A Little House in the Country

The Farnsworth House

By Donald von Fennig Wrobleski

The Chicago Literary Club

February 23, 2009

Printed in the United States of America

A Little House in the Country

A cautious second title might be, "Be careful what you wish for, for you might get it,"

What city dweller alone on a Sunday afternoon, listening to classical music on the radio, looking out at the dull clouds over Lake Michigan, becoming more bored as the day moves slowly on, hasn’t thought of how nice it would be to have a little house in the country? Just a small house big enough for a few friends to visit on weekends, not at Lake Geneva where the family had always gone, but a house built and lived in to enjoy the calm of the country and greenery with beautiful trees and a view of some quiet water only a little more than an hour’s drive outside the city.

Well let’s see what we can do. I think it should be good. Maybe hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design it. An aunt left an inheritance in the money equivalent of four Chicago bungalows. The seven acre site on the Fox River, with an old farmhouse on it, owned by Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the "Chicago Tribune", was available.

Thus in 1945 a 41 year old spinster, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, set out on her quest. Edith Farnsworth was a woman of exceptional learning and intelligence; she was steadily informed about artistic as well as scientific matters. Part of her Asian Art collection is now part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute. She was nationally known for her specialty in deceases of the kidney. Dr. Farnsworth had studied to be a concert violinist. Learning that she was only good, not great, she studied and became a nephrology specialist at Passavant Hospital.

One of Edith’s interests was, "The New Bauhaus", a school founded in 1937 by Lazlo Maholy-Nagy in Chicago to continue the teachings of German Bauhaus. The Bauhaus 1918 to 1933 remains the most important art and architectural influence of the past 20^th century. The Chicago school although supported by several Chicago industrialists had financial problems and reemerged as "The Institute of Design" and later a part of IIT. The "New Bauhaus" had many great parties (I can attest to this, as a night-time student, they are among my best memories.) Dr. Farnsworth would attend along with students and faculty. She met the tall, handsome, Swiss Painting and Sculpture instructor, Hugo Weber. She talked of the house she was going to build. Weber thought she should seek out the new, not the old. He may have been one of those who suggested she hire Mies van der Rohe. She may have felt the post WW II optimism for the new.

Later in 1950 Weber wrote: "Mies has become the conscience of the Chicago school. He is fulfilling Sullivan’s heritage by demonstrating the obvious direct. Frank Lloyd Wright has taken over the romantic leanings of his teacher, Sullivan which is noticeable in the ornamental decoration even in his most clear cut buildings, and he has intensified them into the subjective creations of his late period. Mies’s attitude points toward the future, in particular through his ability to subordinate space and formal imagination to the essential principles. Thus he paves the way for anonymous building which will enable sensible solutions of modern problems to be achieved and provide a sound basis for the development of really new technical and esthetic contributions to architecture" Weber also wrote,” Mies thinks that he would probably have built in the same manner anywhere had he not gone to Chicago."

So it was arranged in late 1945 for Edith and Mies to meet at a dinner party on Chicago’s North side. Mies said almost nothing. She thought that Mies didn’t speak English. Finally she asked Mies if someone in his office would design her new house. Mies said, "I will design your house"

In 1930 Mies had built the Tugendhat villa in Brno, the old capital of Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. The 3500 square foot living room is still the finest modernist domestic space in Europe. It is divided into living, dining, library, study and card playing spaces by a translucent onyx wall and curved ebony walls with free standing chromium clad columns, and enclosed by 130 feet of full height glass walls. But this was only the public space. The bedrooms and service area were conventionally enclosed. Mies did many projects in Europe in the 30’s, when there was little actual work, for houses where the public and private areas would flow together divided only by free standing walls and cabinets. None of these were built. Here was the chance to build his ideas for a glass enclosed, flowing space divided only by free standing cabinets and a core for baths and mechanicals. A weekend house for a single person would be the perfect place to create his ideas for an intelligent, sophisticated woman of fairly ample means.

Planning begun in1946 and Edith was an enthusiastic client and appreciated the potentially historic significance of the project. She and Mies exchange books on Philosophy. They became close friends. They picnicked on the site by the river. In 1947 the model of the Fox river house was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to much acclaim. Edith Farnsworth was going to have one of the most important houses built after the Second World War

Be careful what you wish for, for you might get it.

