1965 Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (1910-1989)
At its first annual meeting at Oak Brook, IL, (September 30-October 2, 1965) IDSA Board Chairman John Vassos awarded the "IDSA Award for Distinguished Service to Design" to Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., US industrial design historian, "who through his critical observations, has elevated and given direction to our profession, and with his involvement by deed has encouraged excellence in design."

Kaufmann was the son of Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a wealthy Pittsburgh merchant who founded Kaufmann's department store. Edgar, Jr. attended Kunstgewerbeschule of the Oesterriechisches Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna in the late 1920s, studied painting and typography for three years with Victor Hammer in Florence and was an apprentice architect at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Foundation from 1933 to1934. He strongly supported his father's decision to commission Fallingwater by Wright in 1936.

In 1940, he 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. He served in the US Air Force during WW II and joined the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 as director of the industrial design department, a position he held until 1955. He initiated the annual national Good Design program that ran from 1950 to 1955 and was a proponent of uniform industrial design education standards.

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