Photography / Travel

Paul Mayén: Fallingwater’s Lesser-Known Architect

by Tim Darling (click for email) - May, 2008.

My wife and I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in May, 2008. The visitor center pavilion at the site struck me: it was an architectural statement of its own, showcasing many of the same qualities that the Fallingwater house was known for. After looking into its creator, though the details available are scarce, the story of a life-long friendship began to unfold.


Frank Lloyd Wright may have designed Fallingwater in the 1930s, but it was Paul Mayén (1918-2000) who designed its gift shop. Both structures host over 130,000 architectural devotees and laymen every year. Both structures are internationally recognized for how seamlessly they blend into their environments. Both men were artists and architects and shared many of the same friends. But while Wright has achieved an almost-movie-star-like fame, Paul Mayén remains practically unknown...

Born in La Linea de la Concepción, Spain in 1918, Mayén earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Cooper Union Art School in New York City and a Master’s degree from Columbia during WWII. He taught classes in advertising design at Cooper Union and New School in New York.

In the early 1950s, he met a fellow art student, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., with whom he would share his life until Edgar’s death in 1989. Edgar’s father was the founder of Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh; it was his father who commissioned Wright to build the now-famous vacation house for his friends and family near a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania. Wright, exceeding the original budget by almost a factor of ten, instead designed and built Fallingwater over the waterfall. In 1955, Edgar inherited the property and Paul and he visited the site together on mountain retreats until the property was entrusted to a conservation in 1963. Edgar’s mother died of an overdose at Fallingwater in 1952; she is rumored to have commited suicide over her husband’s many mistresses.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Edgar worked in the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art where many of Paul’s lamps, tables, and other furniture remain on permanent exhibit. Another of Paul’s pieces, a red cubical sculpture, is on display on the coffee table in Fallingwater’s living room.

In 1956, the couple assisted I.N. and Bernadine Hagan in choosing the furniture for the Hagan’s Frank Lloyd Wright house at the architect’s suggestion. In 1959, Paul designed the jacket of a book about Wright, Drawings for a Living Architecture, which was edited by Giuseppe Samonà.

In 1970, shortly after the first Earth Day, Mayén became an outspoken critic of the growing American habit of buying expendable plastic furniture that was used for only a few years and then thrown away. He claimed that the economic success of plastic furniture relied on the producers creating a mentality among consumers that the items were durable enough to last but cheap enough to replace.
 Paul Mayén’s café at Fallingwater

In 1975, he built a country house for them in Garrison, New York. From 1979 to 1981, he oversaw the building of the Fallingwater pavilion which houses a café, gift store, and visitor’s center. He died in 2000.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed one of the world’s most revered architectural landmarks, Fallingwater, when he was 68 years old. It revitalized his career. Over the next 24 years, he sketched and built over a hundred other buildings. Most of these new creations exhibited the same elements of style as Fallingwater. Everyone, it seemed, wanted their own “house over the river”.

Paul Mayén designed one of the world’s most revered gift stores when he was 61 years old. But despite many presumed subsequent offers, he never built another.

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All text and images copyright © 2008 Tim Darling.