The Iconic Glass Home Constructed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—and the Lawsuit That Solid a Shadow Over It

It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth Home, to interrupt out clichés like “Peo­ple who reside in glass hous­es ought to­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or relatively glass and metal, and its first personal­er turned out to have quite a lot of stones for its archi­tect: Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, the final direc­tor of the Bauhaus, who’d immi­grat­ed from Nazi Ger­many to the Unit­ed States within the late 9­teen-thir­ties. It was at a din­ner par­ty in 1945 that he hap­pened to fulfill the for­ward-think­ing Chica­go doc­tor Edith Farnsworth, who expressed an inter­est in construct­ing a whol­ly mod­ern retreat effectively out­aspect town. Requested if one in every of his appren­tices might do the job, Mies provided to take it on him­self.

The duty, as Mies con­ceived of archi­tec­ture in his time, was to construct for an period by which excessive and fast­ly advanc­ing indus­tri­al tech­nol­o­gy was becom­ing unavoid­ready in ordi­nary lives. Such lives, prop­er­ly lived, would require new frames, and thor­ough­ly con­sid­ered ones at that. The form ulti­mate­ly tak­en by the Farnsworth Home is one such body: order­ly, and to a level that might be referred to as excessive, whereas on anoth­er lev­el max­i­mal­ly per­mis­sive of human free­dom.

That was, in any case, the concept: in phys­i­cal actual­i­ty, Farnsworth her­self had an extended checklist of prac­ti­cal com­plaints about what she started to name “my Mies-con­cep­tion,” not least to do with its attrac­tion of bugs and inexperienced­house-like warmth reten­tion (uncom­pen­sat­ed for, in true Euro­pean type, by aircon­di­tion­ing).

Chron­i­clers of the Farnsworth Home saga are inclined to males­tion that the cen­tral rela­tion­ship seems to have exceed­ed that of archi­tect and shopper, not less than for a time. However what­ev­er affec­tion had as soon as exist­ed between them had certain­ly evap­o­rat­ed by the point they had been suing every oth­er towards the tip of con­struc­tion, with Mies alleg­ing non-pay­ment and Farnsworth alleg­ing mal­prac­tice. Within the occasion, Farnsworth misplaced in court docket and used the home as every week­finish retreat for a cou­ple of many years earlier than promote­ing it to the British devel­op­er and archi­tec­tur­al enthu­si­ast Peter Palum­bo, who espe­cial­ly loved its ambi­ence dur­ing thun­der­storms. In the present day it oper­ates as a muse­um, as defined by its exec­u­tive direc­tor Scott Mahaf­fey in the brand new Open House video above. Hear­ing about all of the tur­moil behind the Farnsworth Home­’s con­cep­tion, the atten­dees of its excursions would possibly discover them­selves suppose­ing that hell hath no fury like a shopper scorned.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Fast Ani­mat­ed Tour of Icon­ic Mod­ernist Hous­es

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Uncommon Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & Extra

The Mod­ernist Gasoline Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

How a Nineteen Thirties Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­piece Har­ness­es the Solar to Hold Heat within the Win­ter & Cool within the Sum­mer

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Naked­ly Contact­es the Floor

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e-book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.