Contemplations of the Built World: The Farnsworth House

I'm Mitchell Rocheleau, principal architect at Rost Architects in Southern California. Today I want to talk a little bit about the Farnsworth House designed and constructed by renowned architect, Mies van der Rohe, in 1937.

The Farnsworth House was Mies's first home that he designed in America. It sits in Plano, Illinois, which is about an hour and a half southwest of Chicago. I had the opportunity to visit the home in January of 2023. I had studied the home in my undergraduate and graduate degrees and looked at the drawings, read the history, but it wasn't really until I was able to visit the home in person that I gained a more fuller appreciation and understanding of the home. And then it also was given a lot of, you know, interesting insight into the structure and the story behind the structure by the docent and, you know, guide that facilitates the showing of the home in Plano.

So, on a high level, the Farnsworth House was designed to be a vacation retreat for Edith Farnsworth. It's a modernist structure. It's a white floating glass box wrapped in glass panes that has views out towards the surrounding Plano Forest, and it sits on the Fox River. Inside the home, there's a sleeping area, a living area, dining, kitchen, two bathrooms and you know some storage areas. The pragmatic aspect of the home like bedroom, bath count, all of that, it's important to understand but that's really not what the house is about. So what does what makes this house an interesting piece of architecture and why is it critical for us to understand and talk about this home? The Farnsworth house is critical for us to study and understand because it was starkly different from homes that people were familiar with at the time. It really embodied this philosophy and language of modern architecture down to every single small detail. It was one of the purest examples of modern architecture that had been realized and constructed up to that point. Around that time, in the 1930’s, the conventional single -family home was typically wood-framed construction. It was clad with brick, wood siding, stucco, to create the solid enclosure. It was very opaque, and then it had punches for doors and windows, so, you know, the typical punch window. It resembled a type of home that you would see a child drawing with the pitched roof, the four punched holes for windows, and the front door at the center of the house. That's a pretty accurate description of what a lot of homes in Chicago at the time were being built to look like. They often took on these kind of synthetic or surface level architectural aesthetics of like, let's say a Victorian style, Tudor style, Queen Anne style, just by small details and, you know, ornamentation applied to the home. At the heart of it, they were very conventional homes. The Farnsworth house was far from that. It was starkly different from that. And it really was a courageous portrayal of what a new style or way of living could look like in this new modern era. So, whereas many of the homes reflected these historical styles of the past, as we mentioned before, Tudor, Queen Anne, Victorian, the Farnsworth House did not refer to any historical tradition or convention. Its purpose was to detach from those and put forth a new idea of what modern living would look like that had no attachment to the past. As opposed to using wood frame construction, the Farnsworth House uses steel and glass and stone, and then as opposed to creating a physical boundary, like many of the conventional houses of the time did, it attempted to dissolve that boundary between the exterior and the interior by the use of glass. So, it's very different, you know, conventional houses created boundaries, they created an internal space inside the home, the Farnsworth house did the exact opposite. It dissolved that external boundary, allowing nature to flow inside of the house and giving the user this feeling of expansive space rather than kind of a closed in private space. The Farnsworth House can be described as a kind of single large room. There are smaller spaces and rooms inside of the home, but in general, it's a single free plan open on the inside. This was also a very different concept compared to the conventional houses at that time where they had very clear internal divisions separating formal dining room, living room, kitchen, bedrooms. In the conventional houses, space was not meant to be free -flowing. There was really this idea that these independent spaces needed to be created to separate the kind of activities of daily living and Farnsworth House proposed a new way, a new form of living that was not separate. It was free -flowing space, flexible space. It was open, you know, allowed internal connections visually and spatially inside of the structure.

Mies believed that his architecture must be objective, impersonal, quiet, and simple. It must be a backdrop against which each individual and all human life in its great complexities can develop freely and develop in changing ways from generation to generation, long after such striking clients such as Dr. Edith Farnsworth in this case are gone. That's a quote from the Architectural Forum Magazine of Building.

