Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (stylized as Edgar Kaufmann jr.; April 9, 1910 – July 31, 1989) was an American educator, lecturer, author, and an adjunct professor of architecture and art history at Columbia University. Kaufmann preferred to stylize his name as "Edgar Kaufmann jr.", spelling the suffix using lowercase letters.

When he left Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in 1935, he joined the family business and became merchandise manager for home furnishings, and in 1938, was elected secretary of the Kaufmann Department Stores, Inc. 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. That same year, he left Kaufmann's to join the Museum of Modern Art. While there, he had a relationship with the architecture curator, John McAndrew. His Edgar J. Kaufmann Foundation also hired Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to design the Kaufmann Conference Center in New York City, which was completed in 1964.

From 1963 to 1986, Kaufmann 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. 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.

Kaufmann, who did not marry and had no children, died in 1989. His ashes were scattered around the property at Fallingwater by his partner Paul Mayén, with whom he had shared his life since the 1950s. Mayén oversaw the building of the Fallingwater pavilion from 1979 to 1981, which houses the café, gift store, and visitor's center at Fallingwater. Following his own death in 2000, Mayén's ashes were also scattered at Fallingwater in accordance with his wishes.

After his death, 21 pieces of his collection of art and sculpture were auctioned off at Sotheby's in New York.