Home
Museums
Back
Issues
Membership
Frank Lloyd Wright
Edgar J. Kaufmann
by R. Jay Gangewere
Dear Mr. Kaufmann:
I dont know what kind
of architect you are familiar with but it apparently isnt the kind I think
I am. You seem not to know how to treat a decent one. I have
put so much more into this house than you or any other client has a right
to expect that if I havent your confidenceto hell with the whole thing.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Dear Mr. Wright:
I dont know what kind
of clients you are familiar with but apparently they are not the kind I
think I am. You seem not to know how to treat a decent man.
I have put so much confidence and enthusiasm behind this whole project
in my limited way, to help the fulfillment of your effort that if I do
not have your confidence in the matterto hell with the whole thing.
Edgar J. Kauffman
P.S. Now dont you think
we should stop writing letters and that you owe it to the situation to
come to Pittsburgh and clear it up by getting the facts?
Frank
Lloyd Wrights rapidly-done sketches for Fallingwater were a wonderful
tour de force of architectural drawing under pressure.
As one of Wrights admiring apprentices,
Edgar Tafel recalls it, Wright was at his Wisconsin studio on September
22, 1935, when he got an unexpected call from Edgar Kaufmann, his
impulsive client and the owner of the Pittsburgh department store.
Kaufmann was in Milwaukee a few hours away, and announced he was driving
out to see Wrights progress on the drawings for the summerhouse at Bear
Run, Pennsylvania.
Come right along E.J., were ready for
you, Wright said. At that moment he had no drawings of Fallingwater.
Always resourceful, the 69-year-old architect
gathered his colored pencils, went to the drafting board, and while admiring
apprentices watched, rapidly drew the plans of a house that became an icon
of American architecture. As fast as his pencils wore out or broke,
he reached for new ones. His style when drawing was to deliver running
commentaries about the clients. For Kaufmann he knew what was needed.
The rock on which E.J sits will be the hearth, coming right out of the
floor, the fire burning just behind it. The warming kettle will fit
into the wall here
Steam will permeate the atmosphere. You
will hear the hiss
.
Virtuoso matchmaking between a client and
his house was Wrights forte, and he finished his drawings shortly before
Kaufmann arrived at his front door. During the leisurely lunch and
discussion of his designs, his apprentices Edgar Tafel and Bob Mosher worked
up additional elevations. When Kaufmann left, satisfied but doubtless
adjusting to the fact that his house was directly over the waterfall, and
not positioned to view it from a distance, he had his architectural plan.
The plans for Fallingwater were not a spur-of-the-moment
exercise. As usual, Wright privately nurtured his thoughts about
his clients needsand in this instance even named the house. Wrights
principles of organic architecture had been perfected over a lifetime of
work, and biographer Meryle Secrest says Fallingwater was the fruit of
a mature creativity and a deeply felt aesthetic.
The house rapidly became a symbol of modern
architecture, its basic design unchanged even as it was refined from drawings
to final construction during 1936-38. Created in the midst
of the Great Depression, the woodland retreat over the waterfall had a
fast track into the American psyche. It was a personal escape into
nature, produced at a time when Hollywood was creating escapist fantasies
of its own about avoiding economic hardship. Millions of Americans,
including unemployed workers in western Pennsylvania, could dream about
life in a private retreat created by the most famous architect in America.
National magazines loved Wrights daring
design and his organic principles. Publicity was immediate. In January
1938 photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and then published
in Architectural Forum. Time ran a feature story describing the house.
The appeal of Fallingwater never diminished. After his parents died,
Edgar Kaufmann jr., who had studied at Taliesin, began considering how
to make the family retreat a public showcase of Wrights high-concept architecture.
He asked Wright to design an entry building to the property, and in 1963
he turned it over to the non-profit Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.
In doing that, Edgar Jr. revealed his own flair for taking good design
to the public, just as his parents did so deliberately in the department
store.
A Unique Client/Architect Relationship
The 25-year association between the Kaufmann
family and Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the most remarkable client/architect
connections in American architecture. Edgar Sr., his wife Liliane,
and his son Edgar jr. shared Wrights conviction that good design could
transform the lives of those it touched. Edgar Sr. had a ready
supply of cash in the midst of the Great Depression, and liked to turn
architectural visions into realties. Wright, an aging and cantankerous
genius whose family motto was Truth against the world, seemed to some
observers near the end of his long, productive career as he approached
70. But Kaufmann was a great client, and knew the price of working
with genius. Their friendship survived the conflicts of two
powerful men each capable of manipulating the other. The day before
Kaufmann died in 1955, he and Wright were still planning architectural
projects.
