*Flooded at the Farnsworth House
In 1988, architect Edward A. Duckett, some twenty years after the death of his mentor Mies van der Rohe, recalled an afternoon when he had gone for a walk with him:
We had gone to the Farnsworth House once for a walk, with Mies and several others. We decided to go down to the river. We had to push our way through the weeds. I was in front and Mies was right behind me. Right in front of me I saw a young opossum. If you hold a stick under the tail of a young opossum, it wraps its tail around the stick and you can hold it upside down. So I bent down and picked up a branch, slipped it under the opossum's little tail, which grabbed it, turned around and showed it to Mies. Nowadays many people think the opossum is one of the ugliest creatures on earth, but I remember Mies looked at me and said, "Isn't nature wonderful!" He studied the opossum for a while and remarked how extraordinary it was, how beautiful the fur and its texture were, and things of that sort.
Having visited the Farnsworth House and reflected deeply on its strange effects, Edward Duckett's anecdote was unexpected for me. I had imagined Mies as a purely urban architect: Berlin and Chicago, the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Seagram Building, Knize suits and Havana cigars. And yet here he is, standing in the riverside reeds, staring at an opossum. True, Mies does not touch the opossum. Duckett holds it at the end of a stick, framing it for Mies's contemplation. Notice what captures Mies's attention: the fur and not the form — a kind of dense thicket of coarse hairs, standing on end, in shades of brown and light auburn. I came to realize that Duckett's tale embodies the immersive spectacle of the Farnsworth House. The stick and Duckett's frame recall the fundamental architectural act of drawing: the stick, now a pencil, describes a frame, now a building, that furnishes a particular apprehension of the world. This interweaving of drawing, building, and nature is remarkably evident in the Farnsworth House. Evident and strange. Drawing strips away the positivist approach to the technology of construction, and the natural world, in turn, deflects, absorbs, and ultimately floods the frame of drawing.
Mies always drew. As a young man at the turn of the century, he apprenticed in the provincial city of Aachen as a draftsman in local stucco workshops, becoming accomplished in the consummate and masterful molds of interior decoration. Mies sought worldly opportunities and in 1905 moved to Berlin, where his drawing ability led to his joining the office of architect Raoul Paul, a follower of the English Arts and Crafts movement, and then the more progressive office of Peter Behrens. In both offices, Mies produced countless sets of construction documents. The apprenticeships led to a formal and prosperous office of his own, which Mies expanded in the 1920s, a period when he shaped a series of superb projects — villas, apartment complexes, skyscrapers — of which we know only through his astonishing drawings. Even in the 1930s, when Mies had assumed the directorship of the declining Bauhaus, he shaped a design pedagogy centered on the systematic development of courtyard houses through perspective drawings. Despite Mies's impressive efforts as an autodidact, we can argue that the only thing remaining from Mies's cordial relations with the world before the rise of National Socialism in Germany and his emigration to America is his drawings. Mies was reticent, though a shrewd promoter of himself, and he abandoned the only language he knew. Temperamentally distant from his wife Ada Bruhn yet financially dependent on his estranged spouse, and professionally dependent on the designer Lilly Reich, he left his wife and collaborator to their own devices. Mies was an avant-gardist, though one who yielded to the wishes of wealthy patrons and, more reluctantly, the municipal establishment — he was both witness to the founding and the discrediting. He was suspicious of aesthetic doctrine, and though he was a leading cultural figure of the Weimar Republic, he considered himself defeated — without any means of dissemination and with a few scattered colleagues. He was anxious about political affiliations, though reluctant to leave the country that had enabled him to rise from a stonemason's son to a prominent architect. Mies clung to Germany with both hands, until he too was found culpable. In 1938, Mies, belatedly, disembarked on the shores of a country that his own country was demolishing. But drawing remained intact. It is true that Mies, even before entering the United States, had a kind of kinship with American transformers. He had reinvented his mask twice before: when leaving Aachen for Berlin, and when shedding his family, conventional career, and assumed name among the Weimar avant-gardes. In America, he established himself in Chicago, by virtue of the campus commission and the academic community of the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology, or IIT), and in New York, by virtue of Philip Johnson's patronage and the cultural endorsement of the Museum of Modern Art. Having thus arrived on shore and prepared himself, Mies confronted two further challenges. In the 1920s, in his compressed manifestos, he had championed glass and steel technologies and abstracted them in his visionary projects. Glass and steel were the everyday realities of building work in the United States.
