This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Edgar Jonas Kaufmann was twenty-eight when he bought out his uncle's stock in the Pittsburgh department store his uncles Jacob and Isaac had founded in 1871, and by most measures he was very good at the job: net sales are reported to have roughly tripled in his first seven years running it. He remade Kaufmann's from a workaday retailer into something closer to a civic monument, commissioning an Art Deco remodel in 1930 that contemporaries called the most beautiful store in the world, murals by Boardman Robinson, and eventually, in 1935, an executive office suite designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that now sits, reassembled, in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. That office commission is what put Kaufmann in a position, later that same year, to ask Wright for something much larger: a weekend house on the family's longtime retreat at Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Kaufmann's son, Edgar Jr., had been an apprentice at Wright's Taliesin studio, and it was through him that the family and the architect really came to know one another. The elder Kaufmann expected, reasonably enough, a house with a view of the waterfall his family loved. What Wright designed instead put the house directly over the falls, cantilevered out above the water, so that the sound and motion of Bear Run would be a fact of daily life rather than a view glimpsed from a porch. First drawings were finished in January 1936; construction began that April; the family moved in that December. The house survives as one of the most photographed private residences in the world, and it is also, quietly, a monument to a fight between its architect and its patron over how much steel the cantilevers actually needed, a dispute serious enough that Wright at one point demanded his drawings back and threatened to walk away from the entire commission. That story is told in full on this article's companion piece and in the dissent recorded on Kaufmann's own page. What is easy to miss, reading only the structural drama, is that Kaufmann's civic instincts did not stop at his own house. He spent heavily and personally on Pittsburgh itself: he founded the city's Civic Light Opera, put roughly a million to a million and a half dollars toward its Civic Arena, helped found the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, and served on the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority in the postwar years when Pittsburgh was trying to remake itself from a smoke-choked industrial city into something more livable. He married his first cousin Lillian, always called Liliane, in New York in 1909, since Pennsylvania barred first-cousin marriage; in December 1934 he hosted Albert Einstein at the family's Fox Chapel estate, serving as his German interpreter, a small measure of how thoroughly he moved among his era's most consequential people without being an architect, a scientist, or a politician himself. He died in Palm Springs in April 1955, eighteen years after moving into the house he had commissioned; it was his son, not Kaufmann himself, who in 1963 gave Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which has stewarded it as a public museum ever since. Kaufmann never founded that trust. He only, twenty years earlier, insisted on the argument with his architect that arguably kept the house standing long enough to be given away at all.