Farnsworth House
Farnsworth House, pioneering steel-and-glass house in Plano, Illinois, U.S., designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1951. The structure’s modern classicism epitomizes the International Style of architecture and Mies’s dictum “less is more.” It is set on the floodplain of the Fox River and is one of only three houses built by Mies in the United States. (The other two are the Robert McCormick house [now part of the Elmhurst Art Museum] in Elmhurst, Illinois, and the Morris Greenwald house in Weston, Connecticut.) The house invites nature in through continuous glass walls and is anchored delicately to the forest floor. The simplicity of the design, precision in detailing, and careful choice of materials made this and others of Mies’s buildings stand out from the mass of mid-century Modernism.
Edith Farnsworth, a medical doctor based in Chicago, commissioned Mies to design a house on the Fox River, 60 miles outside the city. To give the occupant full advantage of the site’s natural beauty, Mies’s design featured an all-glass exterior. Intended as a vacation home or weekend retreat, the house lacked storage space, closets, and other necessities of full-time living, which the architect ignored in favour of an aesthetic perfectionism. A rumoured romance between client and architect reportedly soured as the house was built and cost overruns spurred lawsuits between Farnsworth and Mies. Farnsworth continued to spend weekends in the glass house for the next 20 years, until a nearby bridge and roadway made the setting less bucolic. In 1972 she sold the property to Peter Palumbo (later Lord Palumbo). He held it until 2003, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s and purchased by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which offers public tours.
The house’s main structural support consists of eight white vertical I-beams, which connect the rectangular roof and floor slabs with floor-to-ceiling plate glass. The structure is suspended on those beams some 5 feet (1.5 metres) above the ground and more than 8 feet (2.5 metres) above the Fox River, which lies just 100 feet (30 metres) to the south. A third of the slab is an open-air porch (which Farnsworth had screened in after the house was finished), and the only operable windows are two small hopper units (which are hinged at the bottom) at the eastern end in the bedroom area. A rectangular offset patio, covered with the same travertine as the floor slab of the house, sits a few steps below the house.
A central core contains all services, two bathrooms, a kitchen with a continuous stainless steel countertop on the north side, and a primavera wood living space and fireplace on the south side. I-beams connect just below the roof and patio surfaces, their welds polished smooth to make the connection invisible. Smoothness and continuity are also apparent in the details of the other surfaces of the house, from the floors to the wood panels. Mies removed all evidence of seams and fastenings.
Though the house was designed to withstand flooding, increased development upriver has caused two damaging floods. The first, in 1995, necessitated a massive restoration by Palumbo. 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.