Though Mies's mask in America became the face of a master builder, he had relatively little built work in Europe, and ordinary construction companies had damaged what he had built. Mies often repeated the word "structure" like an incantation for his young assistants at his Chicago office, but he and his assistants soon discovered how little they knew about statics or the advanced state of the American steel industry. More daunting was that Frank Lloyd Wright loomed over everything. Wright's Taliesin domain was not far away, and Wright's late architecture was becoming an uncomfortable neighbor. Of course, Mies's canonical projects had absorbed and reconfigured Wright's early Prairie houses; now Wright returned the favor — the superficial composition of the Barcelona Pavilion had been assimilated by his American houses. Wright was a generation older than Mies and treated his younger colleague with a curious courtesy, a cordiality that Mies reciprocated. Nevertheless, their relationship was not without occasional quarrels and a concealed Oedipal sentiment. Mies, who had been a conjurer in his Weimar period, harbored no illusion that he could compete with the leading native American architect in Wright's own backyard. Now in his fifties, Mies had to learn to speak again, and it was not the English language that worried him. Mies confronted a new condition of building, and he confronted it with the only means at his disposal — drawing. The large IIT campus commission provided an opportunity to shape a new mode of construction, and the slow and steady pace of the war years provided a suitable timeframe. In countless and meticulous perspectives, Mies and his assistants calibrated the subtleties of the steel frame: the fine points of building the building envelope, and the visual effects. The steel frame became the scaffolding of these perspective drawings, its orthogonal order expressing the uniform measure of a perspective grid. It was as if Mies had returned to the consummate drawings of his youth in Aachen — drawings which, as he put it, extended "from floor to ceiling... you had to stand directly before them, drawing not only with the turn of the wrist but by turning the entire arm." When it comes to the subject of drawing, we can ask: how could Mies extend drawing to the surrounding landscape? To proceed, we must distinguish between two terms: the horizon line and the horizon. The horizon line is a technical term referring to the line placed at eye level in a perspective drawing to which all vanishing lines of the drawing are projected. The horizon, on the other hand, is an event in the physical world, referring to the apparent intersection of earth and sky as seen by an observer. While the horizon line of a drawing can correspond to the horizon, such a drawing places the observer and the horizon in a stable correspondence. The horizon as an event in the physical world, by contrast, is dynamic and has an ambiguous relationship with the observer. The horizon, which defines boundaries, recedes as one approaches it; the horizon, though visible, cannot be precisely located; it changes with one's position — the horizon remains distant; the horizon, by defining the finitude of the solid earth, extends into an infinite celestial expanse. Is it possible, then, for a building to function like a perspective drawing, not only for the purpose of measuring the interior space but also for extending the orthogonal order to the landscape and summoning the landscape's horizon as its own horizon line? Mies employed precisely this possibility in his European residential houses, reducing the landscape to a precise response to the spatial logic of the houses. But, observing the other IIT buildings under construction, he could not escape another consideration: the steel frame could be placed so that the surrounding landscape would resist, rather than conform to the frame — abrading it and erasing the horizon line. And with this erasure, a vastly different experience would flood the building.
The weekend house is, among other things, an ideal project for exploring the relationship between frame and nature. Like its historical precedent, the villa, the weekend house converses with the natural environment, a relationship reinforced by the simplicity of its program and thematically underscored by the inhabitants' journey from city to countryside. Though Mies probably needed no additional license, and Dr. Edith Farnsworth later regretted having made such a suggestion, she encouraged Mies to design the house as if he were designing it for himself. Dr. Farnsworth had purchased a ten-acre parcel of land outside Plano, Illinois, in a small farming community sixty miles south of Chicago, wider from east to west than from north to south. Rural roads bordered it from the north (River Road) and west (Millbrook), and the Fox River from the south. Though in the previous century farmers had cleared this land, beautiful sycamore, oak, and maple trees still lined the riverbank, deciduous growth screening this site from both roads while allowing an open space at the center that in turn opened toward the farms to the east. Fortunately, the continuous horizontality of this agricultural plot diminished toward the Fox River, initially with a steep incline. On this northern slope of the hill, Dr. Farnsworth and Mies strolled during the spring and summer of 1947, surveying the land and discussing the siting of the house. They lounged about, conversing about the approximate locations of Mies's earlier houses in Europe. In his first independent commission, the Riehl House in 1906, Mies placed the domestic section on the crest of the elevated part of the land, shaped the near landscape as an extension of the garden adjacent to the interior spaces, and extended it to the distant horizon by projecting the framing lines of the terrace. In his last European house, the Tugendhat House of 1929–1930, he followed a similar strategy. Here architectural construction remade the Riehl garden twice: with the cold and austere steel frame of a kind of pergola and the dreamy vitrine of a winter garden. Similarly, at the entrance, the carport canopy and the lower living room doubled the terrace, where the height of the space captures the dead center at eye level and casts it to the horizon, while the flat floor-to-ceiling glass panels slide to foci. Despite the vernacular and unpretentious appearance of the Riehl House and the surreal discontinuities of the Tugendhat House, both slide from a bright green ground constrained by a closed foreground to a perspectival frame. There is a conspicuous thinness in both the nearby gardens and the distant horizons, because the formal apprehension of the houses forces both to surrender, and they lack the reinforcing connections — spatial, visual, and tactile — that would bind them in a coherent thickness. A kind of intermediate bond is absent: the expansive Potsdam park lies below the Riehl House, and the urban landscape of Brno lies below the bustling Tugendhat House. Yet both are flung into the distance, overlooked.
