Dive into local history

Franklin Toker has written a splendid book chronicling the construction of Fallingwater,… Franklin Toker has written a splendid book chronicling the construction of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous house over a waterfall just 45 minutes south of Pittsburgh. But he doesn’t just describe the house. Toker takes us through everything associated with Fallingwater. He is a biographer of Pittsburgh’s Kaufmann family and Frank Lloyd Wright, and has done extensive research on Bear Run, the creek on which Fallingwater is built. Most intriguing is the fact that, although today we hail Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the giants of American architecture, when he was commissioned by Kaufmann to build the ‘waterfall cottage,’ he was generally regarded as past his prime, and was coming out of a 12-year dry spell in which he didn’t construct one new building.

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ Kaufmann hailed from a family who, upon moving to America, peddled goods in southwestern Pennsylvania. Through a series of coincidences, he and his wife, Liliane, ended up running the family department store in Pittsburgh. When that business took off, he built new branches everywhere, often employing the classical architecture Wright detested. It seems strange, then, that Kaufmann would commission Wright to build him a modern masterpiece like Fallingwater in the woods of Bear Run, but Toker explains it to us this way: ‘We could think of Kaufmann’s education in modern architecture as a class that covered two semesters: the 1920s exposed him to modernistic, and the 1930s to more radical modernism.’

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ Wright, for his part, desperately needed the job Kaufmann hired him for. The Great Depression had hit him hard. He had expensive tastes and no clients. Although he conducted a school for architecture at his home in Wisconsin, which Kaufmann’s son attended, it wasn’t really a profitable enterprise. Ever the sharp self-promoter, he sent Kaufmann a book detailing his work and had his secretary, A. Jensen, travel to Pittsburgh from Wright’s home several times, seducing the businessman with flattery. In fact, Jensen went so far to entice Kaufmann as to have him placed on a jury judging a new industrial arts opening in Chicago with some of the top architects and businessmen in America.

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ When Wright accepted Kaufmann’s commission to build a ‘weekend house’ in the woods at Bear Run, he got more than just a client. Kaufmann was effectively Wright’s patron, nurturing the vision of Fallingwater from its conception to completion. After seeing Bear Run for the first time, Wright reported that the ‘visit to the waterfall in the woods stays with me and a domicile has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream.’ The ‘vague shape’ is the Cubist masterpiece we see today.

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ We learn about the tumultuous relationship between the two men, as well. Toker tells us that ‘the partnership held ‘- at first ‘- because there was genuine fondness between the two men, and Kaufmann and Wright were also linked by their parallel roles as fathers to Kaufmann Jr., one biological, the other artistic. Despite their mutual sympathies, there was much the two men did not understand about each other. Wright’s regional, racial, ethnic, and sexual-orientation prejudices were both numerous and inconsistent, but the most important thing he never understood about E. J. Kaufmann was the worldview of the merchant. Wright could flatter Kaufmann as ‘enlightened’ all week long, but the agrarian populist could never get over his discomfort with merchants.’

‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ This extremely informative book will take you on a tour of history that happened here in southwestern Pennsylvania. The only downfall of the book is that, at times, is it can be overwhelmingly informative, inundating the reader with facts that aren’t really necessary to enjoy the story the book has to offer. If you can get past that fact, open it up and learn a little something about the region of America that you call home — at least for your college years.