Sunday, May 5, 2024

Whats in a Name? Becoming the Edith Farnsworth House National Trust for Historic Preservation

edith farnsworth house

She purchased tables by Florence Knoll, chairs by Bruno Mathsson and Jens Risom, many of which were likely sourced from Baldwin Kingrey, the Chicago-based furniture store owned by Kitty Baldwin Weese and Jody Kingrey Albergo. She fought to retain the house that she’d envisioned, and after years of legal turmoil, she did. The two would visit the site frequently for picnics with the young architects who worked in Mies’ office, and even the office accountant, Felix Bonnet, from 1946, when design began, through 1949, when construction started. And, as Farnsworth became busier, publishing and presenting her research at conferences, the architects in Mies’ office would draw her charts and visualize her data for her. The two shared a friendship and an intimacy that, from a historical perspective, is difficult to define.

Mirror Houses, Bolzano Italy, by Peter Pichler Architecture

edith farnsworth house

Open views from all sides of the building help enlarge the living space area and aid flow between the living space and its natural surroundings. In it, she dwelled alone— feet treading stone floors, hands pulling closed the single outside door. She filled the space with unrestraint, brought books and records, placed priceless ancient art and worn, eclectic goods inside the modern display. The façade is made from individual panels of glass which run from floor to ceiling, fixed to the structure by steel frames.

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edith farnsworth house

The only operable pieces of the façade are the double door and the two windows located in the lower part of the Eastern façade. The connections are structural steel welded in a way which reduces their visual presence to a minimum. This demonstrates a significant change in the manner of proceeding, in comparison to the European projects, where the structure appeared as a grid system punctuating the plane, once the order of the spatial arrangement had been fixed. To the South, a large grove of trees achieves the function of protecting the house, by spreading its branches a considerable height over the travertine terrace. From 1971 to 2003, the British real estate tycoon Lord Peter Palumbo owned the house.

The Glass House

The proportions of the floor, the positioning of the pillars, the porch area and the mullions of the carpentry of the enclosed space are conditions which remain invariable. The architect proposed that the interior distribution had to encompass all the functional requirements, installations, bathrooms and kitchen without interrupting the glazed perimeter. A second characteristic of the house is that it has no interior divisions made on site. We find only, towards the centre of the space, a wooden core which houses two bathrooms separated by a wardrobe and beside which the kitchen is also located- a so-called “American style”. SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities.

The absence of walls

With the Farnsworth house constructed about 100 feet from the Fox River, Mies recognized the dangers of flooding. He designed the house at an elevation that he bellieved would protect it from the highest predicted floods, which are anticipated every hundred years. "If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside. That way more is said about nature—it becomes part of a larger whole."

Pillars

Looking Back: The Farnsworth House Story - Newcity Design

Looking Back: The Farnsworth House Story.

Posted: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Drains and pipes pass through the floor and a vertical shaft which contains the bathroom vents and the chimney flue travels through the roof and exit the exterior, also allowing access for services such as electricity and water. These utilities are concealed, built in the most discrete and inaccessible areas of the slabs, becoming almost as invisible in the interior as the exterior of the house. The white-painted, sandblasted steel frame—with welds sanded away to render attachments invisible—contrasts with its natural setting, becoming an object of Platonic perfection, seemingly more idea than reality. Far from a static, isolated object, the sliding horizontals of the house and terraces reach out and engage their natural setting, offering a contrast to emphasize the rich colors and natural forms of the seasonally changing riparian prairie. Mies served as General Contractor on the project, and his innovative details and iron-willed vision proved costly.

Flooding

In 1968, the local highway department condemned a 2-acre (0.81 ha) portion of the property adjoining the house for construction of a raised highway bridge over the Fox River, encroaching upon the original setting of the design. Since the early nineteenth century land survey imposed boundaries that did not previously exist, National Trust staff continue to study our site history in larger physical and social contexts. An architectural work made of steel, laminated glass and Roman travertine panels for the roof and floor.

