There is news on the Farnsworth House- this International-Style masterpiece is for sale. For Sandy McLendon's thoughts on that development, look at the new section immediately following this article.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House has been called a work of art, a love nest, a failure, and an icon of International Style modernism. It is some of those things, but there is more to it- and less- than legend would suggest.
Sitting serenely in a Plano, Illinois meadow, the house is arguably Mies' finest work. Its proportions are perfect, its workmanship impeccable. It looks as if it had been built by high priests to house a deity.
Its real history is a little rougher and readier: Mies borrowed his concept from another project that fell through. The cost overruns on the project were the stuff of a lawsuit. It is said that Mies' client fell in love with him, and then turned against him when he rejected her. It was all but uninhabitable in its original form; its current incarnation may not be with us much longer.
The Farnsworth House is a house built as a weekend residence for Chicago physician Edith Farnsworth. Dr. Farnsworth came to Mies with her land already in hand; the year was 1946. Her idea was to commission a house that was serious architecture; she would get serious architecture indeed. Mies submitted a plan for a severe, unadorned house almost entirely of glass and steel. His initial sketches came very soon after Edith Farnsworth's request, and there was a reason.
In 1938, an advertising executive, Stanley Resor, had asked Mies to design a summer house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The house was never built, but its concept had been one Mies very much wanted to execute. From outdoors, the Resor house had been conceived as one perfect man-made thing in an otherwise wild setting; from inside, its glass walls were intended to rivet an inhabitant's attention on the landscape outside. An uncontrolled, natural wilderness would thereby gain in focus and beauty: architecture as lens. Mies took one look at the doctor's meadow, decided that it would do as well as Wyoming mountains, and began to turn Stanley Resor's house into Edith Farnsworth's.
His plan for Dr. Farnsworth was extremely simple. Eight steel columns held a floor slab, and a roof slab. Between the slabs and columns were huge expanses of glass serving as both windows and walls. Some floor area was left unbuilt, as an outdoors deck. All floors, indoors and out, were travertine marble. A fireplace wall and the kitchen were in primavera wood. The house was raised on its columns, to allow for flooding of the land on which it stood- and that was all. There were no dividing walls in the interior, no driveway, no garden space: one room and a meadow was the entire program.
Dr. Farnsworth approved of the plan, and, it seems, of Mies: there are rumors to this day that the client fell in love with her architect during the four years it took to make the house a reality. And why not? She was unmarried, and as well regarded in her field as Mies was in his. For his part, Mies was everything an educated woman could wish; charming, well-dressed in his Knize suits, at the peak of an international career, and with an interest in art evidenced by his matchless collection of Paul Klee paintings.
No one alive knows exactly what did or did not happen between Mies and the doctor. They may have simply become close in the way that any sensitive architect does with an intelligent client. They may have had a romance. Whatever they were- partners in architecture, friends, lovers- mattered very much to them at the time; their meetings were frequent and long.
When it was finished, Mies gave the doctor the keys to her new house, and the bills for it, and a curious thing happened: he began to become unavailable to Edith Farnsworth. Was it a cooling of romance? Did he have other projects demanding his attention? Or was it something else?
It could well have been apprehension over the size of the bills: they were, collectively, a stunner. They revealed that the price of perfection had been $73,000- equivalent to nearly half a million dollars today. It may have been very little to pay for perfection, but it was a lot for one room and a meadow, particularly when the meadow was already paid for.
Whatever Mies' motives for distancing himself from the doctor, she reacted with force and reacted badly. Her first move was to bring suit against Mies for the size of the bills for the house. She lost; those four years spent meeting with her architect worked against her. She then took her complaints with Mies public, with newspaper articles and interviews, and a particularly virulent tirade in House Beautiful magazine. She had, it seems, found the experience of living in the house not nearly so wonderful as contemplating its plans. She complained of the impracticality of the house. She complained of the cost. She complained of the heating bills- with excellent reason. And she complained of Mies.
"I wanted to do something 'meaningful'", she wrote in House Beautiful, "and all I got was this false, glib sophistication." Edith Farnsworth even attacked Mies' most famous quote of all: "Less is not more," she wrote, "It is simply less!" She went on to say that something- she did not specify what- should be done about this sort of architecture, and that there would be no future for architecture if nothing was done. Her perfect client-architect relationship was already in shambles; now it seemed the doctor did not even understand the house she had built.
It is certain that she was very unhappy with it; she soon consulted with Chicago architect William E. Dunlap about the main reason for her dissatisfaction. Mies' one-perfect-object-in-a-meadow approach had created an unforeseen problem: at night, it was one huge mosquito and moth lantern. At the doctor's request, Dunlap designed bronze-framed screens that could be folded out of the way when not needed. Dunlap was a fine architect, and a very ethical one; his appreciation for Mies' accomplishment at Farnsworth led him to consult with Mies on the design of the addition. Knowing that Mies was Edith Farnsworth's least favorite person at this juncture, Dunlap tried to keep the consultations secret. He succeeded only until shortly after the screens were installed: the doctor found out what had happened. She fired him, and never spoke to him again.
