Farnsworth House
A glass house that floats above a meadow by the Fox River, carried by eight white steel columns. The walls are entirely of glass, and only a core with bathroom and kitchen divides the space. The house is Mies’s idea of almost nothing in its purest form.
The physician Edith Farnsworth commissioned a weekend house from Mies van der Rohe in 1945. It was built in 1950–1951 on a site by the Fox River, outside Chicago. During construction the relationship between client and architect grew steadily worse, and the costs rose. It ended in a lawsuit, and Farnsworth later publicly criticised the house as impossible to live in.
The house consists of two horizontal slabs, floor and roof, held by eight steel columns welded to the outside. The floor lies about one and a half metres above the ground to cope with floods. The walls are of glass, and the room is divided only by a core with two bathrooms, a kitchen and services. Outside lies a terrace. The steel is ground smooth and painted white, so that the joints do not show. Mies wanted the house to let nature become part of the room.
The river has flooded the house several times, and it has been restored. The house is now a museum. It inspired Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which was completed earlier but built with knowledge of Mies’s drawings. Farnsworth House has become one of the best-known icons of modernism and at the same time an example of the conflict between the architect’s ideas and the client’s needs.