BACKGROUND CHECK

EDITH FARNSWORTH’S COUNTRY HOUSE Mar. 31-Dec. 31 Plano, Illinois farnsworthhouse.org

House Call

Dr. Edith Farnsworth (left) on the steps of her Ludwig Mies van der Rohe–designed weekend house in 1951, shortly after its completion.

The Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois, adds a new layer to its history by exploring the life and times of its pioneering first resident, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, in a nine-month-long exhibition.

By LAUREN GALLOW

WHEN I WAS STUDYING ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY IN GRADUATE SCHOOL AT UC SANTA BARBARA, THE FARNSWORTH HOUSE—A ONE-ROOM WEEKEND RETREAT IN PLANO, ILLINOIS—WAS A CONSTANT PRESENCE IN MY 20TH-CENTURY DESIGN SEMINARS. Completed in 1951 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Farnsworth House has become a modern design icon, on par with watershed projects such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. The glass-walled structure revolutionized design by putting its interiors on full display, further cementing Mies in the annals of architectural history, but the client behind the project—the enigmatic Dr. Edith Farnsworth (1903–77)—is often overshadowed by her own home. Now she finally is getting her due as the subject of a new exhibit opening in March, Edith Farnsworth’s Country House, which for the first time interprets the home’s interior as Dr. Farnsworth occupied it.

Born and raised in Chicago, Farnsworth was an accomplished physician in her early 40s when she met Mies at a dinner party in 1945 and commissioned him to design a getaway house on a plot of land she had purchased in rural Plano, along the Fox River. “Dr. Farnsworth was a risk-taker,” says Nora Wendl, associate professor of architecture and planning at the University of New Mexico whose forthcoming book, Glass, is the culmination of nearly two decades of research on Farnsworth. “She bought an experimental piece of land and hired an experimental architect to design her house on it. Here was a woman who not only made advances in medicine—she was the first to run clinical trials on the synthetic hormone ACTH in treatment of the kidney disease nephritis, and some have argued she should have been nominated for a Nobel Prize for it—but who also desired to be a

GRAY COURTESY DAVID DUNLAP

patron of the arts, to participate socially and culturally in the modern movement. And she certainly did.”

Farnsworth, who was unmarried and pursued a career in medicine after abandoning her earlier dream of becoming a concert violinist, bucked societal expectations in more ways than one. The Farnsworth House reflects her free-spirited, wholly modern attitude. “This was a radical project for the 1950s,” Wendl says. “This was a society that did not embrace women who chose to focus on their careers instead of reproduction. And yet Mies designed for Dr. Farnsworth a house of her own, with no walls, where she could live as she wished and pursue her passions during her time off from work.”

Although visitors have to date seen the house only as its second owner, developer Lord Peter Palumbo, staged it—with Miesian furniture placed according to the architect’s original intentions—Farnsworth lived in the space quite differently. Contemporaneous photographs reveal that she rejected Mies’s ascetic interior plans, instead selecting her own furnishings, which were largely Scandinavian modern pieces and likely purchased from Baldwin-Kingrey, the first store in Chicago to sell midcentury modern furniture to the public. Farnsworth’s domestic life was layered with colorful, textural items: her violin, her typewriter, her books, and even her ashtrays and her bounding black poodle, Amy, reflected her love of the arts and filled her open-plan home with energy.

“Dr. Farnsworth was an individualist, an iconoclast, and a fully developed modern woman,” says curator Scott Mehaffey, executive director of the Farnsworth House. “She didn’t marry or have children; she smoked and drank; she loved music and poetry and world travel—she self-actualized in ways that many women of her time could only imagine. And yet she’s lived in Mies’s shadow for the last 75 years.”

Through the new exhibit, visitors to the Farnsworth House will get a clearer picture of the complex, intellectually accomplished woman who gave Mies his first successful private US commission, essentially launching his American career. Running for nine months, the exhibition, developed in conjunction with the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Her Turn” campaign, completely restages the house and includes programming exploring Farnsworth’s life and times. “It’s about restoring a piece of history,” says interior architect Rob Kleinschmidt, who has sourced original historic furnishings, including a pair of low-slung Jens Risom maple lounge chairs with basket-woven webbing and a glass-topped white-steel Florence Knoll coffee table like those Farnsworth owned.

“Edith was an exceptional person whose role as a client and patron helped shape the course of American architecture,” Mehaffey says. Wendl agrees: “She was a real fighter. Not only did she hire an avant-garde architect, one she wasn’t afraid to litigate against when the house’s costs became exorbitant, but she also went to court against the county a few years later, when they tried to seize her land. History needs to acknowledge more women like Edith: women who wouldn’t agree to be invisible but instead actively worked to become forces to contend with.” h “She didn’t marry or have children, she smoked and drank, she loved music and poetry and world travel—she ‘self-actualized’ in ways that many women of her time could only imagine. And yet she’s lived in Mies’s shadow for the last 75 years.” —SCOTT MEHAFFEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, FARNSWORTH HOUSE

Located in rural Plano, Illinois, the one-room Farnsworth House was designed and constructed by Mies between 1945 and 1951.