Fallingwater Friday: Edgar Kaurmann jr.'s Birthday

April 9th marks the 94th birthday anniversary of Fallingwater's patron, Edgar Kaufmann jr.(sic), who died in 1989. Following a brief apprenticeship at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, Edgar Kaufmann jr. embarked on a remarkable independent career as designer, critic, curator, scholar and educator. Between 1940 and 1955, he was associated with the Museum of Modern Art, where he organized a series of important exhibitions including Prize Designs for Modern Furniture and Modern Rooms of the Last Fifty Years. Between 1963 and 1981, he was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, dividing his time between the Graduate School of Art History and Archaeology and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Today we remember him most for his great gift of Fallingwater to Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and for the thoughtful guidance he provided the staff during his lifetime. No one ever understood or articulated Wright's achievement at Fallingwater better than Edgar Kaufmann jr. He wrote of the house, “..as the name suggests…the house was designed to embody a natural image of movement and flux, a constant fluid movement suspended in space and caught in an instant of time. Weightless and airborne, yet firmly rooted somewhere between earth and sky, Fallingwater is uniquely modern in its expression of oppositions and extremes.”

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