The Farnsworth House, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist masterpiece in Chicago’s far southwest suburbs, needs no introduction. As graceful as a Greek temple and as serene as a Shinto shrine, the single-room house seems to float over a meadow alongside the Fox River — one of the purest and most poetic distillations of the International Style.
But what about Dr. Edith Farnsworth, who paid for the house, lived in it and lost a bitter legal battle with Mies over cost overruns and architect’s fees? Who, exactly, was she?
A daring and fascinating new exhibition, “Edith Farnsworth’s Country House,” does more than flesh out the impressive resume of this overlooked figure, who grew up on Chicago’s Gold Coast and became a leading kidney doctor and translator of Italian poetry. The show restores her presence to the house that bears her name, but where for years she was all but absent.
The exhibition performs this trick by dispatching to the warehouse the home’s coolly elegant, metal-framed Miesian furniture, including the architect’s signature Barcelona, Brno and MR chairs. In their place are replicas of pieces that Farnsworth herself chose, like a lovely wood and metal dining room table by the American designer Florence Knoll. Moroccan wool carpets are laid out on the travertine marble floor, along with potted plants.
We also see objects that represent Farnsworth, from a black leather doctor’s bag to bathroom towels with her monogram “EBF” (the “B” stood for “Brooks”) to a bottle of the sweet Vermouth she sipped each afternoon.
For anyone who’s been to the Farnsworth House before, this transformation is likely to elicit a pleasing shock: The interior seems warmer, more in tune with nature and, above all, more livable — in short, more influenced by the humane Scandinavian modernism of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto than the hard-edged, German American counterpart personified by Mies.
To frame matters in terms of gender rather than style, this is her house, not his — the closest we’ve ever come to seeing the Farnsworth House as its namesake lived in it, not as Mies would have furnished it.
There’s a bigger issue here than Farnsworth and Mies. For as long as architects have wielded drafting tools, the designers of houses, almost always men, and their clients — in this case, an accomplished woman who was anything but a typical postwar housewife — have battled for control of the interior.
When Frank Lloyd Wright stayed overnight at houses he’d designed, he was known to rearrange furniture to his liking while his clients slept. Wright even designed dresses for female clients so their outfits would not clash with a home he conceived as a total work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk, as the Germans call it.
Not surprisingly, this controlling impulse has generated blowback, as it did one day in the early 1950s when one of Mies’ associates telephoned Farnsworth to inform her that the furniture the architect had chosen for her home, including two Barcelona chairs, was about to be delivered.
The essence of her reply: She hadn’t ordered the furniture and had no intention of using it.
“The fact is that Mies has no taste and if you stop to think about it, that is not surprising,” she said in an exchange with English architect recounted in the well-told, deeply researched new book, “Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece,” by Alex Beam.
“I would hate to be forced to break with him, but I would never consent to his ideas on furnishing,” Farnsworth said. “One’s house is almost as personal as one’s skin. I don’t see how he could seriously think that I would go with him beyond the erection of the house itself.”
Beam’s pro-Farnsworth sympathies pervade the exhibition, which was curated by Scott Mehaffey, the Farnsworth House’s executive director, and was scheduled to open in late March but was postponed because of the coronavirus. During the delay, floodwaters threatened the house, which is located in Plano, about 60 miles southwest of the Loop. It was not damaged, due to the stiltlike steel columns that lift it above the ground.
Titled “Edith Farnsworth’s Country House” and part of a larger reexamination of Farnsworth’s role that will be on display at the house and its visitors’ complex through December 2021, the exhibit also was shaped by veteran Chicago interior designer Robert Kleinschmidt and Nora Wendl, who teaches architecture at the University of New Mexico and is an expert on Edith Farnsworth. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has owned the home since 2003 and runs it has as a house museum, deserves credit for cooperating with this provocative endeavor.
To be sure, the show presents an idealized picture of what was, at first, a weekend retreat. Based on historic photographs and Farnsworth’s writings, the exhibit recreates the house as it looked in 1955, just four years after it opened — not in the 1960s, when Farnsworth was living in it regularly and the house became a cluttered mess.
There are no mounds of dirty dishes in the sink, no piles of magazines and newspapers, and no dog vomit from Farnsworth’s poodle — all of which visitors recounted seeing. Also absent is the ungainly screen Farnsworth had installed on the house’s upper terrace to keep away voracious mosquitoes. On the lower terrace, however, are smaller versions of the stone Chinese lion statues (the so-called foo dogs) that Farnsworth placed there in a comically bad departure from Mies’ less-is-more abstraction.
Yet even if the reconstituted house is a little too precious, like a furniture showroom, it has the virtue of putting Farnsworth back into the picture.
She pretty much disappeared after she sold the house to British real estate developer (and now Baron) Peter Palumbo in 1972. Palumbo and Mies’ grandson, Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, lovingly and meticulously restored the house’s exterior and turned its interior into a kind of Mies museum, complete with the décor the architect would have preferred. While that treatment was true to Mies’ idea of the house, it perpetuated a false impression by erasing Farnsworth’s presence, although introductory material in the visitor center always included her.
In the exhibit’s telling, Farnsworth isn’t the sad figure who, as the Mies crowd put it, thought the architect came with the house (for a time, the two were close friends and may have been romantically involved). She emerges as formidable rather than pitiful — first because she hired Mies to design the house, and then because she defied him in furnishing its interior.
As Beam’s book recounts, Farnsworth had help from her friend Kitty Baldwin Weese, the wife of Chicago architect Harry Weese and the co-founder of the influential Baldwin Kingrey design store in Chicago. The store championed furniture and housewares designed by such renowned figures of postwar modernism as Knoll and Aalto.
Indeed, after visitors enter the house and are greeted by a replica of Farnsworth’s 17th century violin, they see the Knoll dining table to the left and to the right, a small circular Aalto table, on top of which are binoculars and a guide to bird-watching by American ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson.
Throughout the exhibition, Farnsworth’s presence is palpable. So is the underlying tension between architect and client, especially in the show’s frank depiction of Farnsworth’s revolt against Mies’ allotment and placement of closet space.
Originally, Mehaffey told me, the architect gave Farnsworth a tiny closet in the house’s galley kitchen. Yet she wanted more room and didn’t want food smells to ruin her clothes, so she secretly got a Mies associate to design a tall wood wardrobe that was placed just off the house’s living area. The wardrobe provided the needed storage space and created a roomlike writing nook, furnished with a sleekly modern desk and an Olivetti typewriter. The wardrobe violated the openness of Mies’ interior, a victory of function over form.
The exposure of such tensions is among the show’s strengths. There would be no Farnsworth House without Mies’ singular talents, of course, yet the house also could not have come into existence without the probing mind and innovative spirit of Farnsworth.
Great architecture is impossible without great clients, even when the relationship between architect and client devolves into bitterness, as it did here. It is fitting that this exhibition brings Farnsworth fully back into the house’s story and, in the process, explores the always-fraught relationship between architect and client, art and habitation, transcendent idea and everyday reality.
“Edith Farnsworth’s Country House” runs through December 2021 at the Farnsworth House, 14520 River Road in Plano. Guided tours cost $20 per person; tours are limited to 10 people, plus guide. For $10, visitors can explore the house’s nearly 60-acre grounds and the Farnsworth House from the outside. The exhibit is part of “Edith Farnsworth Reconsidered,” which includes small exhibits about Farnsworth’s life and the restoration of the house by later owner Peter Palumbo at the house’s visitor center complex. For details, go to farnsworthhouse.org or call (630) 552-0052.
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
