Mies van der Rohe Gets Sued
The troubled story of the glass-walled Farnsworth House
By Jackie Craven, About.com Guide / http://architecture.about.com/od/houses/a/farnsworth.htm
Critics called Edith Farnsworth lovesick and spiteful when
she filed suit against Mies van der Rohe. More than fifty years later, the
glass-walled Farnsworth House still stirs controversy.
Dr. Edith Farnsworth was outraged. "Something should be
said and done about such architecture as this," she told House Beautiful
magazine, "or there will be no future for architecture."
The target of Dr. Farnsworth's fury was Mies van der Rohe,
who had built for her a house made almost entirely of glass. "I thought
you could animate a predetermined, classic form like this with your own
presence. I wanted to do something 'meaningful,' and all I got was this glib,
false sophistication," Dr. Farnsworth complained.
Mies van der Rohe and Edith Farnsworth had been friends.
Gossips suspected that the prominent physician had fallen in love with her
brilliant architect. Perhaps they had been romantically involved. Or, perhaps
they had merely become enmeshed in the passionate activity of co-creation.
Either way, Dr. Farnsworth was bitterly disappointed when the house was
completed and the architect was no longer a presence in her life.
Dr. Farnsworth took her disappointment to court, to
newspapers, and eventually to the pages of House Beautiful magazine. The
architectural debate mingled with 1950s cold war hysteria to create a public
outcry so loud that even Frank Lloyd Wright joined in.
When Dr. Farnsworth asked Mies van der Rohe to design her
weekend getaway, he drew upon ideas he had developed (but never built) for
another family. The house he envisioned would be austere and abstract. Two rows
of eight steel columns would support the floor and roof slabs. In between, the
walls would be vast expanses of glass.
Dr. Farnsworth approved the plans. She met with Mies often
at the work site and followed the progress of the house. But four years later,
when he handed her the keys and the bill, she was stunned. Costs had soared to
$73,000 -- equivalent to nearly half a million dollars today. Heating bills
were also exorbitant. Moreover, she said, the glass-and-steel structure was not
livable.
Mies van der Rohe was baffled by her complaints. Surely the
doctor did not think that this house was designed for family living! Rather,
the Farnsworth House was meant to be the pure expression of an idea. By
reducing architecture to "almost nothing," Mies had created ultimate
in objectivity and universality. The sheer, smooth, unornamented Farnsworth
House embodied the highest ideals of the new, utopian International Style.
Dr. Farnsworth sued, but her case did not stand up in court.
She had, after all, approved the plans and supervised the construction. Seeking
justice, and then revenge, she took her frustrations to the press.
In April 1953, House Beautiful magazine responded with a
scathing editorial which attacked the work of Mies van der Rohe, Walter
Gropius, Le Corbusier, and other followers of the International Style. The
style was described as a "Threat to the New America." The magazine
insinuated that Communist ideals lurked behind the design of these
"grim" and "barren" buildings.
To add fuel to the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright joined in the
debate. Wright had always opposed the bare bones architecture of the
International School. But he was especially harsh in his attack when he joined
in the House Beautiful debate. "Why do I distrust and defy such
'internationalism' as I do communism?" Wright asked. "Because both
must by their nature do this very leveling in the name of civilization."
According to Wright, promoters of the International Style
were "totalitarians." They were "not wholesome people," he
said.
Eventually, Dr. Farnsworth settled into the glass-and-steel
house and begrudgingly used it as her vacation retreat until 1972. Mies's
creation was widely praised as a jewel, a crystal and a pure expression of an
artistic vision. However, the doctor had every right to complain. The house was
-- and still is -- riddled with problems.
First of all, the building had bugs. Real ones. At night,
the illuminated glass house turned into a lantern, drawing swarms of mosquitos
and moths. Dr. Farnsworth hired Chicago architect William E. Dunlap to design
bronze-framed screens. The next owner, Lord Peter Palumbo, removed the screens
and installed air conditioning -- which also helped with the building's
ventilation problems.
But some problems have proved to be unresolvable. The steel
columns rust. They frequently need sanding and painting. The house sits near a
stream. Severe flooding has caused damage that required extensive repairs. The
house, which is now a museum, has been beautifully restored, but it requires
ongoing care.
It's difficult to imagine Edith Farnsworth tolerating these
conditions for more than twenty years. There must have been moments when she
was tempted to throw stones at Mies's perfect, glistening glass walls.
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Mies van der Rohe: Less is more.
Edith Farnsworth: We know that less is not more. It is
simply less!
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The Farnsworth Saga: 1946-2003
I was famous before. She is now famous throughout the world.
Mies, of Edith Farnsworth, under oath
Mies reminded me of a mediaeval peasant.
Edith Farnsworth, of Mies
I think the house is perfectly constructed, it is perfectly
executed.
