Edith Farnsworth house

Edith Farnsworth house

Lawrence Technological University

January 28, 2015

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig

O’Connor, Thomas (photograph)

German

Single Built Works

July, 1965

Illinois (state)

Plano (inhabited place)

International Style (modern European architecture style)

Modern (styles and periods)

houses

stairs

Detail view of steps leading up to the Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois designed by Mies van der Rohe and built in 1951. "The significance of the Farnsworth House was recognized even before it was built. In 1947 a model of the Farnsworth House was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Describing it, along with the unbuilt Resor House, as a “radical departure from his last European domestic projects,” Philip Johnson noted that it went further than the Resor house in its expression of the floating volume: “The Farnsworth house with its continuous glass walls is an even simpler interpretation of an idea. Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel columns from which it is suspended nor the independent floating terrace break the taut skin” … In the actual construction, the aesthetic idea was progressively refined and developed through the choices of materials, colors and details. While subsequent debates and lawsuits sometimes questioned the practicality and livability of its design, the Farnsworth House would increasingly be considered, by architects and scholars alike, to constitute one of the crystallizing and pivotal moments of Mies van der Rohe’s long artistic career,"--Farnsworth House website.

glass (material)

steel (alloy)

1,500 square feet

jpeg

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LTU-TO-195