Minimalist house is full of conflicted history between the owner and architect
By Glenda Winders // Photography by Phil Allen
The Midwest is a treasure-trove of architectural masterpieces and perhaps none are more significant than the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. The house is a National Historic Landmark, and even the land by the Fox River where it stands has an impressive pedigree.
To begin there, the nine acres Farnsworth purchased in 1945 had once been home to several Native American tribes, and Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet explored the area during their 1673 expedition. In 1832, however, the Black Hawk War between European settlers and several Indigenous tribes ended with the Natives being sent to reservations and the new Americans taking possession of their land. Eventually this parcel came to be owned by Robert McCormick, longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and it was from him that Farnsworth made the purchase.
She was a nephrologist whose discovery of a successful treatment for the kidney disease, nephritis, brought her national attention in 1949. She was also a poet and translator who spoke Italian, French and German. As her life became busier and increasingly stressful, Farnsworth sought a weekend getaway from her work in Chicago where she could study, think, write and enjoy being in nature.
Also in 1945, Farnsworth met the acclaimed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at a dinner party, and the two became friends. “Mies” as he is commonly known, was an academic and interior designer who was the last director of Germany’s Bauhaus, a ground-breaking institution in the world of modernism. Once in the United States, he became the head of the architecture school at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is also credited with coining the phrase “less is more.”
Farnsworth invited her new friend to visit the property she had purchased in hopes of engaging him to design a house for her. He immediately fell in love with the landscape, and because of the privacy it afforded, he proposed building a house of steel and glass in the functional and utilitarian International style.
The 1,500-square-foot home he created literally consists of those two materials and travertine floors. The living space flows around a central core that delineates the uses of the different areas. On one side are the cupboards, sink and range that mark the kitchen. On the core’s other side is a fireplace that anchors the living and dining areas. At one end is the bedroom, and there are bathrooms at either end, as well. A generous deck provides outdoor living space.
Mies was a minimalist who was reticent to include anything in the plan that he deemed unnecessary. When Farnsworth asked for a closet in her bedroom, he told her that since it was a weekend home, she could just live out of her suitcase. However, he reluctantly agreed to do so and created a freestanding wardrobe in the middle of the room.
The period of construction seems to have been a heady time, with Farnsworth and Mies driving out from Chicago on weekends and hosting picnics for their friends — often other architects, designers and artists — at the construction site. When the house was finished, such prominent interior designers as Florence Knoll and Kitty Baldwin Weese helped select the modernist pieces that would complete the home.
But problems arose. Mies, who had his own ideas about furniture, manufactured a table and chairs for Farnsworth in a finish she didn’t like. He wanted wood; she wanted upholstery. When she realized the all-glass house with which Mies was enamored made her feel vulnerable when the lights were on in the evenings, she wanted drapes. She asked for a warm brown fabric; he wanted silk. She was also unhappy that there was only one way to get in and out.
Other issues also arose. The house was chilly in the winter, and in summer the evening lights attracted bugs. It was built on stilts, partly because it was constructed in a flood plain just 100 feet from the river and partly to create a feeling of being able to float in nature. But in 1954, just three years after Farnsworth began living there, a flood rose to a height of four feet inside the house. The structure itself was hardly damaged but the interior furniture and drapes were ruined.
By that time, she and Mies were embroiled in a whole other level of disagreement. Mies had estimated that the cost of building would be about $40,000, but the actual total came in at more than $70,000. Part of the reason was that the house was had been constructed in segments, as money became available. Another reason for the unexpected cost was that Mies had not figured his own fee into the price, and Farnsworth wasn’t willing to give him the compensation he believed he deserved. In addition, the Korean War had driven up the cost of steel.
Mies sued Farnsworth for his fees and an unpaid electrician’s bill, which totaled some $30,000. Then she countersued, also for around $30,000 — the difference between what Mies had originally said the house would cost and its actual price. There was also a question of Farnsworth having to relinquish ownership of the house if Mies won. He did, but for the sake of curtailing bad publicity, he accepted $2,500 from Farnsworth as payment and she kept the house.
Some people have speculated that Farnsworth and Mies had a romance while the house was being built — that perhaps she was more interested in the architect than the architecture. What’s known for sure is that one-time friends never spoke again after their financial disagreement was settled.
In outfitting the house after the flood, Farnsworth chose the cozier furnishings she preferred, and she enjoyed living there for 17 more years. In 1967, however, the county condemned 2 acres of her property for the purpose of straightening a dangerous curve in the road and replacing a nearby bridge. She fought to save the land based on the fact that Indigenous people had once lived there, then offered to gift the house and the land to the county if they waited until after her death. Unfortunately, her offer was not accepted.
Ultimately, she sold the property to a British architecture aficionado — Lord Peter Palumbo — for $125,000 and a lifetime stipend, then bought a 15th-century Italian villa outside Florence, where she lived until her death in 1977. In 2003, when Palumbo was ready to sell, a group of preservationists and fundraisers helped the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Illinois Landmarks purchase the house for $7.5 million.
Today the property is open for tours from March through November. The National Trust, which stewards the property, suggests making reservations online at edithfarnsworthhouse.org to avoid disappointment since tours are limited to 20 people.
A footnote to this site’s colorful history is that Myron Goldsmith, a student of Mies who was the structural engineer on the project, went on to design the Republic Building in Columbus, Indiana, which is also a steel and glass building built in the International style. Renowned architect Philip Johnson, one of Mies’ partners, built his famous Glass House in New Caanan, Connecticut, after seeing a scale model of the Farnsworth House at New York’s Museum of Modern Art before it was even built.
