Architectural historian, archaeologist known for scholarship on Pittsburgh, Fallingwater
Franklin Karl Toker, an engaging architectural historian and archaeologist whose indefatigable scholarship unearthed revelations about Italy’s Florence Cathedral, Fallingwater and Pittsburgh landmarks, died Monday at his Squirrel Hill home, just 10 days shy of his 77th birthday. He retired in 2018 after being diagnosed with a rare form of dementia.
For more than 40 years, he taught the history of art and architecture to students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. His two best-known books are “Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait” and “Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann and America’s Most Extraordinary House.”
The first book contextualized a wide range of Pittsburgh buildings, said Richard L. Cleary, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.
“He was fiercely proud of Pittsburgh ... at a time when Pittsburgh did not have an exciting reputation that it does now as a destination city. Frank’s work on writing that urban biography of Pittsburgh was very important in helping to promote the whole range of Pittsburgh’s architecture,” said Mr. Cleary, who lives in Littleton, Wis.
“He was a passionate teacher, passionate in the sense that he really loved his subject. He had strong opinions that he was not afraid to put out there,” said Mr. Cleary, who taught at CMU in the 1980s before moving to Austin, Texas, in 1995.
“Fallingwater Rising” showed, through letters previously unavailable to scholars, how deeply involved department store owner E.J. Kaufmann was in the design and construction of the house that he commissioned and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Mr. Toker destroyed the myth, propagated by Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the department store owner’s son, that he, Edgar Jr., had played a
key role in the home’s design and construction.
“He put a context to Fallingwater in a way that hadn’t been done before. That’s what took him time, effort. He was like a beagle dog. He put his nose to the ground,” said his retired colleague, Katheryn Linduff, of Shadyside.
The author of 10 books and a serious book collector, Mr. Toker spent his teenage years bicycling around his native Montreal nearly every weekend, memorizing its streets, a way of learning cities that served him throughout his life.
“In college, he became a guide to the city during his time at McGill,” said his wife, Ellen Toker, of Squirrel Hill.
Mr. Toker rode his bicycle to work, and its clicking spokes echoed in the Frick Fine Arts Building hallway at the University of Pittsburgh’s Oakland campus.
Before defending his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, the rising academic star published his first book, “The Church of Notre Dame in Montreal: An Architectural History,” which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 1971. He later served as president of the SAH in the early 1990s.
Barry Bergdoll, the Meyer Schapiro professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, said that first book was “pretty precocious work” because, “it was not simply about architectural style but really a social history of architecture and the complicated relations between the French and the English in Quebec.”
The son of a dental surgeon, Mr. Toker earned three fine arts degrees: a bachelor’s from McGill University in 1964, a master’s from Oberlin College in 1966 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1973. Gifted with languages, he read and spoke French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin and some Hebrew.
From 1970-74, he led a team of people on an archaeological dig of the Roman and early medieval complex beneath the Florence Cathedral, launching decades of research that filled two volumes.
“The goal was to see what they could find. There may be textual information as well but there is no substitute for archaeological evidence revealed through excavation. It reveals information that couldn’t be known in any other way,” said Drew Armstrong, associate professor and director of architectural studies at Pitt.
At a weekend party in Florence, the 27-year-old academic met Ellen Judith Burack, a 21-year-old Middlebury College student who was studying fine arts in Tuscany. The couple married on Sept. 3, 1972, remaining in Italy while he finished research for his dissertation.
In 1974, Mr. Toker became the Andrew W. Mellon visiting professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and joined the school’s faculty a year later. He moved to Pitt in 1980.
A man of many interests, he also taught a seminar about “Las Meninas,” a famous Diego Velazquez painting that shows the Infanta of Spain and her parents reflected in a mirror.
Christopher Nygren, associate professor and director of medieval and renaissance studies at Pitt, came to Pittsburgh in 2014 with his wife, Chiara, who grew up in Florence.
“Frank was really excited to meet Chiara because he lived many years in Florence. I introduced them and immediately he flipped right into speaking Italian,” Mr. Nygren recalled.
“Any place he went he had a map in his mind of the urban fabric,” Mr. Nygren said, adding, “He gave me one of his super memorable tours of Pittsburgh. When Chiara’s mother and sister came to town, around 2016, he took them on the Frank Toker tour and did the whole thing in Italian. He showed you parts of the city that you never would have noticed on your own.”
Ms. Linduff said her longtime colleague was supportive and possessed enormous curiosity, drive and a positive outlook. He wore red academic robes to graduations and a red fedora when he walked to Saturday services at the Young People’s Synagogue or Beth Shalom.
“He was a picture. He stood out no matter where he was,” Ms. Linduff said. “He was a great lecturer. Nobody could lecture like Frank Toker,” she said, adding that more than 200 people would pack the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium to hear him.
“His publication list shows that he cared about public understanding of architecture and he cared about academic scholarship,” she added.
David M. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, said Mr. Toker’s work had as much enduring influence on Pittsburgh as two other Canadians — Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby.
“He was just a remarkable man who understood this community in terms of its buildings. He was a giant, really,” Mr. Shribman said.
Besides his widow, Mr. Toker is survived by a daughter, Sarah Summers, of Springfield, Ill.; two sons, Maxwell, of St. Augustine, Fla., and Jeffrey, of Brookline; one sister, Charlotte Guttman, of Montreal; and six grandchildren.
A private service was held Wednesday at the William Slater II Funeral Home in Scott. The family requests memorials to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Frick Fine Arts Building, 650 Schenley Drive, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.