Content area
Full text
Facing the rippling waters of the Fox River, the house seems to float above its grass-carpeted landscape. The spare, glass-and-steel structure looks a bit like a large sculpture rooted in a sculpture garden, yet serenely adrift.
Which is exactly what it is.
This is the Farnsworth House, designed by legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and known to design devotees as one of the most famous buildings of the 20th century. Less than a three-hour drive from Milwaukee and open for public tour, this is a masterful work by the late van der Rohe, who died in 1969.
A German who once directed the renowned Bauhaus school of design and arts in Dessau, he left his homeland in 1938 and was adopted by America, specifically Chicago. He was best known simply as Mies, and remains as famous for his modernist design as for his motto, "Less is more."
Mies scholar and author Franz Schulze describes the Farnsworth House as "perhaps the most beautifully executed piece of minimalist architecture that anyone has ever achieved." Schulze, professor of art at Lake Forest College in Illinois, says the house is Mies' most important American residence and ranks as one of his two most important houses internationally, the other being the Tugendhat House in Brno in the Czech republic. The Farnsworth House was completed in 1951; the Tugendhat in 1930.
In agreement with Schulze is Terry Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Riley says of Mies' Farnsworth design: "In his whole career, it is one of his most important residences, if not the most important." While he designed numerous houses, only 11 were built in Europe and three in the United States.
The Farnsworth, the epitome of restraint and order, is a rectangular composition of nine-foot glass walls that rise from a Roman travertine floor and are supported by wide-flange steel columns.
The interior, some 1,585 square feet, is...