Behind the Design

A Forgotten Frank Lloyd Wright Masterpiece Is Finally Getting Its Due 

An exceptional Wright-designed office interior has been hidden away in the V&A’s storage for the last 15 years. AD PRO goes behind the scenes of its meticulous restoration
Frank Lloyd Wright Kaufmann Office
Christopher Wilk, Keeper of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the V&A, amid most of the office's wall panels at Plowden & Smith's London studio. Photo by Sam Bush 

By the mid-1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright—amid architectural circles anyway—was considered a bit of a has-been. The popularity of Prairie-style buildings, the style Wright helped pioneer and perfect, was at the nadir of its popularity and the architect was emerging from more than a decade’s worth of personal catastrophe and scandals. “As far as the wider world was concerned, Wright was washed up and retired,” says Christopher Wilk, keeper of furniture, fashion, and textiles at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

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But in 1935, Wright, then a senior citizen, hit a stroke of luck. Pittsburgh-area businessman Edgar J. Kaufmann tapped Wright to design a private office for his sprawling department store as well as his family’s weekend retreat in nearby Mill Run, Pennsylvania.

The Kaufmann office would become a room-size case study for Wright’s design values, featuring geometric panels crafted from humble cypress plywood, sculptural furnishings of the architect’s own design, and textiles by Loja Saarinen. Called Fallingwater, the Kaufmann house, a dynamic composition of cantilevering volumes, would become Wright’s residential masterpiece—and mark his comeback. “The project revived his career,” says Wilk, “and he went on to build more in the last 20 years of his life than in his entire time before that.” In 1938, Wright even landed the cover of Time magazine, with Fallingwater in the background.

The Kaufmann office fully assembled, as it would have appeared in the mid-'30s. The furnishings, including the desk and chairs, were designed by Wright while the textiles and carpet were designed by Loja Saarinen. The restoration efforts are supported in part by a grant from TEFAF. 

Photo © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2018

The office, meanwhile, drifted into obscurity. In 1957—two decades after its installation at the department store, and two years after Kaufmann’s death—his son relocated the office to the headquarters of the family’s private foundation in Pittsburgh. In 1963 the room’s components were placed into storage until the family gifted it to the V&A in 1974. Save for a tour of Japan in the 1990s, the office has remained largely out of the public eye since 2005.

Wright often took humble materials and elevated them to astounding effect as with these plywood panels. Here, the Kaufmann office's individual components await assembly at Plowden & Smith. 

Photo by Sam Bush 

Now, however, the interior will finally receive its due. After undergoing a meticulous restoration, it will become a highlight of the V&A East, the institution’s new Diller Scofidio + Renfro–designed museum facility in east London. When it is revealed to the public in 2023 as a freestanding room within a room—the only Wright interior outside the U.S. and one of the most complete in any museum collection—visitors will be able to walk around and inside it, appreciating its beauty, craft, and engineering from all angles. “[It] perfectly exemplifies Wright’s view of the place of ornament in architecture,” says Wilk, referring to the room’s plywood relief, “that decoration should be of the surface, not on the surface.”

Kaufmann, who ran a successful Pittsburgh department store, would have sat at this original, Wright-designed desk. It features expandable leaves and has plenty of cupboards. 

Photo by Sam Bush 

A specialist checks new molding against an original piece. 

Photo by Sam Bush 

The V&A did not have enough workshop space to accommodate a structure of this size—a composition that is more than 30 feet long, 25 feet wide and 7 feet tall. So instead, the museum shipped out the pieces in 14 huge crates to restoration specialist Plowden & Smith in south London. The V&A took care to dictate the terms of restoration themselves and referred back to earlier in-house treatment and analysis records from the 1990s to gain additional clues about how to best conduct the project. “The main reason we retained that control for this is that conservation is governed by a code of ethics that stipulates that any materials used are reversible— if we add anything, we want to be able to take it off in the future,” explains Zoe Allen, the V&A’s principal furniture conservator.

A conservation specialist from Plowden & Smith uses a molding plane to create a molded top on a laminated element. 

Photo by Sam Bush 

Thankfully, says Oliver White, Plowden & Smith’s senior furniture conservator, the conservation process itself has been relatively straightforward because the office was so complete. (When the curators cleared the V&A’s storage facilities, they even rediscovered an original drawer handle and a set of drawers.) “We were not exactly adding lots of new pieces— only where chunks were missing and didn’t read properly to a viewer,” White says. Moreover, all of the freestanding Wright-designed furniture and Saarinen textiles were in such good condition that they did not require conservation treatment.

There was, however, some wear and tear to the office’s plywood panels, which, in addition to requiring a deep cleaning, needed repairs to their internal layers. “[They] have a latticework structure inside—almost like a trellis—that makes them really light. It’s not something I’ve ever come across before,” says White. These layers, he adds, “were quite vulnerable—especially around edges.” In addition to this latticework, the team had to secure lifting cypress veneers and broken “tongues” within tongue-and-groove joints—all of which were compromising the panels’ structural integrity.

The decorative plywood panels fit together like an elaborate puzzle. Here, a Plowden & Smith studio member tests out a small piece. 

Photo by Sam Bush 

Everything in the Kaufmann office was custom. This V-shaped void, for instance, will eventually accommodate a triangular light fixture.   

Photo by Sam Bush 

The main solution was to repair the panels with cold-set fish glue (an adhesive derived from fish bone that is easily reversible, according to Allen), which was used to secure the veneers and strengthen the weaknesses. In total, the team had to meticulously fortify some 1,500 individual panels—“quite a laborious process,” says White.

But the team maintained some of the office’s cosmetic flaws including chips and scratches on the veneers—souvenirs of the room’s peripatetic life. The conservationists hope to complete the repairs live in front of museumgoers during the structure’s installation at the V&A East. The story of the Kaufmann office, it seems, has yet to conclude.