Construction had to wait until 1949 when scarce building materials became available. Mies wanted everything to be perfect. He picked each slab of travertine marble for the floors and terraces. He had the steel frame sandblasted after erection to cover any marks left by grinding the welds at the connections. Costs begun to rise but inflation was also making the original four bungalow budget rise to seven Chicago bungalows. Edith was told she was being taken by an ambitious, egotistic architect. She refused to pay her last architect’s billing for the office staff. Mies had supplied his services at no cost. Mies sued Edith, Edith counter sued. Mies won but they both lost. Some said that Edith thought the architect came with the house. Mies never accepted a residential commission again.

A less than happy Edith Farnsworth moved into her now famous house. In the morning she would come out of the bathroom in her robe to find uninvited Japanese tourists looking in not at her but at the house. Students would rent boats and row over to her house. Devoted students and professionals would hop over the gates when they thought she wasn’t there. It was known that the site chosen, next to the river, flooded. The floor was built six feet above the ground or two feet above the highest known flooding. The house flooded a few times ruining the silk curtains and furnishing. Except for planting wild-flowers, almost no landscaping was done. The road used for construction was left and not moved to a more appropriate location. Edith Farnsworth lived in her internationally famous house for almost twenty years. She retired and sold the house to an English Lord and moved to a villa above Florence, Italy where we all hope she found peace at last. Edith Farnsworth died in 1977 at the age of 74.

Peter Palumbo, a successful real estate developer in London, had studied photos of the Farnsworth house while a school boy at Eaton. In 1962 he commissioned Mies to design a major office building for his development at Mansion Square in London. While in Chicago to discuss the London project he heard the Farnsworth house was for sale. He became the second owner in 1971 and commissioned Mies’s grandson, Dirk Lohan to restore and furnish the house, and Lanning Roper an American living in England to landscape the site now grown from seven acres to 62.acres. Peter Palumbo became a collector of great modernist homes by three of the most important architects of the past 20^th century. He also owns the 1954 Kentuk Knob home by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania near Wright’s famous, Fallingwater. In Paris he owned the 1956 Maisons Jaoul by Le Corbusier.

In 2003 Palumbo was forced to sell the Farnsworth house by his adult children who claimed he was dissipating their inheritance. The State of Illinois agreed to buy the house as a public historic site and operate it. Unfortunately Lisa Madigan refused to put the sale though because the appropriation included only funds to buy the house and did not include funds to run the historic site. Palumbo put the house up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The Committee to Save the Farnsworth House raised funds to bid. When the bidding reached $7,000,000 John Bryant, of Sara Lee, who headed the committee told Richard Gray, the Art dealer who was handling the bidding for the Committee to stop because they were out of funds. Richard Gray bid $7,200,000, including $200,000 of his own funds and the house was saved for the public instead of a rumored plan to disassemble the house and move it to Long Island to use as a pool house.

Today the Farnsworth House is owned by the National Trust and run by Landmarks Illinois. Interestingly 10% of the visitors come from the Chicago area. 40% come from other parts of the United States and 50% come from foreign countries including many from the Far East. The House will reopen April first after the clean up from last October’s flood which left 18 inches of water in the house on the Saturday after my Friday visit.

Many solutions have been offered to mitigate the flooding. The most logical is to raise the house two and one half feet and fill in the ground around it to the same two and a half feet. With tree wells around the trees the house would present almost the same setting as it originally did. Unfortunately the Department of Natural Resources will not allow this because it would lessen the flood plain of the Fox river by 2 ½ feet by about an acre..

So why is this simple one room weekend cottage so important? When left alone inside I have found it possible to get a connection to the spiritual as strong as I have felt anywhere else. Nature and architecture are indelibly fused in the way that the highest reaches of architecture have always sought.

Sitting on the Farnsworth terrace, a couple of years ago, on a great summer day, watching a play "The Glass House” by June Finfer about the troubles of Mies’s and Edith’s relationship, I looked around and thought, "Perhaps it was all worth it."