Must-Know Modern Homes: Edith Farnsworth House

Edith Farnsworth House at a Glance
Year built: 1951
Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Location: Plano, Illinois
Visiting info: Individual and group tours available
Size: 1,500 square feet

Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House are very similar, but their small differences are dramatic. Each is a glass box with an open plan of roughly the same size on a large estate for an individual, but Johnson’s house sits directly on the land, while Mies’ house for Edith Farnsworth is raised above it. The Glass House blurs the distinction between structure and glass framing, while the Farnsworth House clearly expresses the structure. And of course one is painted black and one is white.

Johnson may have completed the Glass House in 1949, two years before Farnsworth House was built, but having seen a model of Mies’ design at MoMA in 1947, he was clearly indebted to Mies. While the two houses are strongly linked formally, for Mies the house is part of a larger idea about universal space that he had been exploring for decades and that would find much grander fruition in a number of office and residential towers in the 1950s. In this sense the Farnsworth House is an incredibly important house for the architect, a small-scale experiment in his ideas. Things were not as great for the client, as we’ll see, but the view of the house as a masterpiece of a modern architect has prevailed to this day.

Farnsworth and Mies met at a dinner party held by mutual friends in November 1945. Farnsworth knew of his buildings and asked him to design a weekend retreat for her on 9 acres she owned in Plano, about 40 miles west of Chicago. Mies agreed to do the project that evening.

Accounts of their meeting and subsequent working relationship indicate that Farnsworth respected Mies’s creativity and gave him a lot of leeway with the design. She liked the idea that her house could serve as a prototype for a new American architecture.

The weekend house sits on the banks of the Fox River, on land that would eventually mushroom to 62 acres from the initial 9. The house sits within the flood plane, so Mies lifted it about 5 feet above the level of the river. He also positioned the rectangular box parallel to the river, to take advantage of the views to the south and to the clearing in the north.

The house is composed of three horizontal planes: the floor of the house and porch, the roof, and the lower porch. The house and adjacent porch occupy a 28- by 77-foot rectangle, while the lower porch is 22 by 55 feet, roughly the same size as the enclosed portion of the house.

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The two porches lend the otherwise regular house some asymmetry. They also ensure that people visiting the house approach it in a certain manner, walking from the east and then seeing the house frontally from the south and then up the steps.

In contrast, the north side of the house is so regular that it borders on uninteresting. Nevertheless one detail (and remember, Mies is known for saying "God is in the details") that comes across well in this view is the way the floor and ceiling extend past the columns.

This photo, of the view toward Fox River from the porch, illustrates how Mies accentuated the landscape as an image through the parallel planes of floor and ceiling. We can also see the roughly 2-foot-square grid on which he based the plan; every piece lines up with the grid.

What we don't see are the screens Farnsworth had installed after she moved in. These and a wardrobe inside were taken care of by Mies' employees, but the architect and client were not communicating at the time. He sued Farnsworth for nonpayment, and she countersued, saying the house was unlivable. The courts sided with Mies on both lawsuits, but the whole undertaking scarred him so much that he never pursued another residential commission.

The house's entry is between the dining room and office within the open space. Beyond is a piece of millwork that extends form the floor to the ceiling; within are two bathrooms, the kitchen cabinets, a fireplace and a mechanical core. In front of the millwork is the living area, seen here. In the background is the wardrobe that Farnsworth had made after moving in; to its side is the sleeping area.

Mies believed that a house with large expanses of glass would connect people to nature in a more profound way than smaller windows, or even being outside. Appreciating nature as an image was therefore just as important as being within it. A house in nature, such as the Farnsworth House, then provided the ideal condition for this appreciation.

Even though the lawsuits brought the relationship of client and architect to a bitter close, Farnsworth used the house for more than 20 years. Peter Palumbo bought the house and property in 1972; he removed the screens, added air conditioning and made extensive changes to the larger grounds. He also opened up the house for visits when he wasn't in town.


In 2003 he put the house up for auction. Preservationists and the National Trust for Historic Preservation worked together so the NTHP could purchase the house and operate it as a house museum, like Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Two higher-than-average floods in the past 20 years sent the Fox River's waters well above the floor level. In 1996 the house underwent restoration after the waters peaked 5 feet above the floor, and in 2008 waters rising 18 inches above the floor required some less extensive repairs. Rising waters are again threatening the house this year, but the NTHP had learned from the previous floods and enacted emergency measures to protect the interior.