The Iconic Glass House Built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—and the Lawsuit That Cast a Shadow Over It

It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first own­er turned out to have more than a few stones for its archi­tect: Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, the last direc­tor of the Bauhaus, who’d immi­grat­ed from Nazi Ger­many to the Unit­ed States in the late nine­teen-thir­ties. It was at a din­ner par­ty in 1945 that he hap­pened to meet the for­ward-think­ing Chica­go doc­tor Edith Farnsworth, who expressed an inter­est in build­ing a whol­ly mod­ern retreat well out­side the city. Asked if one of his appren­tices could do the job, Mies offered to take it on him­self.

The task, as Mies con­ceived of archi­tec­ture in his time, was to build for an era in which high and rapid­ly advanc­ing indus­tri­al tech­nol­o­gy was becom­ing unavoid­able in ordi­nary lives. Such lives, prop­er­ly lived, would require new frames, and thor­ough­ly con­sid­ered ones at that. The shape ulti­mate­ly tak­en by the Farnsworth House is one such frame: order­ly, and to a degree that could be called extreme, while on anoth­er lev­el max­i­mal­ly per­mis­sive of human free­dom.

That was, in any case, the idea: in phys­i­cal real­i­ty, Farnsworth her­self had a long list of prac­ti­cal com­plaints about what she began to call “my Mies-con­cep­tion,” not least to do with its attrac­tion of insects and green­house-like heat reten­tion (uncom­pen­sat­ed for, in true Euro­pean style, by air con­di­tion­ing).

Chron­i­clers of the Farnsworth House saga tend to men­tion that the cen­tral rela­tion­ship appears to have exceed­ed that of archi­tect and client, at least for a time. But what­ev­er affec­tion had once exist­ed between them had sure­ly evap­o­rat­ed by the time they were suing each oth­er toward the end of con­struc­tion, with Mies alleg­ing non-pay­ment and Farnsworth alleg­ing mal­prac­tice. In the event, Farnsworth lost in court and used the house as a week­end retreat for a cou­ple of decades before sell­ing it to the British devel­op­er and archi­tec­tur­al enthu­si­ast Peter Palum­bo, who espe­cial­ly enjoyed its ambi­ence dur­ing thun­der­storms. Today it oper­ates as a muse­um, as explained by its exec­u­tive direc­tor Scott Mahaf­fey in the new Open Space video above. Hear­ing about all the tur­moil behind the Farnsworth House­’s con­cep­tion, the atten­dees of its tours might find them­selves think­ing that hell hath no fury like a client scorned.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Quick Ani­mat­ed Tour of Icon­ic Mod­ernist Hous­es

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

How a 1930s Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­piece Har­ness­es the Sun to Keep Warm in the Win­ter & Cool in the Sum­mer

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.