Most importantly, Mies slid the Farnsworth House away from the hill, onto the flat ground adjacent to the Fox River. Mies situated the Farnsworth House in the neglected middle ground of the Riehl and Tugendhat houses — ground that had neither the soothing tranquility of Potsdam's urban forests nor the familiar pattern of Brno's urban fabric. The Farnsworth House relinquishes the grasp on the landscape and opens like a hand in a river.
The slide of the Farnsworth House does not seem so precipitous if we consider the commission just before it, a commission that marks a transformation in Mies's understanding of landscape, just as IIT marks a development in his understanding of the steel frame. Mies first came to America at the invitation of Mrs. Helen Resor, a brilliant advertising copywriter and art collector in New York City. Disappointed by the progress of architect Philip Goodwin's work on the family's holiday house, and enamored of the Tugendhat House, she contacted Mies through Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art and ultimately, in August 1937, lured Mies to New York for a visit to America. One day after arriving in the city, and in order to visit the new site, Mies boarded a train: passing through a creek, he arrived at a ranch outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I do not know what passed through Mies's mind during this rapid transition: he suddenly found himself in a landscape that, though no longer wild, still possessed a sublimely liberating grandeur. Apparently, Mies spent his days at the site, calmly contemplating the effects of daylight and the view of distant mountains. His comments were limited to objections about having his work absorbed into that of another architect, specifically the case where that architect had placed his building far above the river on long, slender stone piers. But in the voluminous file documenting the project,
Riehl House Tugendhat House
Site diagrams: Riehl and Tugendhat houses, above, and the Farnsworth House, below
two drawings are striking. Both frame the distant view, and in each Mies does something he had never done before in his residential buildings: he captures the view in a photograph and then affixes it to an architectural frame drawn with stark simplicity. Though Mies often affixed site photographs to the drawings of his urban projects, he typically regarded the view from commissioned residential houses and reduced them to a single abstract horizon line. Moreover, both the photograph and the composition change from the first drawing to the second. By placing service volumes of rubble stone on either side of the Mill Creek, Mies accommodated himself to Goodwin's half-finished building, and then bridged between them at the second level with a main living space wrapped in cedar and lightened by floor-to-ceiling glass facing up and down the river. In the first drawing of 1937/1938, the interior appears in the cold, matte gray of an austere space; the cruciform columns of the Tugendhat House appear again and shrink to align with the compact steel mullions of the window. A site photograph is affixed to the windows, apparently taken from the Goodwin building, and its distant horizon line falls on the intersection of the column and base perspective lines. Mies depicts this space as a terrace-like living space of the Tugendhat House: a kind of balcony that frames the distant horizon. But the differences matter more. Here Mies bridges over the landscape and surveys it from an elevated vantage point. The architectural frame, though describing a single-point perspective, divides the view into five framings: a central framing flanked by pairs of narrow and square framings. Because of this separation, our eyes are not drawn to the center, setting aside the edges as a disjointed haze. A visual thickness responds to the distant horizon, the middle ground of the farm, the meadow, and the trees. In every case, Mies revised his European strategies. The horizon line is no longer the line of release where earth meets sky, but the floor line of a valley surrounded by mountains, released only by the bend of the river that catches the eye, perhaps, beyond the dense cover of the evergreens. The middle ground emerges from ambiguity, and with the muted effect of the evergreens on the right, and beyond the creek, and portions of the laboriously prepared farmland, it links foreground to background: the main farmhouse, the half-finished outbuildings, and the temporary dirt roads among scattered deciduous trees. This is a contested terrain. The advance of civilization is limited by the temporary farm settlements and checked by the creek waters, the encroachments of the forest, and the towering mountains beyond. Perspective manages a kind of apprehension, focusing on the distant main farmhouse as if lending power to its cursory appearance; but perspective is shown to be as inconsequential as the wooden bridge meandering in the foreground. When we turn to the outermost square framings, our eyes unbridle the horizon and fly through the dense foliage like barn swallows. We have not yet landed; we hover in place. We turn toward the bridge, do not land, but instead slide through the bridge rails, which repeat the formal order of the drawing, and tumble into the depths of the water — we are immersed. The second drawing, completed with the assistance of George Danforth and William Priestley in 1939, intensifies the tension between frame and landscape. The interior of the Tugendhat House appears once more and encloses a panoramic photograph of a mountain pass. No longer suspended above the water, we face a wall of rock. The only human incursion is a pair of passing cowboys who have faded against the enormous granite. The photograph, in its immersion, is aggressive: its viewpoint falls below the foreground, its horizon line drops softly against the background of the short slope and arcs across the diameter, its release is limited to a seemly reference to a bend in a pass above and to the left, its depth is indeterminate. Only the horses have a foothold in the central framing, while distances flicker and deceive in the right framings, and foreground, middle ground, and background struggle to open their way in the left framings, as if they could be experienced in depth rather than in sequence.
