An Afternoon Amid the Glass Walls of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: October 26, 2003
Just south of Plano, Ill., the Fox River sweeps from east to west before turning south toward its confluence with the Illinois River a few miles away. By the time it reaches Plano, the Fox is a broad, powerful river, the kind that once gave rise to milling and manufacturing in dignified towns farther upstream.
What you notice now, however, are the new towns, a hurricane of development swirling in the direction of Plano, consuming farmland at an almost unimaginable rate. It is a storm of invented neighborhoods and instant architecture. One day soon it will roll right over Plano and past one of the great monuments of 20th-century architecture: the Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
In its own way, the Farnsworth House, which was completed in 1951, is the perfect antithesis of the suburbs rolling toward it. Its clear-span glass walls surround a little more than 2,000 square feet of interior space: a pure rectangle raised by eight steel piers and as minimal an expression of the architect's art as has ever been built. The glass walls demand the buffer of woods and open land that surrounds the Farnsworth House. You couldn't crowd houses of this kind together in a subdivision.
Since 1947, when a model was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Farnsworth House has been an icon of modern architecture. It looks in photographs like a theoretical solution to an abstract problem — an almost Klee-like arrangement of severe white planes and pillars. What the photographs do not prepare you for is the extraordinary sense of beauty that comes with simply being in the house. I walked through it on a perfect autumn afternoon, when the leaves on the maples had turned and the air was full of Asian lady beetles, their work eating aphids in the soybean fields over for the year.
The real puzzle of the Farnsworth House is that a structure so severe, so machinelike in its intensity, could be so frankly and wholly committed to nature. Everyone supposes, naturally, that living in a glass house means worrying about the outside looking in, and perhaps that is so over a run of weeks and months. But to walk through the house — to imagine living in it — is to indulge in looking out, in seeing all the ways the woods and the river and the lawn to the north frame the living spaces. It is hard to explain how floor-to-ceiling glass walls could increase the intimacy of nature itself, but that is exactly what they do. The house hovers on its steel piers five feet above the ground, just high enough to isolate you from the roll of the earth. The wooded canopy seems to reach down and brush the glass walls like a constantly shifting Japanese print.
There was never any supposing that many people would choose to live like this. Even the original owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, came to struggle with it. Over the years, its isolation has diminished, especially since a new highway bridge was built closer to the house. The present owner — only the second — is Lord Palumbo, and he is an infrequent visitor.
In a sense, the Farnsworth House has become less a device for living and more a device for making people think about the ways we choose to live. It reframes the assumptions implicit in the tract houses marching toward Plano, forcing us to reconsider the intimate presence of nature. It confronts us with a thought experiment, and an exquisitely imagined one at that.
On Dec. 12, the Farnsworth House will be put up for sale as the final lot in an auction to be held at Sotheby's in New York. The best guess of the price it will bring is $4.5 million to $6 million. There are no restrictions on the buyer, nothing to guarantee that the Farnsworth House remains intact and on its present site. How easily such small masterpieces are destroyed was made plain last year when a Richard Neutra house in Rancho Mirage, Calif., was abruptly demolished. Two preservation groups — the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois — have begun the fund-raising to purchase the house by committing $1 million each.
The Farnsworth House began in 1951 as a private retreat, but it deserves now to become a public pavilion. Living in a glass house may seem like a radical notion, but to stand inside one, looking out, is a wonderful way to glimpse the limits of the way we assume we must live.