The Farnsworth House

Along the Fox River outside Plano, Illinois, a house sits on eight steel columns about five feet above the floodplain. It has no curtains. The walls are floor-to-ceiling glass. The interior is a single open room, broken only by a central utility core enclosing the bathrooms. From outside, you can see straight through it to the river and the woods beyond.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed the Farnsworth House between nineteen forty-five and nineteen fifty-one as a weekend retreat for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago physician and nephrologist who had met Mies at a dinner party and commissioned a house on her Fox River property. It was only the first major domestic commission Mies completed after leaving Germany for America, and it became one of the defining works of twentieth-century architecture.

The relationship between architect and client did not end well. Mies had estimated the cost at forty thousand dollars. The final bill exceeded seventy-four thousand. Mies sued for non-payment of the outstanding balance. Farnsworth countersued, alleging design errors. The court sided with Mies, attributing the cost overrun to rising materials prices rather than malpractice. Farnsworth moved into the house and spent years telling anyone who would listen how uninhabitable it was. Too hot in summer because the glass walls collected solar heat, too cold in winter, too visible from the river path, too difficult to furnish without violating the geometry.

All of that is probably true. It is also beside the point. The house is not a comfortable place to live. It is a proof of concept: the idea that a building can be reduced to structure and enclosure, that walls can be glass, that the division between inside and outside can dissolve without the building ceasing to be shelter.

Philip Johnson, who had helped show Mies's design at the Museum of Modern Art, finished his own Glass House in Connecticut in nineteen forty-nine, two years before the Farnsworth House was done. The conversation those two buildings started is still going on in architecture schools.