Legendary architect Mies van der Rohe was just establishing himself in the U.S. when he took on a private commission to build a glass house in Plano, Illinois, in 1951. It has since become an icon of the International Style of architecture. His client was Dr. Edith Farnsworth, an eminent physician and the subject of a new book. “Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth” is an architectural history in the form of a memoir about author Nora Wendl’s experience researching the history of the Farnsworth House. Wendl is an associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico.
NORA WENDL: I had read this article in The New York Times, and the title of it was “Sex and Real Estate,” and it was about the Farnsworth house, glass house. It was in 2003. This was published, and the house was about to be auctioned. And the whole narrative was that Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe had been lovers and like, that was the story that came along with the house. So if you were buying the house, you were also buying this fabulous narrative of the house as a love child. And I remember reading it, thinking, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ And so I got really curious about who this woman was, and a good friend of mine encouraged her family to donate her papers to the Newberry Library, and so I was able to read these memoirs that she left behind that were really about the true story of why she wanted this house in the first place, and included these remarkable poems about living in the house, and led me down the road of finding more about her identity, which was so much richer than I had been led to believe by the sort of typical accounts of the house.
KUNM: Who was she? I've heard of Mies van der Rohe, of course, but I'd never heard of her.
WENDL: Yeah, she was an interesting person. She was a nephrologist, so she specialized in kidney diseases. I mean, she had this kind of incredible career in medicine. She also was a poet. She translated the poetry of Eugenio Montale, and really, I think an important patron, or I guess matron, is a woman of the arts, and she commissioned this glass structure from Mies van der Rohe before he was really widely known in the U.S.
KUNM: I've been looking at pictures of the house while we're talking, and it's quite stunning. Also, such an interesting idea to have an all-glass house in a place as cold as Plano, Illinois. I'm sure, it cost a fortune to heat.
WENDL: A fortune, and those questions became really contentious as the house went on. And I think that's one of the reasons she was sort of dragged through the mud, maybe in architectural history, is that she did become a difficult client who would ask questions, you know, she, I think, believed in the arts, but also had a pragmatic side to her. You know, it's hard to envision a house, I think, when you first start, if you're not an expert in architecture. So I think as the house got to be realized, she started to -- as one would -- say ‘oh my gosh, a single pane glass structure is going to be thermally problematic for me. I didn't think about this.’ And I think she assumed maybe that the architect would have made these calculations for her.
But of course, we're talking about a famous architect for whom the question is really the beauty of the structure. So I think as the house became realized, a lot of these conflicts came to the foreground, and that question for me, was really interesting and mirrored, I think, some of the gender dynamics that became really interesting for me in the book, because, as she was, you know, really having issues with how this thing was being realized, it was inevitable that it was just going to be built this way. It was kind of done already. You know what I mean? By the time it was fully built, I think she realized ‘This is now my problem.’ He sued her for a small unpaid bill. But in the end, they didn't have a contract enforcing anything, and so the judge had to throw it out. He said, ‘Look, you've got to settle. You should pay him this unpaid bill, but ultimately he can't sue you for the structure, because there's no agreement that I can base this on. There's no contract.’
But it was an interesting thing to discover, because from my perspective as a writer, even getting these original documents to write this history was itself a gendered project. So to get the trial transcript, I had to track down this man who was a Mies enthusiast who had the only copy of the transcript in his living room, because the original the one that was held by the by Kendall County courthouse was destroyed in a flood, I had to go to his living room to read it. He wouldn't let me copy it. He wouldn't let me, like take pictures of it. He sat in another room and watched me try to read 4,000 pages of it. So I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a gendered, messy project of trying to write a history that includes this woman's perspective.’ And so the book became the project of, I'm not just going to write about her experience, I'm going to write about my experience, trying to write a book about her experience, which began to open up so many more avenues for reflecting on the way. So much history and the process of writing, it is a really contentious thing, and it became a project to sort of acknowledge why histories really don't change. Because in order to change them, you're confronting literal institutions and individuals who have this incentive, I guess, to not let them change.