Who was Mies van der Rohe? Mies was a German architect. He grew up in Aachen, Germany. He recalls visiting and marveling at a large cathedral built in the era of Charlemagne near his hometown and it's safe to say that this visit or this event in his life was very impactful for him and that it influenced his career or his trajectory and interest in architecture because he was profoundly impacted and kind of moved by the this cathedral at a young age. Mies never took a formal class on architecture. He was trained as a stone mason in his hometown and he worked in his family's masonry business. He was introduced to the construction industry at an early age and also the importance of craft and detail in construction. This was a principle that he deeply embodied in his work as a professional, but then also many have speculated that he kind of gained this appreciation early in his childhood, watching his family work in Carve stone in his hometown. Early in his career, Mies worked primarily on residential architecture where he tried to refine his philosophy and kind of discover his own architectural identity and curate his ideas. His career was put on hold when he was recruited into the German army at the outset of World War I. Fortunately, he was discharged from the military due to appendicitis and he then, after that, escaped to the United States just before the war started using his brother's passport. After landing in America, Mies began practicing and teaching architecture in the United States, he would develop a lasting and influential career embedding the language of modern architecture into American culture.

So, who was Edith Farnsworth? Edith Farnsworth was a practicing physician in Chicago. She was from a wealthy family and was exposed to many opportunities. She studied violin, music, theory and poetry, which allowed her to really develop an appreciation for the arts and architecture. In 1934, she entered Northwestern University Medical School and she achieved her M.D. in 1939. This is a time when many male practitioners were recruited for World War II. So, it allowed her this space professionally to establish a name for herself. She published many papers and she made significant strides in her field. However, her notoriety is as most widely attributed to her participation as the client of the Farnsworth House by Mies.

How did Mies and Edith meet? They were introduced by a mutual friend to get drinks one night. And at that conversation, or during that conversation, Edith mentioned to Mies that she had a nine acre plot of land near Plano, Illinois, bordering the Fox River. And she was looking for an architect to design her a small vacation getaway cottage. She described to Mies kind of the site conditions and let him know that there was a portion of the site that was in the flood zone closer to the river and was kind of grappling with how to deal with those conditions. She had purchased a lot for about $500 per acre and was ready to start designing her home. After dinner and a few drinks, they continued to discuss the project. They took several weekend trips to the site together to kind of discuss preliminary design concepts, materials, and the building's siting. In earlier conversations, Mies mentioned that, and this is a direct quote, “here the site where everything is beautiful and privacy is no issue, it would be a pity to erect an opaque wall between the outside and the inside. So, I think we should build the house of steel and glass. In that way we’ll let the outside in”, end quote. So, this quote gives you kind of some insight into Mies's initial vision for the house, which came about very early in this process after a couple of site visits and discussions with Edith.

Mies and Edith, they worked really well together at the beginning of the relationship. They were both highly intellectual people. They enjoyed sharing thoughts on philosophy and poetry. Many have suspected that an affair occurred between the two of them despite Mies’s still being married to a woman in Germany. However, through the process, tensions did steadily grow between the two people, Mies and Edith. Countless accusations, apparent cost overruns, miscommunications and disagreements would eventually kind of surface and the relationship would be tarnished. It would ultimately be kind of unsalvageable and there would be a lot of resulting conflict, so, the agreement and litigation of the Farnsworth house.