Merchant Prince and Master Builder brings
together for the first time 49 drawings and models which reveal this fruitful
client/architect relationship. Dennis McFadden, curator of the Heinz
Architectural Center, says that all three Kaufmanns–father, mother and
son–were very creative individually, and artistically adventurous in returning
to Wright over and over again with new commissions to give form
to their aspirations for their life, their business and their city.
The exhibition establishes Wrights work here as another reason for tourists
with architectural interests to visit Pittsburgh.
Designing spectacular apartment towers for
Mt. Washington was a special challenge, and Wright wanted all units
to have an unobstructed view of the Golden Triangle.
McFaddens co-curator of the exhibition,
architectural historian Ricchard Cleary of the School of Architecture of
the University of Texas at Austin, has produced for the exhibition the
definitive catalogue of the dozen projects which Wright created for the
Kaufmann family. Only three were built (Fallingwater, its guest house,
and Kaufmanns office), but the drawings include some of Wrights most
visionary schemes for urban redevelopment. Most of the original drawings
in the show are from the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives in Scottsdale, Arizona,
and have never been exhibited before.
Edgar jr. studied at Taliesin, and Fallingwater
captured their familys need for a summerhouse, but the Kaufmanns lives
interacted with Wrights in other ways. The Kaufmanns marriage
was troubled, and Wrights designs had a recurring role in keeping harmony
within the family. Edgar jr. and Liliane commissioned Wright to design
a place of spiritual meditation at Bear Run–the Rhododendron Chapel–but
it was never erected. Shortly before Lilianes death at Fallingwater
from an overdose of sleeping pills, Wright was engaged in designing a home
for her: Boulder House, in Palm Springs, California.
Edgar and Liliane were cosmopolitan, forceful,
and stylish. They brought to Pittsburgh the latest ideas and fashions they
saw on their travels in Europe. They also were first cousins. Intermarriage
was a dynastic tradition going back for centuries in the Kaufmanns German-Jewish
ancestry, according to professor Franklin Toker of the University of Pittsburgh.
Certainly marriage consolidated family ownership of the store, and together
they promoted the stores importance to the city. Liliane enjoyed
an independent life of her own. She created the high-style Vendome
Shops on the eleventh floor of the store, reflecting the elegant Place
Vendome in Paris, where they enjoyed staying at the Ritz Hotel. She was
also an important leader in the hospital community, for years the head
of the board at Montefiore Hospital and later a promoter of Mercy Hospital.
Kaufmann had Wright design a parking garage
next to the the store, but abandoned the idea because of structural,
functional, and building code problems.
Design and world affairs intermingled in
their lives. They assisted Jewish friends in Europe in immigrating to the
United States to escape the anti-Semitism before World War II. They knew
artists and intellectuals (Physicist Albert Einstein stayed at Kaufmanns
house in Pittsburgh when he first immigrated to the United States.) The
family was part of a small Pittsburgh community of collectors of avant
garde art at a time when abstract art was not welcome at all museums, and
Fallingwater, an extreme example of reinforced concrete architecture, was
a complete rejection of the traditional idea of a European manor
house in the country. Kaufmanns taste for sculptures, paintings
and houses was years ahead of its mainstream acceptance by many collectors
and museums.
Selling Good Design
Edgar Kaufmann, one of the most creative of
storeowners, was a constant advocate of Modernism in style and technology,
and in merchandising good design. Good forms sell much better and cost
no more. The work of the artist has
become profitable both in industry and
business. So argued Paul Frankl, leader of the American Union of
Decorative Artists and Craftsmen, and a friend of Kaufmanns. Needless
to say, Kaufmann brought him to Pittsburgh to lecture.
The store held exhibitions, brought distinguished
lecturers to the city, and celebrated events such as Lindberghs trans-Atlantic
flight (thus attracting 50,000 visitors in one week). After the trend-setting
exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris in 1925, Kaufmanns
staged its own International Exposition of Industrial Arts, featuring examples
of great design from periods throughout history. Replicas of the
ancient bronzes at Carnegie Institute were borrowed for the display.
