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Designed and built from 1946 to 1951, the Farnsworth House is considered to be the apogee of the architect Mies van der Rohe's American career. But credit lies not only with the architect. Seldom mentioned except in relation to Mies, Dr. Farnsworth was far more than just a client: Educator, translator and nephrologist, Dr. Farnsworth was in many ways every bit Mies's equal. She believed in bringing together those on the cutting edge of the sciences with those on the forefront of the arts for a collaboration that would improve each others work. Dr. Farnsworth is the kind of client that makeARCHITECTURE dreams about – she was intelligent, cultivated and open minded – and this is something lost in all of the mythology surrounding the house.
Mies, while an incredible architect, had little respect for women professionally or otherwise. (Lily Reich was one of the few women with which he a productive, mutually beneficial professional relationship. See Franz Schulze's biography of Mies for more information.) Partly due to this, their relationship ended badly. She cut off funding of the house at $75K. The custom furniture was never designed save for a wardrobe. (And the wardrobe was designed only after the client questioned the architect's "hang your clothes on the back of the bathroom door" view of domesticity.) In its place are older designs for less pastoral sites. She sued him. He counter sued. The architect came to finish work on the house only when the client was not present. The client lost the court case and was bitter. She moved into the house and decorated in her own inimitable style. She later wrote in her memoirs (available at the Newberry Library in Chicago) that Mies was a "medieval peasant" – he was intellectually an inflexible, closeminded "hedgehog" (in Isaiah Berlin's terminology) and personally a cruel, remote person. She wrote that he only began to unwind after imbibing several martinis and then would speak of his parents, the girls from a school near the office in Berlin where he worked for Behrens and his dealings as head of the Bauhaus with the Nazis. There's a tantalizing passage in her memoirs that begins to speak of Mies's meeting with Goebbels, the Nazi minister of culture. It is a version of the story that was related in the wee hours of the morning after several martinis and Cuban cigars. But the pages were torn out of the handwritten manuscript and we are left wondering if he told her more than he cared to admit publicly about what happened.
But the greatest legacy is not the anecdotes about Mies or even the house itself, but the attitude of Edith Farnsworth – we can come together as intelligent, cultivated individuals, collaborate and push things forward – and Mies's quest for excellence. That's exciting and the pursuit of these ideals is what keeps makeARCHITECTURE going.
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