It’s a 60-mile haul from Chicago to Plano, Illinois, to see the Edith Farnsworth House, the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed residence built along the Fox River.
But it’s certainly worth the trip.
Designed in 1945 (but not completed until 1951) the pavilion-like, one-room house helped kick open the door to steel-and-glass postwar modernism and laid the groundwork for Mies’ revolutionary work, including 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive and Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
The Farnsworth has been a house museum operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation since 2004.
Author and IIT College of Architecture professor Michelangelo Sabatino seeks to bring the Farnsworth from Plano to your coffee table with his comprehensive new book, “The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture Preservation Culture,” that hits the bookstores this week, published by Monacelli Press.
The 270-page coffee table book also chronicles the 2003 battle led by Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust to buy the residence at auction, saving the home from the possibility of being dismantled and hauled off by an out-of-state buyer.
“So you’re getting three books for one, because it also reveals the complexity of what it means to inhabit a modern, single-family house and the groundbreaking, pioneering role that Edith played in that,” Sabatino said.
“And so we want to tell her story, but we also want to tell the story of the people that came after that stewarded it and worked to acquire it,” he said.
Edith Farnsworth in her own words
Buttressed by absolutely sterling photography from the likes of Hedrich-Blessing and Annie Leibovitz, the book is a worthy read that sheds new light on the house.
It also finally brings to the fore Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the wealthy, 6-foot-tall kidney specialist who commissioned the weekend residence — then unsuccessfully dueled with Mies in court over its cost overruns.
Her story has too often taken a back seat to Mies’, but not here. Sabatino even unearths Farnsworth’s diaries, in which she wrote in detail about meeting Mies and her lawsuit against him.
And it’s good to read Farnsworth’s thoughts, as opposed to having them filtered through writers and historians. She wrote about the difficult time she had living in the house, from roof leaks to uninvited curiosity-seekers.
“It was hard to bear the insolence, the boorishness, of the hundreds of persons who invaded the solitude of my shore and my home,” Farnsworth wrote. “It was maddening and heartbreaking to find the wild flowers and ground covers so laboriously brought in to hide the scars of the building, battered and crushed by the boots beneath the noses pressed against the glass.”
“If anyone wants to really hear Edith’s voice, this is really a precious component of the book,” Sabatino said.
The book features other goodies as well, including letters Farnsworth wrote to Mies at the start of the project, the home’s original zoning application and drawings.
There are also recollections from architect Dirk Lohan — Mies’ grandson — and Peter Palumbo, the former British House of Lords member, and his wife Hayat. Palumbo bought the house from Farnsworth and put the home up for auction in 2003 after the state reneged on a deal to purchase the residence and turn it into a museum.
A ‘generational reinvestment’
What’s next for the Farnsworth House? Supporters will celebrate the home’s 20th anniversary as a museum on June 11 at Crown Hall.
Meanwhile, the National Trust has more work planned for the home.
“We just completed $1.5 million worth of work, and that was two years after about a million dollars of work rebuilding the lower terrace,” said Farnsworth House Executive Director Scott Mehaffey. “It’s an expensive house to maintain, and it’s 75 years old now. So in some ways we’re rebuilding the house. It’s a generational reinvestment.”
Still, the Farnsworth House, and the 60 picturesque acres that surround it, is an active place that hosts talks, exhibitions and visitors.
And it’s still a draw, even as Farnsworth leaders move to ramp up outreach and awareness about the house.
“I’m sitting here in front of the house right now, and there are 100 architecture students from Uruguay here,” Mehaffey said, “and they’re replicating the floor plan of the Farnsworth, to scale, in the backyard with rolls of Mylar.”
Lee Bey is the Sun-Times architecture critic. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.
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