Farnsworth House
Interesting facts
- All the exterior steel was sandblasted to erase every weld mark and then given four coats of white enamel, so the beams seem almost glued together.
- Mies used about 600 travertine slabs for the floor and terrace, rejecting 46 more as not good enough.
- A flood in 1954 put up to about 1.2 metres of water inside the house, destroying some of Edith Farnsworth's furniture.
- Single-pane glass, a leaking roof, condensation and swarms of mosquitoes troubled Farnsworth, who recorded the flaws in her diary.
- In 1967 the county seized part of Farnsworth's land to build a new bridge about 55 metres from the house; she sued and lost.
- It was Mies's first private house in the United States and one of only three he designed in the country.
- Peter Palumbo first spotted the house by chance in a Chicago Tribune advertisement in 1968, though the purchase took several years to negotiate.
- After Mies died in 1969, Palumbo hired the architect's grandson Dirk Lohan to restore the house and to make furniture for it.
- Palumbo's sculptures on the grounds included works by Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg, alongside British telephone boxes and a section of the Berlin Wall.
- When Sotheby's auctioned the house in 2003, the only rival to the preservationists was developer Aby Rosen, who wanted to move it to Long Island.
Why it is worth it
The Farnsworth House is little more than a white steel frame, two floating slabs and walls of glass, set in a meadow by the Fox River. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it as a weekend retreat for Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago kidney specialist, and when it was completed in 1951 it became one of the defining works of the International Style — a house reduced so far that the surrounding trees and seasons become its decoration. Mies put it plainly: seen through glass walls, nature gains a deeper significance.
Farnsworth met Mies at a dinner party in 1945 and soon drove him out to her riverside land near Plano. Despite worries about flooding, he chose to build on the floodplain and lifted the house about 1.6 metres above the ground on eight steel columns. A travertine terrace forms an intermediate step between grass and house; the western third of the box is an open porch. Inside, a single open space is broken only by a wooden core holding the kitchen, bathrooms and services, and by a free-standing wardrobe, with living, dining and sleeping areas arranged around them. The design was exhibited as a model at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, two years before construction began, and it influenced Philip Johnson's Glass House, which was finished first.
The relationship between architect and client did not survive the project. Costs rose, and in 1951 they sued each other in a dispute that dragged on for years; Farnsworth nonetheless kept the house until 1972. The British businessman and peer Peter Palumbo then owned it for three decades, restoring it, landscaping the grounds with the help of Lanning Roper and filling them with sculpture. The river has repeatedly flooded the house, notably in the late 1990s and in 2008, each time followed by restoration. Since 2003 it has belonged to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which runs it as a museum on an estate of about 60 acres, and it is a National Historic Landmark.
Getting there
The house stands on the north bank of the Fox River just outside Plano, Illinois, about 93 km south-west of downtown Chicago; the town of Yorkville is about 7 km away. The nearest major airport is Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD), about 65 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Edith Farnsworth House is a historic house museum along the Fox River near Plano, Illinois, United States. Completed in 1951, it was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the International Style and built as a weekend retreat for the nephrologist and physician Edith Farnsworth. It is one of three private residences Mies designed in the U.S. and is cited as a major modernist work. The house is raised 5+1⁄4 feet (1.6 m) above the floodplain, with a minimalist exterior and a mostly open plan interior. The surrounding 62-acre (25 ha) estate also includes a visitor center and exhibit gallery. The estate is owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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