The panels which form the façade of the house are simple glass with a thickness of 0.64cm, kept in place by steel frames constructed with W-shaped angles and bars. The travertine marble floor was placed in a way that the tiles are not interrupted or perforated, thus creating a smooth transition between the interior and exterior. Although it ended up being difficult to live in, the elegant simplicity of the Farnsworth House is still considered today as an important achievement in the international architectural style. Sold in 1964 to another private owner, in 2004 two groups of North-American conservationists launched a campaign to raise funds to acquire it, since which it has been converted into a visitable space. The design of the house was devised by Mies van der Rohe in 1946, on request of Dr. Edith Farnsworth, who wished to have at her disposal a second home in which she could spend part of the year in a relaxing and solitary environment. That show is still running, alongside a complementary second initiative; through December 19, 2021, visitors can take a guided tour through Edith Farnsworth’s Country House, a recreation of how the home would have appeared in 1955.

Smoothness and continuity are also apparent in the details of the other surfaces of the house, from the floors to the wood panels. While Mies employed the same vocabulary—steel, large expanses of plate glass and stone—at Farnsworth as he did for his other projects of the time, the house conveys a much different feeling from his other work. Painted an elegant white instead of an industrial black, small and intimate, set alone rather than sited on a campus or city grid and gently lifted above a riverbank and meadow, Farnsworth House uniquely illustrates the softer side of Mies’s architecture. Legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe instead floated a pristine glass box on a wooded river bank, with windows for walls and a space-age kitchen.

The architecture of the house represents the ultimate refinement of Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist expression of structure and space. It is composed of three strong, horizontal steel forms – the terrace, the floor of the house, and the roof – attached to attenuated, steel flange columns. Mies intended for the house to be as light as possible on the land, and so he raised the house 5 feet 3 inches off the ground, allowing only the steel columns to meet the ground and the landscape to extend past the residence.

The windows are what provide the beauty of Mies' idea of tying the residence with its tranquil surroundings. His idea for shading and privacy was through the many trees that were located on the private site. Mies created a 1,500-square-foot (140 m2) structure that is widely recognized as an exemplar of International Style of architecture. The retreat was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006, after being listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.[5] The house is owned and operated as a house museum by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. During the late nineteenth century, Plano and the Fox River environs were considered a “beauty spot,” attracting travelers and new residents – including several gentleman farmers and weekend cottagers. No doubt Edith Farnsworth was aware of the area’s rural character and natural scenery when, in 1944, she discovered the site of her future weekend house.

In 1997, he built a temporary visitor center east of the house and opened up the property for tours. Working in partnership, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (now Landmarks Illinois) were able to purchase the modernist icon. A 2008 flood damaged the core and required extensive repairs to the freestanding teak wardrobe. Given the understanding that upriver development and global warming have permanently increased the frequency of high water events at the Farnsworth House, flooding remains a threat to the site. 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.

The site is open Wednesday-Sunday from April through November and on Fridays and Saturdays in January and March. The Edith Farnsworth House stands as a metaphor for the fragile union between humanity, art, and nature – a balance of the controlled and uncontrollable and of the physical, intellectual, and aesthetic. Previously known as Farnsworth House, the iconic site was officially rededicated by the National Trust as the Edith Farnsworth House in fall 2021 to elevate Edith’s story as a visionary and a patron of the arts, as well as to shed light on her fascinating life and legacy.

Outdoor living spaces were designed to be extensions of the indoor space, with an open terrace and a screened porch (the screens have been removed). Yet the synthetic element always remains clearly distinct from the natural by its geometric forms that are highlighted by the choice of white as their primary color. Farnsworth had purchased the wooded, nine-acre riverfront property from the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert R. McCormick. Mies developed the design in time for it to be included in an exhibition on his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947.[9] After completion of design, the project was placed on hold awaiting an inheritance from an ailing aunt of Farnsworth. The commission was an ideal one for any architect, but was marred by a very publicized dispute between Farnsworth and Mies that began near the end of construction. A cost overrun of $15,600 over the initially approved construction budget of $58,400, was due to escalating material prices resulting from inflationary commodities speculation (in anticipation of demand arising from the mobilization for the Korean War).

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