How many lives can a building like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe‘s Farnsworth House live in the seventy years since its completion, within a relatively short period for the times of architecture? The number is at least equal to that of its owners, Michelangelo Sabatino explains to us in the engaging story in words and images carried out in a book largely conceived and written by him, but which also includes contributions from other connoisseurs of American Modernism, landscape architects, and rare first-hand testimonies: The Edith Farnsworth House Architecture, Preservation, Culture (Monacelli/Phaidon, New York, pp. 256, euro 64.95).
The answer may seem trivial; it is not at all, however, if we consider that the work in question is among the most iconic of rationalism, if not of the entire twentieth century: an architectural object fixed by its designer in the very controlled forms of an idealist minimalism, ruthlessly indifferent to the needs housing, rather reduced to an immutable Cartesian composition of stone platforms, steel beams and glass walls, suspended in the intact nature of Plano, Illinois. «It’s almost nothing», Mies would have said, with equal poignancy of the word.
This mental Farnsworth House is the image that immediately stands out in the abundant publications, the result in turn of immediate, almost obsessive attention on the part of professionals, architecture students and enthusiasts: since the exhibition at the MoMA in 1947 , with which the last director of the Bauhaus, who moved to the IIT of Chicago, is indicated as the guide of the new season of American modernism. At that moment the project, commissioned two years earlier, was little more than an idea, far from being put into practice, but already summarized by the model displayed there with the three parallel stripes of the ceiling, floor and terrace, and the four pairs of pillars welded along the edges (a stringent relationship between construction aspects and formal principles explored in depth by Dietrich Neumann’s essay); not even the few treads of the stairs are present, as evidenced by the very detailed iconographic documentation of the volume.
It is these fundamental signs, of immaculate orthogonals that frame the glass box of the house, that systematically recur in the shots of authors such as Blessing, Sugimoto and Leibovitz, and subsequently as the background of the performances of Abloh and Manglano-Ovalle, or even of advertising campaigns like Edwin’s from the early 2000s.
Edith Farnsworth
All these appropriations are summarized in the photographic chapter entitled Lives, 1972-2024extended up to the present day, that is to say the twenty years in which the building became part of the architectural heritage managed by the National Trust. The volume, however, aims precisely to fill the “significant gap between representation and reality”, between this sort of parallel life of the project, reduced to pure visual invention, and the material history of what was originally a holiday home of modest, with an almost agrarian connotation, designed according to the river landscape that surrounds it.
This is the meaning of the other chapter that completes the biography of the building in images, Groundwork, 1945-1972, in which it is possible to follow from season to season, sometimes from month to month, the choice of the site, the construction site, the difficult to adapt the building to the arrival of its first tenant, Edith Farnsworth, with her dogs, the guests selected but often present, not least thanks to a careful narrative editing of the captions.
Returning credit for the creation of the Edith Farnsworth House – which, not by chance, in 2021 formally acquired the full name of its client in its title – to such an extraordinary woman, among the first to emerge in the world of medical research in Chicago, then a translator trusted by authors such as Montale and Quasimodo in the last part of his life, it is undoubtedly a merit of this publication. Not only thanks to the inclusion of the very fresh snapshots taken during stays in the company of friends, and to say, the very personal taste that emerges from them, in the combination of common furnishings for the American upper middle class with updated design pieces, all carefully identified in the volume; but above all through the transcription of Edith’s unpublished memories, written – in Pigna notebooks – during the Italian years.
From this reading, first of all, we reconstruct the weight of his intuitions for the developments of the project: for example, the role assigned in the composition to the large tree that originally curved over the steel and glass box, protagonist of the page that recalls the first inspection, in the company of Sue, the wife of a young colleague: “I think we both dreamed that night in the shade of the black maple.”
Indeed, the receptivity towards the wild beauty of this piece of Illinois (studied in the book by Ron Henderson) is the point of greatest proximity to Mies, who a few years later, in dialogue with one of the most original voices of twentieth-century architecture criticism as Norberg-Schulz, in turn, declared: «observing nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper meaning». The report then contains very vivid details that highlight the ruthless and, at the same time, visionarily spiritual personality of the architect, such as the long oracular silence that precedes, in an evening at the home of mutual friends, the decision to accept the assignment; or his monumental coat whitened by Edith’s cocker hair, during a car trip to Plano. But one is equally struck by the comments that become progressively harsher, even caricatural, as financial and construction complications, and then the daily problems of using the house, compromise the relationship, up until the well-known legal case that will transform the Farnsworth House – ironically called in the diaries «my Miesconception» – in a journalistic case, and Edith as the victim of insolent visitors, equipped with cameras.
The exceptional events of the building continue to be told in the volume, describing the decades following the decision by the first owner to get rid of it, with the sale to Lord Peter and Lady Hayat Palumbo: cultured real estate developers and true collectors of architecture, that is of homes designed, also, by Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier. Interviewed in pages that offer the most effective counterpoint to the harshness of Farnsworth’s diaries, their voice is that of authentic Mies enthusiasts, who devotedly restore the house assisted by his nephew, Dirk Lohan, for example remedying the damage caused by repeated floods of the Fox River, which the property overlooks; but also, they transform those acres of land into a monumental contemporary sculpture garden carefully designed by Lanning Roper, as a stage for the jet-set of international patronage. Ultimately, for Palumbo, the house is a piece of architecture that already belongs to the myth – “like a contemporary version of the temple of Paestum”, he confesses. Therefore it does not resist its avant-garde characteristics; only unconditional veneration, laying the foundations for that debate on the restoration of the Modern of which the recovery and conservation of Farnsworth House will become, in fact, an essential chapter.