The floods literally filled the house, damaging the interior and furniture, and breaking one pane of glass. Lord Palumbo has had every detail restored or replaced wherever possible; some details- like the original stove- continue to need restoration, because restoration parts have not yet been found. The house continues to present a very unique set of maintenance challenges. Painting and rust removal are constantly needed; the travertine exterior decks require bi-weekly scrubbing and bleaching to remove the stains left by autumn leaves.
Lord Palumbo has now opened the house for public tours, in an effort to make the house available to its admirers; it is to be hoped that the admissions are helping him with the cost of maintaining such perfection. The major remaining problem with the house is its continued survival; it is not yet known whether the floods that damaged the house so badly were a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, or if they are an omen of worse floods to come. The years since 1950 have brought many changes to the area around Plano; the flood plain may be damaged beyond repair.
And so, it has come to this: both Mies and Edith Farnsworth are dead, and so is whatever relationship they had. Their differences live on, in court records, and in articles like this one. But the house- their joint accomplishment- is timeless, and beautiful, and appreciated, and very nearly as perfect as it was in 1950, before friendship turned to ashes.
You should- must- go see Farnsworth.
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Farnsworth For Sale: What Will Happen?
I'm stunned. It's for sale. Like any other house. Mies' greatest work is going on the market; Lord Peter Palumbo has decided to part with the crowning jewel in his collection. The Farnsworth House will belong to someone else soon, and I am not sure what that means, or how I feel about it.
It definitely means uncertainty, for the time being- uncertainty about how the house and those who love it will fare. Will the house and its land remain together? Will a new owner be as generous with Farnsworth as Lord Palumbo has been in recent years?
One thing I know- it's difficult to imagine any circumstances better than those in place right now. The house is open for tours. The owner has found a balance between privacy and generosity. The public can see and feel and touch this work of art.
What I'm afraid of is that the value of property in the area of the Farnsworth House will force a change in what is working so beautifully. The house may well be so valuable that only movie stars or financiers could possibly afford it, and people like that are usually not very amenable to holding public tours. A foundation could be formed to buy it, but then the house could become a ghost of what it was intended to be. There would be rules and budgets and bylaws; things meant to be used would suffer the chill caresses of conservators. Worst of all, the sheer value of the land is going to attract some damn-fool developer who will think he can get away with building over most of the site, or even with moving the house and building over all of it. At this point, there is absolutely no reason to think that the present owner would consider selling to that sort of cretin, but it is certain that some such idiot will make an attempt to buy the real estate.
What's needed here is someone who is wealthy and hip and generous. Someone who loves Farnsworth enough to share it with others. Someone who knows that the grounds are part of Mies' achievement. Someone, in short, very like Lord Peter Palumbo.
Keep your fingers crossed. And as soon as the weather breaks into Spring, go tour Farnsworth. You know, things could change.
Continuous visual space is the essence of the house which is four walls of glass between two poured concrete horizontal planes - the roof and the raised floor. Eight steel columns form the structure, with interior and exterior floors of Roman travertine marble. The interior is totally open except for an interior rectangular structure covered with Primavera wood, containing two bathrooms, kitchen, and service facilities. All exterior walls are glass.
The columns and decks were precisely plumb and precisely level; every sheet of glass was perfect in its rectangular dimensions. Every weld in the framework was ground, and then polished smooth with techniques more commonly used in building Rolls-Royce bodies than in the framing of buildings. The frame was sprayed with zinc chromate primer, and after its painstaking final coats of paint, appeared to be finished with baked enamel. Edith Farnsworth would soon own what very few people ever see: a building with no physical imperfections anywhere, visible or not.
Some of their meetings were at the house while it was under construction; it was an astonishing project. The plans for the house did not- could not- show the most salient feature of the house as built: its incredible perfection of detail.
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The immediate surroundings of the house were landscaped by Lanning Roper, and the extended grounds contain a sculpture park with many large outdoor sculptures by noted artists including Harry Bertoia, Wendy Taylor, and many others.
Dr. Farnsworth settled into her perfect/imperfect house in a disgruntlement that lasted until 1972, when she sold the house to its current owner, Lord Peter Palumbo. Lord Palumbo has worked very hard to maintain the house in an original condition; one of his first acts was to remove the Dunlap-designed screens. After suffering for some years with the mosquito problem and ventilation difficulties, he finally added a discreet air-conditioning system: Mies' design was truly habitable at last. Lord Palumbo has been sorely tried by changes in the flood plain surrounding the house; it flooded badly in 1996 and 1997, finally necessitating a complete reconstruction under the direction of architect Dirk Lohan, Mies' grandson.
Purchased in 1972 by Lord Palumbo, at which time it was equipped for the first time with furniture designed by Mies.
Questions? Comments? E-Mail the author at DANEMOD@aol.com
© 1999, 2000, D.A. "Sandy" McLendon and Joe Kunkel, Jetset - Designs for Modern Living. All Rights Reserved.
This info is provided for educational purposes only; contact the Farnsworth House Estate to arrange a tour and to purchase items from them relating to this house and Mies van der Rohe. The house and grounds are open to the public for tours (call 630-552-8622 for info) or write to: Farnsworth House Estate, P.O. Box 194, 14520 River Road, Plano, IL 60545