Pennsylvania Pilgrimage

Image Credits: Left: Independence Hall, Philadelphia – Public Domain via PublicDomainPictures.net 

Center: Mercer Museum Atrium, Doylestown – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons 

Right: Fallingwater, Mill Run – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons 

A brief note from the road: I’m in Pennsylvania this week, with Philadelphia behind me and Doylestown ahead. The City of Brotherly Love offered what I expected—formal civic spaces, historic architecture, and a visible effort to balance preservation with contemporary use. William Penn’s original plan is still legible, a rectilinear grid punctuated by five public squares, with City Hall at its center. Much of the city’s symbolism is embedded in its built environment, from Independence Hall to the spatial logic of its civic layout. 

I’ve rented a car, avoiding interstates and tolls, choosing instead to navigate at a more deliberate pace along rural roads. It’s a different kind of access—less efficient, more revealing. Today I’ll visit Doylestown, where Mercer’s concrete constructions illustrate his idiosyncratic and eclectic design approach, one that is tactile and scaled to attention rather than spectacle. The rest of the itinerary includes Gettysburg, Pittsburgh, and two houses by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Laurel Highlands. 

This trip is, in many ways, a personal pilgrimage. Writing a fifth-grade book report on Fallingwater was the moment I first understood that architecture meant more than building alone. Turning the page of that book, I discovered a startling image of dramatically cantilevered balconies over a wooded stream—a revelation, and my first glimpse of architecture as a way of thinking, shaping, and responding. Visiting the house now is not about nostalgia, but about acknowledging that point of departure and the path it set in motion. 

I’ll write more once I’m back in Eugene, when the impressions have had time to settle and the reflections can take shape.