On the surface the Farnsworth house is a pristine pure work of architecture with worldwide acclaim and a widespread notoriety. However, the story behind the home is riddled with conflict, building defects, and litigation, and kind of nasty disagreements between the client and architect. A fascinating book titled "Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece” by Alex Beam goes into more detail on this conflict between Edith and Mies, and it gives more insight into how the conflict played out and the intricacies of that drama, basically. I won't go too much into the detail of that, but I do want to give a little bit of a background to kind of set the stage on what the conflict was about and how some of these things kind of sifted out in the process. So unfortunately, there was no formal agreement at the conception of the project between Mies and Edith. This was a significant mistake between both parties and would be at the core of the dispute between them. The unwritten agreement was that Mies would design the home without charging professional architectural service fees. And when Mies could not find a contractor willing to build a home, he also assumed the role as builder and general contractor for the house. It was stated that Mies provided Edith with cost estimates, spending reports and updates throughout the project. However, Edith alleged that this was not true. The lack of formal work really kind of created a he said, she said environment between the two parties. So, it was very difficult to sort through. Mies and Edith ended up suing each other. Edith would accuse Mies of not involving her in the design decisions, exceeding the construction budget estimate and lacking professional competency and kind of the ability to technically execute a single family home because of many of the defects that occurred in the house after it was finished. Mies would accuse Edith of nonpayment. The event was professionally humiliating for Mies in many ways because it was widely published. However, when photographs of Edith reviewing drawings with Mies at Mies's office were brought up during the litigation. It really challenged and was detrimental to the credibility of Edith. At the end, Mies would eventually prevail in the suit and he would be owed only a few thousand dollars as compensation for the project. Mies's victory would not alleviate his distaste for Edith or the project, it said that Mies never actually visited the site and the home after it was completed. However, there were accounts from drivers that have said to pick Mies up in Plano years after the completion of the home. So, there is some speculation that he did see the completed product.

So the house was primarily constructed from steel and glass. The travertine, there's travertine stone tiles that clad the entire interior and exterior floor plane of the home. The frames of the roof and the floor structure are created using 15 inch steel C-channels and turned on their flat side to expose the kind of cleaner side of the structural member. There are a total of eight columns, W8 by 48s, which are welded to the C-channels and create a vertical support system for the home. The columns span vertically tying in the roof structure and roof plane with the floor plane and then terminate down in the foundation kind of creating this hovering effect where the house is elevated above the grade. All of the structural members of the home are painted white and finished in a white paint. The square footage of the home of the home calculates at about 1500 square feet with an additional 676 square feet of exterior floor space on the porch totaling about 200 square feet.

Details of the Farnsworth House. The elevated level of detailing and care that Mies exhibited in the home was something that I really had not fully appreciated until I got to visit the house. I had seen the drawings, the technical details, and the kind of level of care that was shown in those drawings about, you know, material transitions, finishes, hiding welds, hiding rivets, hiding bolts, all of that, but it was challenging to fully appreciate it until I visited the home in person. Mies took extreme care in minimizing the exposure of all these connections and joints and the precision in these connections between the different materials and in the steel for application is really incredible. Instead of using exposed standard bolt connections, Mies used concealed custom rivets and fillet welding to hide the visible connections. Although this was a significantly more expensive and labor-intensive technique, it allows the structure to be free and clear of any visible bolts and connections. Mies intentionally terminated the eight vertical supports of the structure below the top of the roof. He did that so when somebody is standing at grade level viewing the house from below looking up, the top plane of the home, the rectangular kind of silhouette is not disturbed by the vertical posts kind of sticking up through the roof plane. So, by dropping them about four inches below that roof plane, you just read in silhouette this one clean continuous line of the roof plane running all the way across the home. This shows Mies’s kind of ability to think about the human experience, although he was highly theoretical, you know, and had these more kind of abstract and conceptual ideas about architecture, high level philosophies, these small moves tell the story that he was still very highly attuned to the human experience and very interested and thought deeply about how somebody or how the person would view and experience his structure. The easy thing to do would be to terminate the eight vertical columns directly at the line of the roof, but then you would see in silhouette a slight jog of those columns because the person was viewing it from a lower perspective. I think just thought this was a really kind of thoughtful approach that gave insight into Mies’s thought process and maybe challenge some of the typical ideas about his kind of, let's call it dogmatic adherence to theoretical principles and pragmatic modernism.

