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Mies and Farnsworth would never speak again, and the completion of the house was orchestrated by intermediaries. Tickets are required and can be purchased online or by phone when staff is available. Be advised that no pets are allowed on the tours, and there is no shady area to leave them at our Visitor Center. Lisa Macaione is a college English instructor, a writing group facilitator, and a former staff member of the Farnsworth House museum in Plano, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, the Kane County Chronicle, and ArtsFest St. Charles, among others. She was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, and after a time away, now lives with her husband and two daughters in the town where they grew up.
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The transparency allows that from the interior, one is fully conscious of the landscape, but also acts inversely to incorporate the interior of the house into the enclave in an innovative way. Mies acted fully aware of his responsibility and carefully studied each element in function of its impact on the new place he had dictated for it. The architect consciously chose the site conditions where it stands and the means of dealing with them.
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The Farnsworth House is significant as his first complete realization of this ideal, a prototype for his vision of what modern architecture in an era of technology should be. Of the many famous designs, Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, sit in the mind’s eye as primordial examples of the medium, celebrated for their ingenuity and capture of the zeitgeist. A new book from Phaidon features 50 such homes and celebrates stunning feats of architectural wonder that engage glass in thoughtful and compelling ways.
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Thus, the dispute ended up in the court where, eventually, they ruled in favour of the architect, forcing the doctor to pay an elevated fee which covered the surcharge of the house. Mehaffey, who’s been on the job since 2018, has been nudging along a shift in the narrative about the house. The change is being done with no disrespect to Mies, who designed a sublime, ethereal place to watch wildlife and the river drift past. Instead, something that used to be a secondary part of the story, Edith Farnsworth’s fundamental role in getting this special place built, is being lifted up. A pair of glass and black steel apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive in Streeterville are so strongly identified with their architect they are often simply called “the Mies buildings,” but Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed another famous building that year sixty miles southwest. She furnished it with Midcentury Modern furniture when she moved into it, making a home despite the ongoing lawsuit and countersuit.
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To design and build the structure, she chose Mies van der Rohe, who had not yet built a house in the United States since arriving from Germany in 1938. Though the house was designed to withstand flooding, increased development upriver has caused two damaging floods. The 2008 flood required removal of the wardrobe, a 1996 replica of the original that Mies’s office had designed at Farnsworth’s request. Palumbo furnished the house with several additional examples of Mies-designed furniture, but even so, it maintained the serene open quality that the architect and client originally envisioned. At the same time, the prismatic composition of the house maintains a sense of boundary and centrality against the vegetative landscape, thus maintaining its temple-like aloofness. The great panes of glass redefine the character of the boundary between shelter and that which is outside.
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The furniture is heavy, the rugs a little worn at the edges, the vegetation completely wild. In renaming this structure the Edith Farnsworth House, a glimmer of this history is recalled and acknowledged. Mies applied this space concept, with variations, to his later buildings, most notably at Crown Hall, his Illinois Institute of Technology campus masterpiece.
Mies has decided to rely on the action of nature to frame the project and to act in participation with it. During spring, when the river overflows and rises up to 60cm below the base of the structure, the water completes the architect’s vision, achieving the projected image. On the banks of the Fox River in Northeast Illinois is a one-room house on a 60-acre property near Plano, approximately 56 miles southwest of Chicago. Built by Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a weekend home and getaway from her life as a physician-scientist, the house has, since its inception, been known for its Modernist design.
The house, designed in 1951 to be the weekend getaway of a Chicago physician, has recently undergone a subtle change. Long known as Farnsworth House, it officially became the Edith Farnsworth House on Nov. 17, 2021. That date would have been the 118th birthday of its namesake, the omnivorously intellectual woman who commissioned Mies to build it and later battled him in court. In Plano, a long, serene pavilion of glass and white painted steel located at River Road sits on stilts above the ground so it appears to be floating near the banks of the Fox River. Dr. Farnsworth chose a site that is located at a point where the Fox River bends southwest towards the Illinois River, which is several miles away.
Though initially budgeted at $30,000, because construction began just as the Korean War was driving up material costs, the house ultimately cost Farnsworth more than $70,000, a staggering sum at a time when the average single-family house cost less than $10,000. Farnsworth and Mies eventually sued each other regarding the overages, and a painful court case drew national notoriety to the unconventional residence. In the media, their financial dispute became tied up with a larger contemporary perception that modernism represented a foreign attack on traditional American culture. The building design received accolades in the architectural press, resulting in swarms of uninvited visitors trespassing on the property to glimpse this latest Mies building.
Waiting on an inheritance, Farnsworth could not begin construction until 1949, and Mies spent the intervening years refining his design and developing meticulously considered details for the steel and glass house. Those original images, taken by Bill Hedrich, show the house nearly empty and completely transparent. In contrast, Farnsworth’s photographs of the house, taken years later, show vegetation growing up the exterior columns of the house, and spiderwebs in the depth of their flanges; trees heavy with leaves, sheltering the house from view and scattered across the white travertine terrace. In her photographs, the glass walls are at times a mirror in which we can even catch a glimpse of her tripod.
During the late 1990s, moving towards retirement, Lord Palumbo tried repeatedly to sell the property to the State of Illinois for use as a public park and house museum. Since its completion in 1951, the Edith Farnsworth house has been meticulously maintained and restored. The most important restoration took place in 1972, when then owner Peter Palumbo hired the firm of Mies van der Rohe’s grandson, Dirk Lohan, to restore the house to its original 1951 appearance. A second restoration took place in 1996, after a devastating flood damaged the interior.
Mies viewed the technology-driven modern era in which an ordinary individual exists as largely beyond one's control. But he believed the individual can and should exist in harmony with the culture of one's time for successful fulfillment. His career was a long and patient search for an architecture that would be a true expression of the essential soul of his epoch, the Holy Grail of German Modernism. He perceived our epoch as the era of industrial mass production, a civilization shaped by the forces of rapid technological development. Mies wanted to use architecture as a tool to help reconcile the individual spirit with the new mass society in which the individual exists.
Far from a passive client, Farnsworth was an active patron of the arts and advocate for innovation. It is easy to imagine a history of an embattled woman, but for another 14 years after the trial ended, and until she lost a dispute with Kendall County over their condemnation of two acres of her land, Farnsworth inhabited her house on Wednesdays and on weekends. Following a flood in 1954 that damaged the furniture and the drapes, she chose pragmatic pieces for the house—the bed was placed directly on the floor, she installed opaque roller blinds that gave her privacy whenever she desired, and she brought in heavier furniture. However, Farnsworth’s ongoing relationship with the house is perhaps best recorded in the poetry she wrote and published.
In 1954 the river rose six feet above the one-hundred-year-mark and flooded the house. However, Mies was not able to anticipate the increase in water runoff caused by the development in the Chicago area which led to more floods. Current research states that the interior of the house has received flood waters on 6 occasions, beginning in 1954 and becoming more frequent having also flooded in 1996,1997, and just recently in 2008. The Farnsworth House sits isolated on a floodplain that faces the Fox River, establishing the architect's concept of simple living.
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