Mies, about the Farnsworth House, under oath
In 1945 Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago physician, purchased
nine acres of an old farmstead bordering the Fox River near Plano, Illinois,
sixty miles southwest of Chicago. The seller was Colonel Robert R. McCormick,
publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The sale price was $500 per acre. A farmhouse
and several outbuildings stood on the property, but Farnsworth wanted something
new. In an unpublished memoir from the 1970s, she recalled her project’s
beginnings:
One evening I went to have dinner with Georgia [Lingafelt]
and Ruth [Lee] in their pleasant old- fashioned apartment in the Irving. Also
invited that evening was the massive stranger whom Georgia, with her peculiarly
sweet smile, introduced, as I slipped off my coat: “This is Mies, darling.”
I suppose he must have formed a few syllables as we had
dinner, but if so, I do not remember them. My impression is that the three of
us chatted among ourselves around the granite form of Mies. I related in detail,
probably too much, the story of finding the property, the dickerings with Col.
McCormick and the final acquisition of the nine- acre plot….
All of this came to naught, conversationally speaking, and I
concluded that Mies spoke almost no English; how much he understood remained
problematical. We moved back to the sitting room after dinner and both Ruth and
Georgia disappeared to wash the dishes.
Farnsworth continued, addressing Mies:
“I am wondering whether there might be some young man in
your office who would be willing and disposed to design a small studio
weekend-house worthy of that lovely shore.”
The response was the more dramatic for having been preceded
by two hours of unbroken silence. “I would love to build any kind of house for
you.” The effect was tremendous, like a storm, a flood or other act of God. We
planned a trip to Plano together, so that I could show him the property…. We
set out for a day in the country, to inspect the property with a view to the
ideal weekend house. It was either late autumn or late winter [of 1944–45] when
I stopped at 200 East Pearson to call for Mies, and he came out wearing an
enormous black overcoat of some kind of soft, fine wool which reached well down
toward his ankles. Installed beside me in the little Chevrolet he put up only
feeble resistance to the advances of my white cocker who sprawled across his
knees for the duration of the trip.
Finally we reached the dooryard of the farmhouse and I could
open the car doors. The emergence of Mies and the cocker was spectacular, as it
turned out that the latter had yielded most of his white coat in a soft
frosting over the black wool of that splendid overcoat, and we had nothing on
board with which to remove it.
We walked down the slope, through the frozen meadow grass
and dormant brush, and I worried for fear a European might be unable to see the
beauty of the mid-west countryside at so unfavorable a season; but midway down,
Mies stopped and looked all around him. “It is beautiful!” he said, and I
didn’t doubt the spontaneity of his exclamation.
This is the beginning of the tale as remembered by
Farnsworth, then in her seventies. Remarkably, we have Mies’s quite different
version of the same events, offered in 1952 as testimony in the action Van der
Rohe v. Farnsworth:
Question, to Mies: Will you state what your conversation was
with Dr. Farnsworth that evening?
Answer, by Mies: After dinner Dr. Farnsworth said that she
had a site in Plano, and she would like to talk with me about a house she had
planned there and then we were left alone and we talked about the site. She
told me she wanted to build a small house and asked me if I would be interested
in doing that. I said normally I don’t build small house but I would do it if
we could do something interesting.
Q: Did you explain what you meant by “interesting”?
A: No.
Mies added that he learned that before she met him,
Farnsworth had asked Chicago architect George Fred Keck to design the house.
Keck, said Mies, would undertake the project only on condition that he “can do
what he wants, and she didn’t seem to like that.”
Reprinted with permission from Mies van der Rohe: A Critical
Biography, New and Revised Edition, by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst,
published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of
Chicago. All rights reserved.
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My night in a ‘Glass House’..
By Grlfashionista / http://20somethingrl.wordpress.com/tag/harris-yulin/
Harris Yulin as Mies van der Rohe and Janet Zarish as Edith
Farnsworth
What a treat to witness acting at it’s finest in June
Finfer’s Glass House with leading lady Janet Zarish(Public Theatre, Primary Stages
appearances), who plays the self-sufficient Edith Farnsworth and it’s leading
man Harris Yulin, a prominent Broadway actor (Hedda Gabler, Julius Caesar) and
film star as Mies van der Rohe, a German architect. Directed masterfully by
Evan Bergman and appearing in conjunction with Henrik Ibsen’s The Master
Builder, Resonance Ensemble’s, The Glass House, tells the true story of a
German architect, Mies van der Rohe(1886-1969), and the opportunity he was
given to create a live-able work of art for Chicago Doctor Edith Farnswarth who
was in search of a weekend getaway.
