Scott W. Perkins

Scott W. Perkins has overseen Fallingwater’s preservation and collections care since 2013. Prior to joining Fallingwater, he was Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper.

Perkins has lectured widely on Wright and his circle and coauthored essays on Wright’s interiors, furniture and fixtures for the Price Tower Arts Center’s fiftieth Anniversary commemorative catalogue, Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower (2005), and on the interiors and furnishings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for its fiftieth anniversary publication, The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum (2009). In 2010, he contributed to two publications, an essay, “Air,” in Wright Panorama: Elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture in 360 Degrees, and “Bruce Goff and the Modern Organic Interior,” in Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind, a publication he edited to coincide with an exhibition of the same name.

His book, Building Bartlesville: 1945-2000 (2008), explored the post-World War II architectural impact of Wright, Bruce Goff, and William Wesley Peters upon that Oklahoma community, and in 2014 his essay on Zaha Hadid’s 2002 museum expansion project for the Price Tower appeared in Richard Longstreth’s Frank Lloyd Wright: Preservation, Design, and Adding to Iconic Buildings. Perkins has also served as Guest Editor and frequent contributor to Save Wright, the magazine of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, and to the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly and OAD: The Journal of Organic Architecture and Design. For over thirteen years, he contributed to The Twentieth-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the nomination of Fallingwater and seven other Wright structures for United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage status – successfully inscribed in 2019 as the United States’ only modern architecture designation.

His exhibitions pertaining to Wright’s work include Wright Restored: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower Interiors (2006), Fellowship: 75 Years of Taliesin Box Projects (2010), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Samara: A Mid-Century Dream Home (2012), a nationally touring exhibition celebrating an Indiana Usonian design (eleven venues), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania (2023) for the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and the National Building Museum. Exhibitions on other twentieth-century topics include Bruce Goff: A Creative Mind (2010); Lights! Camera! Fashion!: The Film Costumes of Edith Head (2009); Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (2008); and Karim Rashid (2006). While at Fallingwater, he has organized annual exhibitions pertaining to the preservation and conservation of the house, its history and its collections, and, in 2021, on Joseph Urban’s unrealized designs for Kaufmann’s Department Store in Pittsburgh.

Perkins received his MA and MPhil in Design History at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York City where he also completed doctoral coursework (ABD). He holds a BFA in Interior Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an AA in Interior Design from Madison Area Technical College, Madison, Wisconsin.