One of the features of the home that I could really appreciate was the radiant floor heating system. I visited the home in January, so it was freezing cold when I was there. Mies designed in the interior radiant floor system by kind of sinking it down several inches below the interior travertine. And he ran copper pipes throughout the home that circulated warm water. It really is a nice kind of effect when you're inside of the home. It allows the home not to be kind of encumbered by a conventional HVAC system where you're running ducts through the roof and dropping soffits everywhere. Instead, the floor temperature control is coming from below. It's very subtle, it's very inconspicuous, but it also works very well. Another interesting detail of the home that I was made aware of was the inside of the living space, Mies used a lot of wood casework inside of the home. And he was aware that the exterior envelope of the home was all glass, obviously, as he had designed it. And then he understood that the sun would penetrate that glass envelope and get into the home. The angle of the sun that would penetrate into the home was important for him. He knew that he wanted to prevent that angle of sun from reaching as best he could the wood casework as he knew that UV rays and light from the sun can bleach wood casework very easily and it would create a horizontal line on the wood casework where that sun kind of came down and hit. So, in order to alleviate that he really thoughtfully lifted a portion of the wood casework up off the floor and it is said that he lifted it up the exact height at which the sun would come in at its lowest elevation in the winter solstice and hit that line. He lifted the wood casework up just above that so he wouldn't get any kind of bleaching on the casework, I thought those were really, you know, nice thoughtful detail. The way that Mies detailed the electrical outlets in the home is also worth discussing. Obviously in a home with all glass exterior walls and minimal interior walls, you can run into challenges with where to place electrical receptacles. So, what Mies did was embed these electrical receptacles in the floor. In the travertine, he detailed them beautifully. There was a nice kind of delicate metal ring around the outlet that was inside of the travertine floor and the plug for the lighting, or any kind of electrical appliance was intended to plug straight into the floor. Mies was also not keen on having can lighting in the ceiling in the home. So, he liked a nice, clean ceiling in the Farnsworth house. You'll see that there's a beautiful pristine, clean, white plain as the ceiling that has no apertures in it for can lights, as you normally see in, let's say, commercial construction and homes today. Mies didn't like that. Not only did he not want this kind of interruption of the white plane, the visual interruption of the white plane via the can lights on the surface, he also was not keen on the effect that down lighting had on people. So, he preferred human scale lighting accomplished by lamps and lower level lighting. He thought it was more ambient, created more intimate spaces, and created more attractive lighting effects on the humans in his spaces. This again suggests to me his fine attunement to the human experience and a bit more of a humanistic approach than he's often given credit for. Underneath the home, there's a single utility core that kind of collects, gathers all of the plumbing, electrical, sewer lines all into one vertical cylinder, which is hidden in shadow underneath the home. Because the home is elevated off of the ground plane, There's the challenge, how would you get all of the HVAC plumbing, how do you get that down into the ground and connect that with the services? So, this idea of a central cylinder bringing everything down in one core, getting it down into the earth was, I think, a nice way of dealing with and addressing that challenge. The utility core is relatively inconspicuous from the outside. I think it's painted or finished in a kind of a darker finish, it sits in shadow. So, it's really, you know It's not something that your eye gravitates towards it accentuates this idea about this floating kind of glass box because it really is hard to pick up if you're viewing the home from the outside.

So why is the Farnsworth House lifted up and elevated off of the ground plane. Mies did this for a very practical purpose. The area that the Farnsworth House was sited on is in a flood plain near the Fox River. Mies attempted to contact the Illinois State Water Survey Board to inquire about the highest flood plain levels in this. They didn't really provide any historical data on this. So, he went around to local farmers and he asked what their experience was and how high they had seen. After asking around to all the local farmers, he came back with the dimension of about five foot, three inches above grade was the highest that some of these farmers had remembered the Fox River flooding at that time. So, he chose to elevate the home off of the grade plane to accommodate for that. Now, over the years, there have been several floods in the area. The worst being in 1996 and 2008, there have been others that breached and elevated the terrace, but thankfully kind of subsided. However, with each flood, portions of the home didn't need to be kind of repaired and reconstructed. So, Mies was able to avoid several floods, but there were a couple that did raise above that height of the five feet, three inches.

