Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (1910 – July 31, 1989) was an American architect, lecturer, and author.
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He was the son of Edgar J. Kaufmann, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman and philanthropist who owned Kaufmann's department store. Edgar Jr. attended the School for Arts and Crafts at the Austrian Museum of Applied Art in Vienna, Austria in the late 1920s. He studied painting and typography for three years with Victor Hammer in Florence, Italy. Edgar Jr. was a resident apprentice in architecture at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin East School and Studio from 1933 to 1934. According to fallingwater.org, he was particular about spelling his name "Edgar Kaufmann jr".
In 1940, Edgar wrote to Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art, proposing the Organic Design in Home Furnishings Competition, won by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. He served in the US military during World War II. Afterwards, he was Director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. Edgar's greatest accomplishment during his tenure at MOMA was the 'Good Design' program of 1950 to 1955, in which the museum joined with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, promoting good design in household objects and furnishings.
From 1963 to 1986, Edgar Jr. was an Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Art History at Columbia University. He authored several books on Wright architecture and modern design, and was a contributor to 'Arts + Architecture journal' and 'Encyclopædia Britannica.
Edgar Jr. strongly supported his father's decision to commission Frank Lloyd Wright for the famous 1936 'Fallingwater' house over Bear Run, in Stewart Township, Fayette County Pennsylvania. After his father’s death in 1955, Edgar Jr. inherited the 'Fallingwater' house, continuing to use and share it as a mountain retreat until 1963. Then he entrusted the Wright structures and several hundred acres of the surrounding pristine Laurel Highlands lands in the Allegheny Mountains to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy as an architectural house museum and conservation open space preserve, in memory of his parents.[1][2]
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. died in 1989. His ashes were scattered around the property at Fallingwater[3] .