“The house is a house, but it is also a metaphor; it has been described as a quantity of air trapped between floor and roof, … as a glass cage, and as a poem.” That’s how Nora Wendl begins her new book about Edith Farnsworth. And if you have visited the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, you may well agree it is all those things.
Wendl, an associate professor of architecture and planning, decided to explore the messy details of how Edith Farnsworth, a Chicago physician, came to commission and own the famous house 60 miles west of Chicago. The glass house built near the Fox River is one of the more famous designs by architecture giant Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus architect who fled to the US from Nazi Germany and made his home in Chicago.
Those messy details have always included a purported romantic and/or sexual relationship between Mies and Farnsworth. Wendl’s charter for herself in her new book—Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth—was to research deeply into Farnsworth’s life to either disprove (preferably) or prove whether their relationship was ever more than client/architect. The book is Wendl’s attempt to reverse the sex and real estate myths surrounding the Farnsworth House.
The development of the Farnsworth House began in 1945 and continued until 1951, when the owner moved in. The client/architect relationship definitely became stormy as they sued each other for various claims, his including nonpayment of fees, hers a countersuit for fraud since the roof leaked and flooded the house. There was no formal signed contract between architect and client, which was fatal for Mies’ lawsuit.
I will refer to the client as Edith and the architect as Mies (as he is commonly known) in this review, as Wendl refers to them in her book.
Wendl’s book, written over a 10-year period, is a peculiar mixture of scholarly research on Edith and Wendl’s own memoir of trying to make a living and succeed as an academic. Wendl draws from Edith’s papers, journals, collected poems, photographs and her memoir from the resources at the Newberry Library, at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute, where she photographed every page of Edith’s journal, poems and memoir, and at Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, where she collected every book that referenced Edith. She also describes sitting in a unit at one of the Mies-designed towers on Lake Shore Drive and reviewing the 4,000-page trial transcript.
We follow Wendl’s road trips as she researches the book, applies for and works in different jobs, and we even observe her own personal relationships and foibles. It is indeed a work of highly “creative nonfiction,” as the University of Illinois Press describes it.
Wendl’s title, Almost Nothing (beinahe nichts) was Mies’ concept for Edith’s house, his first glass structure in the US. Walls were pure glass, unencumbered by panes or bricks, until Edith hung draperies around all the window walls to preserve her privacy from curious visitors. And with the Farnsworth house as an inspiration, Mies designed glass towers, many of them Chicago landmarks, such as the IBM Building, 860–880 and 900–910 North Lake Shore Drive, 2400 North Lakeview Ave., and of course, the Federal Center, which fills the block bounded by Dearborn and Clark, Jackson and Adams. He also designed 20 buildings at IIT, where he became director of the department of architecture in 1938.
One could say that the one-story Chicago Federal Plaza United States Post Office building on the federal site is indebted to the Farnsworth House for its design. Most of the other buildings are high rises, with the magnificent exception of IIT’s Crown Hall. Mies designed two other homes in the US. One is the McCormick House, designed in 1952, now on the campus of the Elmhurst Art Museum. The Morris Greenwald house in Weston, Conn., built in 1963, is a private home.
Edith Farnsworth was a cosmopolitan woman, a Chicago physician and nephrologist who specialized in kidney diseases; she developed a cure for nephritis, a condition that once was fatal. She spent most of her medical career at Passavant Hospital, which merged with another Chicago hospital to became Northwestern Memorial Hospital in 1972. She was also a poet and violinist who studied music in Italy in the 1920s and lived and traveled in Europe.
Edith planned her house in Plano as a weekend country retreat. She paid today’s equivalent of $1 million dollars for what is essentially a one-room house, an open space with a central core for kitchen, bath and storage. (See the floor plan here.) Edith spent her first night in the house on December 31, 1950; she moved out in 1969. She lived in Europe for a few years and died in 1977 at age 74; her ashes are buried in Graceland Cemetery.
Wendl alternates quotes from Edith’s writings and the house’s history with descriptions of her own life, long hours of research in Chicago, where she couch-surfed or rented a room in someone’s apartment, and her academic life and struggle to get tenure. She joined the architecture faculty of the University of New Mexico and moved to Albuquerque in 2016. She tells the story of being accused of sexual harassment by a student in one of her classes at another school. In the departmental investigation that follows, he accuses her of making eye contact with him and wearing feminine apparel. The charge is dropped.
Wendl mentions names of some men that Edith might have had affairs with—and also suggests possible lesbian activities, describing warm friendships and vacations with small groups of women in the 1920s and her special friendship with one of them.
Describing Edith’s relationship with Mies, Wendl notes that one of the reasons rumors might have begun about a romantic relationship between client and architect was that the house took so long to build. Edith first asked Mies to build a house for her in 1945, and work did not begin until 1949.
“The house is a house, but it is also a metaphor ...."
—Nora Wendl
Edith was often portrayed as an angry spurned woman in works such as a rarely produced play by a Chicago playwright and a never-produced screenplay (in the works as late as 2019), as well as in the Mies biography published in 1985 by Chicago art critic and scholar Franz Schulze. Wendl criticizes Schulze’s work for its emphasis on the love affair, including noting that Edith was vengeful, “in love with the architect, hired hm from obsession, and then sued him out of rage after he moved on romantically.” Schulze describes Edith as “no beauty, equine in feature,” and “six feet tall and ungainly of carriage.” When she meets with Schulze and queries him on his emphasis on the romance, his response is, “Every writer needs a story.”
In 1972, Peter Palumbo, a British developer, art collector, and architecture connoisseur, purchased the house and hired the firm of Dirk Lohan, Mies’ grandson, to restore it to its 1951 condition. The house was refurnished then (turning it into a Mies museum) with European-style modernist furniture, which Wendl describes as “made of steel and taut leather, the kind of furniture that repels human flesh, and has to be sourced from museums and collectors ….”
Edith's original furnishings, while definitely modern, were more comfortable. A 2020–21 exhibit dedicated to the house's original owner—titled Edith Farnsworth Reconsidered—refurnished the house with reproductions of Edith's furnishisngs from period photographs, including her books, her violin, and Olivetti typewriter. Nora Wendl was co-curator of the exhibit.
Palumbo opened the house and property to limited public tours. I toured it with my architecture-docent friends in 2002. In 2003, he sold the house at auction to the Friends of the Edith Farnsworth House, a group of donors who bought the property for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which now owns and operates it as a house museum along with Landmarks Illinois. It is open to the public and available for private events. The site opened for public tours in 2004.
I strongly recommend touring the house in person, but if you can’t, here's an excellent photographic tour of the house and its floor plan.
Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth is available from 3 Fields Books, an imprint of the University of Illinois Press, or from your favorite bookseller.
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