Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. was born in 1885 and attended Shadyside Academy in Pittsburgh, eventually going into retailing.  In 1919 Edgar, Sr. became president of Kaufmann’s, and in the same year married Liliane.  In the early 1930s at the height of the Depression, Kaufmann became interested in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and commissioned him to build a house in harmony with the natural attributes of his property at Bear Run. Wright drew up the plans for Fallingwater while Kaufmann was taking the 45-minute drive from Milwaukee to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin.

In 1936, construction on Fallingwater began, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most acclaimed works – a house boldly cantilevered over a waterfall in the western Pennsylvania mountains. It is a supreme example of his concept of organic architecture, which promotes harmony between man and nature through design that integrates a building with its natural surroundings. Inspired by natural sandstone ledges at the waterfall, Wright designed Fallingwater as a series of reinforced concrete trays set on native sandstone columns and walls to rise more than 30 feet above Bear Run. This daring construction has long captivated architects and the general public alike, both for Wright’s use of modern technology and for his obvious love of nature. Fallingwater’s patrons, the Edgar J. Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, shared Wright’s outlook, and found personal renewal in the house’s free-flowing interior spaces, open vistas and outdoor terraces. 

The family used Fallingwater as a vacation retreat from 1938 until 1963, when Edgar Kaufmann, jr., entrusted it to Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the region’s oldest conservation organization.

In his address at the ceremony entrusting Fallingwater to WPC, he stated that Fallingwater:

“is one of the most beautiful works made by man for man.  … It’s beauty remains fresh like that of the nature into which it fits.  It has served well as a home, yet has always been more than that, a work of art, beyond any ordinary measures of excellence.  Itself an ever-flowing source of exhilaration, it is set on the waterfall of Bear Run, spouting nature’s endless energy and grace.  House and site together form the very image of man’s desire to be at one with nature, equal and wedded to nature. 

Without drawing on tradition, without leaning on precedent, Fallingwater was created by Frank Lloyd Wright as a declaration that in nature man finds his spiritual as well as his physical energies, that a harmonious response t nature yields the poetry and joy that nourish living.

Finally, why are these acres and this house given as a conservation, in the care of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy?  Because conservation is not preservation:  preservation is stopping life to serve a future contingency; conservation is keep life going.  The union of powerful art and powerful nature into something beyond the sum of their separate powers deserves to be kept living.  As the waterfall of Bear Run needed the house to enter the realm of art, so the joint work of art, Fallingwater in its setting, needed Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to enter a new life of public service  I believe the happy coincidences that have marked this enterprise from the start will continue to favor its new existence in the hands of the Conservancy.  I believe the Conservancy will give nature, the source, full due, and art, the human response to nature, full respect.”

Fallingwater opened to the public as a museum in 1964, greeting more than 3.5 million visitors from all over the world since then.