the artwork from multiple viewpoints. Plus, I like larger scale pieces and I think they look best outdoors.

I was surprised by one totally unexpected piece – a 12 foot high section of the Berlin Wall, with its East and West Berlin sides. It wasn’t so very long ago that the wall stood as a huge divide; something still worthy of contemplation.

Confluence, PA

For this visit, we camped at Outflow, a COE campground on the Youghiogheny River. After setting up, we hopped on our bikes to check out the nearby bike trail. We discovered that it goes all the way to D.C., which explains why we saw so many bicyclists at our campground. This would be a fun trail for an extended trip. We rode for an hour or so, and then took a little break at a café in Confluence, a good small town along the river, just minutes from our campsite.

The next day, we drove to Ohiopyle. We could have biked, but the day was steamy. The town is a busy hub for outdoor sports enthusiasts: rafting, canoeing, hiking, and so on. We had an outdoor lunch at The Falls City Pub. If you ever swing through town, this is the place to perch for a while and enjoy some great food and service.

Next stop on the way to Michigan: Newbury OH