The architectural archives of Edgar Tafel, who was best known as an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, are coming to Avery Library.
Tafel, one of three apprentices who directed the construction of Wright’s famous Fallingwater house in the 1930s, died last January. The Edgar A. Tafel Living Trust announced Wednesday that it would give his archives and research files, as well as $100,000 to help fund their processing, preservation, and presentation, to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
The collection is composed of materials taken from Tafel’s 11th Street home in Manhattan, where he lived for years above his architecture office. It includes his drawings, manuscripts, and correspondence, as well as photographs of his work, and will be available for faculty and students in about a year.
Carole Ann Fabian, the library’s director and acting curator of art properties, said Avery is “a natural place for the collection to come to fulfill Tafel’s wishes.”
“Tafel had a desire that his assets be given to support architectural education and scholarship,” she said.
The donation was the result of months of discussion between the trust and Avery Library staff members, particularly Curator of Drawings and Archives Janet Parks. Parks said it helped that she already knew some of the foundation’s trustees, many of whom also have connections to the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Although Avery receives three or four collections of this magnitude each year, Parks noted that Tafel’s is unique because of its breadth.
“What’s interesting about Tafel is that it’s a full life,” she said. “It’s all of these different phases of his career and his engagement with these major figures and their work that makes Tafel’s a more unique, interesting kind of collection.”
Tafel studied with Wright at his studio, and worked on such iconic Wright projects as Fallingwater, a house in southwestern Pennsylvania. Later in his career, he branched out and designed his own projects—including New York’s First Presbyterian Church and the State University of New York’s Geneseo campus.
He also worked on restoration projects for some of Wright’s buildings and became a historian of Wright’s work. Fabian said that Tafel’s connection to Wright makes his archives particularly useful.
“The Tafel archive is going to feed this whole cadre of Wright people,” she said. “And then, more generally, this becomes the study ground for the historic preservation students,” at GSAPP.
Parks noted that Avery also houses archives of many of the architects with whom Tafel worked, including some of Wright’s archives.
“They all kind of fold and flow together, and speak to each other,” Parks said.
“You don’t have a second chance at these materials,” she added. “This is like the first touch of raw history.”
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