Content area
Full text
This spring, with the 20th anniversary of the rescue of a masterpiece of modern architecture, there's a second rescue to celebrate: the restoration of its first owner, Edith Farnsworth, to a central spot in the narrative of the riverside country house that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed for her.
On May 1, 2004, when the tranquil glass and steel pavilion built in 1951 in Plano opened to the public, "the story was about the great man, the architect and what he had created," said Michelangelo Sabatino, an architectural historian and professor at the IIT College of Architecture.
"Edith was like a sidebar; she was a footnote," he added.
Two decades later, Farnsworth, a Chicago physician and medical professor who got Mies to design her a second home and then battled him in court over cost overruns, is getting praise as the knowing patron of an architect who, though he revolutionized high-rise architecture, did few houses and none as serenely beautiful as hers.
"It was not meant to be a monument to Mies," said Scott Mehaffey, executive director of the Edith Farnsworth House, which has been a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation since 2010, after being managed by Landmarks Illinois in its first several years as a public asset.
It was meant to be the elegant country house that one erudite artistic woman asked for "in this wonderful natural landscape she...