Well, true in the fact that it is based on actual people, not
neccesarily events. That is writer June
Finfer took Mies and her other characters and created an emotionally driven
play chopped full of affairs, betrayals, and passionate 4th wall monologues
with Mies talking to the audience about his desire to create this skin and
bones glass house not only for Farnsworth, but for his own desire to create
something new, something with purpose. Taking
place over a ten year period(1945-1955), we see the developement of not only
the house, but of the relationship between Mies and Farnsworth, which comes to
a crashing halt in the last 20 minutes of the oddly blocked show. A play that not only forces you to question
what is art and its role in the modern world, but to what extent art can frame
the way in which an individual leads his/her own life.
The highlight of the evening, for me, as an actor, was
witnessing impecable and flawless acting by Zarish and Yulin. Yulin’s performance was perfection. Emotionally she connected bravely with her
high strung, indecisive Doctor and had I not known that I was watching a play I
would of thought that she was merely a stranger who had wandered off the
streets of midtown, found her way on to a stage and begun a conversation with
Yulin. Her naturalistic style is
refreshing and inspiring and it never falters at any point in time throughout
the play, but instead grows with every scene creating a living, breathing human
being that you expect, after the show ends, to go back to her lab or wherever
she came from and carry on with her life.
And I’m sure having Yulin as a support would make it even easier for
someone who is already as talented as Zarish to be able to create an even more
enriched performance. Yulin, I think,
has heard enough praise to know that he is one of immeasurable talent. I’m sure that many critics have commented on
the beauty and simplicity of his acting.
I would, of course, agree with their criticism as it is undeniable that
Yulin’s talent exist beyond the capacity of words. I can merely say that it was a joy to watch
him perform and a honor to sit in a theatre with someone of such seasoned
skill. Not to mention that his German
accent was dead on and he played perhaps the best grumpy old man I have ever
seen. Not that your old, Yulin. In regards to both Yulin and Zarish it was if
the audience didn’t exist and they were both carrying on with their lives,
playing off each other smoothly, creating tension, love, hate, co-existing and
growing within the ten years, and portraying how in real life, it all
ends. Quite simply, a magnificent work
of Art.
In all my awe and although, in general, I highly enjoyed
Glass House there were a couple of things that bothered me. Number 1, the sets. Now, it didn’t bother me
so much that between the succession of each year the lights dimmed, jazz music
played, and the set was changed, what bothered me was that the set moves
seemed, for lack of a better word, pointless.
With no more than maybe two chairs and a desk on stage, it seemed
distracting to me that stage hands, dressed smartly in the decades attire,
would come on to move a desk in a different position, change the utensils on a
table, or to take away every other scene the same table and chairs. Had it been done quicker it might not have
been much a nuisance, but I found myself concentrating on how long it would
take for the sets to be changed rather than what was going to happen next. With such a strong play that has so much to
say about art and life and with such strong point of view, why would you
distract by creating unnecessary obstacles such as moving the same desk 10
times? Less, as Mies would have seen it,
would have been more in this instance.
Number 2: The two minor actors. Gina Nagy Burns(Skylight, The Heiress), who
plays Mies’ ex-love Lora Marx, delivers a tolerable performance, but lacks the
fire that it acquired of her character.
As Meis’ artist lover, a sculptor, who takes it upon herself in the
earlier scenes to break her relationship with Mies due to his drinking and
dependency, I find that the character may have required someone with a more
powerful presence. Someone who could
stand up to Mies when he forcefully asked her why she was leaving. Someone that could center herself, stand her
ground, and deliver the well thought out text with powerful purpose and
zeal. Here it seems that when Meis and Marx are conversing, Mies seems to be having
one-sided conversations, and at points he leans in hard to distract from the
actresses not delivering her lines with intention. This may be because I am over critical or it could be because this actress may not
have fully understood who her character was and was not given good direction.
The second minor character, Philip Johnson, played by David
Bishins(We Declare You a Terrorist, Incident at Vichy), who is Mies’ protege
and a curator at the MOMA, actually delivered a commanding performance, but I
find, and this may be silly, that the voice he chose to use for his character
was distracting. It is a shame because
you can tell, from the audience, that Bishins is actually a very talented
actor, but he made a bad choice and that in some parts he falls out because he
is thinking more about his smoker voice rather than his beats. From the minute he opened his mouth at the
beginning of the play, I knew that it would be a problem. While I realize that the span of the plan takes
place in the 50′s and 60′s and that the cliché is the raspy, sexy voice of a
male cigar smoker, when you begin to lose the actor’s words, therefor the text,
therefore the play, it becomes a problem.
And besides this forced, if I
think about it makes my throat hurt, raspy voice, his performance was actually
delightful, light, airy, and an almost comic relief from the sometimes heavy
tension that lived between the three other characters. Charming and snub at times, Bishins played a
convincing role of student and what it is not only to please your teacher, but
to find out that at some point you have to live your own life. What an interesting lesson for Art to teach.
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