Frank Lloyd Wrights architecture was part
of this ongoing scenario to promote good design in Pittsburgh.
In 1935 Kaufmanns store exhibited Wrights model of Broadacre City,
a visionary plan for a decentralized community (a disappearing city)
with farms, businesses, and public buildings. New building materials and
furnishings were shown along with information about home financing to give
the average person a new approach to housing. But Mayor William McNair
of Pittsburgh called it pure socialism, and a town built for a lot of
social workers. Controversy probably fueled attendance.
A Vision of Pittsburgh
Inevitably Kaufmann drew Frank Lloyd Wright
into his urban renewal plans for Pittsburgh. As a civic
leader Kaufmann envisioned a rebuilt downtown core, and during the 1940s
he advanced the work of the new agencies to create a Pittsburgh Renaissance.
Wright responded to the challenge to redesign downtown with a megastructure
at the point, incorporating everything a city center needed: sports, theater,
opera, gardens, retail, parking, fountain, aquarium, a marina
all easily
accessible by automobile. He called his 1947 design, Point Park Coney
Island in Automobile Scale, and he described the structure as a good
time place, a peoples place.
Pittsburgh decision-makers in business
and engineering were intrigued but not convinced. Wrights plans
welcomed the automobile age with giant bridges, ramps, and parking facilitiesbut
in later decades monstrous parking garages of reinforced concrete turned
out not to be the salvation of cities. Wright also designed new housing
for Mt. Washington, and a circular parking garage (looking somewhat like
the Guggenheim Museum in New York) next to the department store.
None of these was built, despite the time, energy and money spent on them.
Wright periodically chided Kaufmann for
never following through on these plans, but they were fundamentally different
from the successful collaboration at Fallingwater. The summerhouse
was a comparatively minor feat, totally under Kaufmanns control.
It hardly mattered that in the 1930s it was projected to cost about $30,000
and eventually cost over $70,000. Kaufmann could pay for it.
But the Pittsburgh designs a decade later were vast government projects
involving private support, official agency approvals, and tens if not hundreds
of millions of dollars of investment.
Many of the ideas of the time took other
forms. Kaufmann once proposed to Wright that he design a planetarium
next to the department store. It did not happen, but a few years
later Buhl Planetarium was built on the North Side, a project of the Buhl
Foundation. The open air Civic Light Opera space that Kaufmann wanted in
the Point Park megastructure eventually became the Civic Arena, for both
entertainment and sports. Point Park became an historical parkcontrary
to the Wright-Kaufmann development idea. But Point Park today has
a performance space, and in its way is a peoples place.
In the 1950s the brilliant client/architect
relationship ended. Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann separated,
and Liliane died in 1952. Newly remarried, Edgars health failed, and he
died in California in 1955. Edgar jr. cultivated the beauty of Fallingwater
by himself, but increasingly saw it as a public treasure under his stewardship,
and he gave it to the public eight years after his fathers death.
During a speech Edgar jr. gave at Carnegie
Music Hall, he remembered that when he was young he saw the giant plaster
façade of St. Giles in Architecture Hall at Carnegie Museums, and
that had made an unforgettable impression on him. He never forgot
that you could give architecture to people, and that it could change their
lives. It was equally a controlling idea for Edgar Sr., for Liliane,
and for Wright, and it is on display in Merchant Prince and Master Builder.
-R. Jay Gangewere
Sources
Richard Clearys Merchant Prince and
Master Builder: Edgar Kaufmann and Frank Lloyd Wright (The Heinz
Architectural Center, 1999) is the definitive treatment of this subject.
Especially helpful to me was information shared by Professor Franklin Toker
of the Fine Arts Department of the University of Pittsburgh. Other
sources included Edgar Tafels, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank
Lloyd Wright (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1979); Meryle
Secrests Frank Lloyd Wright ((New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1992); and
Edgar Kaufmann jr.s Fallingwater, A Frank Lloyd Wright Country House (New
York: Abbeville Press, 1986). Edgar Kaufmanns life is summarized
in Leon Harriss Merchant Princes (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
Copyright
(c) 1999 CARNEGIE magazine All rights
reserved. E-mail: carnegiemag@carnegiemuseums.org
