Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office Restoration

Although we have a great collection of period rooms, none of them are as original and as authentic as the Kauffman office. And once the room is installed at V&A East's collection and research center, it'll be the only Frank Lloyd Wright interior on view outside the United States. Frank Lloyd Wright was the most important American architect of the 20th century. Born in 1867, died in 1959, and for much of that time, he was very successful. He built buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. He was always evolving as an architect, and he was always trying to do something new, using new materials or materials that weren't used in high-style architecture. Kauffman office is a very successful and very interesting project by Wright. The office was designed between 1935 and 1937, at the same time that Wright was working on Falling Water, Kauffman's house. It was a simple, largely rectangular room made using a series of plywood panels, modular size, repeated throughout the room on the floors and on the ceiling. When Wright liked a material, he really went to town with it, and in this case, on every surface. You're in a room that on one level seems luxurious, but is really made of a very humble material, and Wright liked that sort of juxtaposition. He believed that an interior, along with the building that housed it, should be a complete work of art. Therefore, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the furniture, the upholstery, the lamp built into the wall, all designed by Wright, along with this big decorative feature, which is the plywood relief mural against the wall by the desk. Now, often people don't associate decoration with modern architecture, but Wright believed in decoration if it was, as he put it, of the surface, not on the surface. That it grew out organically, would be his word, from the nature of the materials, the nature of the design. Kauffman didn't make any alterations to the room for the 20 years that he used the office, and that's quite a tribute, I think, to Wright's design. Because the Kauffman office is 85 years old, because it's been installed and reinstalled at numerous venues during its lifetime, and because we want it to look its best when it goes back on view as part of V&A East, there's a certain amount of conservation work that has to be done. We're able to undertake the conservation of this very important interior, thanks to the generosity of the Tafoff Museum Restoration Fund, and we are very grateful for that. The Frank Lloyd Wright office is one of the V&A's most important 20th century objects. However, it's also one of the largest. It's made up of 240 panels. Once fully constructed, it's nine metres long, eight metres wide, and whilst we've got the expertise within the V&A Furniture Conservation Studio, we don't have the physical space to take on a project of this scale. So we chose Plowden & Smith, who are a renowned conservation company, and they have fantastic facilities to be able to take on something of this scale. In order to decide on a treatment plan, a conservation survey was carried out of representative elements of the room. So V&A conservators looked at panels from the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. The majority of the panels were found to be in really good condition, however several did have some damage. Damage ranged from surface damage to more serious damage in the structure and in the jointing systems. The panels are jointed in various different ways. They're either tongue and grooved, or they're also jointed with grooves and floating tongues, and in some instances these tongues were either lost or broken. So we're early on in the conservation process. Plowden & Smith have completed their assessment of each panel, and they're starting the cleaning and the consolidation phase, and then they'll move on to the partial reconstruction and addressing the structural problems that it has. So there are two key processes involved in the conservation treatment. The first one is to dry clean the panels, and the second one is to consolidate the panels. It's important to dry clean the panels before we do any consolidation, because there is a risk that the dirt can be ingrained into the panel itself with the introduction of the adhesive. The second process is the consolidation of the loose or extant elements that have been separated from the panels, or in the case of the plywood, the veneers start to delaminate where the bonding layers have failed, and that is where we introduce fish glue between the layers and clamp them in place. There's going to potentially be thousands of times that we need to clamp. Some panels just have one section of lifting veneer, but some of the larger panels might have 10 or 20 delaminations that we need to treat individually. Once conservation treatments are completed, the next phase of the project will be working out how the room will be installed. This will require us to do a dry run in the workshop, work out the locations of all the individual pieces, and then create a plan of the room layout. A second phase of treatment will be after it's installed at the collection and research centre, when we'll be able to see it as a whole and assess the surfaces to see if any areas stand out more than others in terms of ingrained dirt, if some areas may need cleaning more than others, but that will be done afterwards, after the installation. The collection and research centre is going to be a new kind of museum building and a new kind of museum experience for visitors. This is a completely open museum store that has a public loop through it. Frank Lloyd Wright's Coffman office will be one of the key attractions. You'll be able to walk into the room, the depth of one of the floor panels, and you'll be able to look in also from the other side, so you really will be able to experience this room as a piece of architecture. I think in the collections research centre it's going to be fantastic because you can really appreciate the size of the room. Also another wonderful thing is that all the furniture within it, they all are in fantastic condition and they'll be installed as well. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to work on a room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, as this is the only example outside of the United States of an extant room. It's extremely exciting to contemplate this room being out on view again and being made available to the public because I know how much people are going to admire and enjoy seeing this great work of architecture.