Something important to discuss, I think, is the context of the Farnsworth House in relationship to Mies's professional career and kind of compare it to past works or past buildings that Mies had completed. One of the most notable structures that Mies completed was the Barcelona Pavilion. I think there's a clear distinction between the two pieces of architecture. For me, the Farnsworth House represents a more mature and a more kind of humanistic, more functionally conscious work of architecture than the Barcelona Pavilion, which he had done several years before. The Barcelona Pavilion was simply a pavilion. It was an indoor /outdoor pavilion designed in Barcelona for a world exposition. There was no designated bedrooms, no bathrooms, no kitchen, so it didn't need to function as an actual home. It was really kind of more along the lines of a sculptural or artistic pavilion. Whereas the Farnsworth House, it actually functioned as a home. There were technical requirements that needed to be addressed, functional living spaces that needed to be implemented inside of the home, in which Mies accomplished, he did all of that while still kind of communicating and preserving the purity of his modernist ideas. So in both scenarios, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House, he did communicate these kind of tenets and ideas about a new modern architecture. However, I think, again, the Farnsworth House took it to another level because while simultaneously incorporating this new modern idea about living and these new kind of modern aesthetic principles, he also made the thing functional, which shouldn't be overlooked, it's quite, I think, an achievement. Although there were problems with it and it was riddled with defects, I think the courage to kind of embark on that challenge and the degree to which he did execute it and manifested the home, brought it into reality is commendable.

Imitations of the Farnsworth House. So, the Farnsworth House has been widely imitated and you still see imitations of this house being attempted today. Most notably was Philip Johnson's glass house in New Canaan, which was designed and constructed between 1949 and 1950. Although the Farnsworth House was completed one year after Philip Johnson's glass house, Johnson had seen, apparently seen a design model and some drawings for the Farnsworth House at a gallery opening before he designed and built his glass house. So undoubtedly, there was some mimicking going on there. Johnson would clearly and shamelessly kind of replicate many of the characteristics of the house in his glass house.

Edith Farnsworth owned the house until about 1971 when Peter Palumbo purchased it. The Palumbo family restored the home twice during the three decades that they owned it. In 2003, the house was sold to friends of the Farnsworth House and the National Trust for historic preservation. The Farnsworth House has been designated as a national historic landmark and operates as a museum open to the public for touring and education. This was the organization that now holds these tours and they do a fantastic job, kind of giving good background inside education about the home, its history, construction and significance in the culture.

On its surface, the Farnsworth House is a clean and pure expression of modern architecture. However, I don't believe that that's why this project holds such widespread acclaim and importance for us to study and understand. Really the reason why I think it's important for us to discuss the home and to study it is because it signals this shift in culture. It's a proposal for a new kind of living, a new way of looking at a home that challenged the conventions of the past. It challenged this historic and traditional way of living in these separate, confined rigid rooms and spaces in a home and brought to the forefront this new paradigm or this new possibility for living and free and open space that had transparency to the outdoors, allowed nature in. It was really a pivotal shift, not only in architecture, but I think in the culture of America at large. And from then on, you see slowly at first, but you do see different homes and projects begin to incorporate these principles and accept these principles of a newer, freer way of living into the single-family home. And today, obviously that's, I think that's everywhere. So, I really think this project signifies this pivotal shift in our culture and for that reason I think it's worthy of us to understand it and to look at its history and understand why this building came to fruition and why the shift occurred.

So, thanks for listening. If you'd like some more information on the on the Farnsworth House we have a write up on our website, rostarchitects.com, with some photographs of my visit when I was there in January of 2023. I hope you enjoy the article, and if there are additional houses or works of architecture that you'd like to hear about, please feel free to let us know. Thanks.

Photo Credits

Colonial Houses

By Teemu008 from Palatine, Illinois - Joseph W. Fifer House Uploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29481041

By Teemu008 from Palatine, Illinois - Rex Jones HouseUploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29481692

Interior Farnsworth Photo

Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Exterior Roof Photo

Benjamin Lipsman from Chicago, IL, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Utility Core Photo Core

Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Architectural Drawings

Milnarik, Elizabeth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mies van der Rohe Portrait

Hugo Erfurth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Edith Farnsworth Portraits

Edith Farnsworth Papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago

Broken Glass Book Cover Penguin Random House LLC