The panorama amplifies the strange depths of two elements collaged in the foreground; their colors overwhelm the imperceptible grays of the photograph and blur the delicate demarcation of the frame. A sample of wood paneling truncates the column and base on the right, and the colorful provender of a 1939 Paul Klee painting covers the column and base on the left. The wood grain and the Klee figures emphasize a vertical orientation that deflects our eyes from a stabilizing horizontality. Our eyes wander back and forth in the dense forest of grain and drift in Klee's dreamlike space, where the everyday detritus of Europe floats in a calm distraction: a peaked house, a wine bottle, a flag, an umbrella, a fork, a medieval tower, a dessert cup, a beer glass, a woman's face... . Finally, deciphering the space of the architectural frame is difficult; the single line of column and base suggests an oblique view, while the simple rectangular shape of the window insists on a frontality. A single perspective point enables a temporary foothold in this unfamiliar terrain, though it surrenders to a flexible landscape, an indeterminate materiality, and surrealist imagery. A delicate frame, a dense site, and a section of trimmed forest — all reappear in the Farnsworth House, and their strange effects thicken and fill. The Klee painting, owned by Helen Resor, does not reappear; the dream of the American landscape is more often painted. The closing lines of The Great Gatsby are revealed: "For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." It is a revelation, because in most readings the challenge of the middle clause is overlooked — "compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired" — and the insight degenerates into a dreary apology for Manifest Destiny. The field of vision accommodates itself to technological progress, just as perspective draws the landscape to a limited focus, and the human impulse to seize the reins conceals nature's paradoxical composition of abundance and limited resources. Mies's Resor drawings offer a vastly different landscape; a uniform terrain rejects human dominion, and the unifying thrust of perspective fragments into a dispersal of the field of vision. Mies, shoved aside by the hot, frenzied assault of his civilization, now found himself in a landscape whose cold and colossal indifference once again brought him to his knees. Mies seemed to welcome this situation. He even seemed willing to accept that his own instrument of survival — drawing — was most effective in demonstrating its own inefficiency. The final model of the Resor House slides right onto the water, as if welcoming the assault. Can we explain this in another way? Mies slides the Farnsworth House from the hill to within a hundred feet of the Fox River. It is partly true that an ancient black oak on the riverbank shelters the house from the southern rays of the sun. Yet the dazzling sun is not the most potent natural force of the site — the river is. And the final position of the Farnsworth House, as Mies well knew, lies squarely in the floodplain of the Fox River. Here we find ourselves at risk of annual flooding, instead of being reassured by the systematic floriculture of a gardener; and the rise of the forest-clad riverbank obstructs our view of land and sky and, with it, the easy continuity of perspective and horizon.
Approaching the Farnsworth House from the east and crossing the open area at the center of the site, its broad north elevation reveals itself among the oaks, ashes, and maples along the river. This open area, currently covered in tidy lawn, was originally a field overgrown with tangled weeds and left wild. Even today this area drains poorly and is often marshy underfoot. Two rows of four columns hold the house five feet above the ground; the rows run east to west, thirty feet apart, while the two central columns are twenty-two feet apart. Steel C-sections bind the roof and floor into rigid planes that extend five feet beyond the columns to the east and west. The main living volume floats softly between these planes, and its wooden core is visible behind the floor-to-ceiling glass. Meanwhile, the minimal steel window mullions register the midpoint of the column cantilevers and are then pushed beyond their logic to the corners. To be sure, this white steel frame, superb in its proportions, celebrates the triumph of its fabrication and erection against its unstable site. But looking more closely at the house, we are pressed to rely on this assumption. First, we see very little of the frame, especially the horizontal frame. The construction documents describe the main floor and roof structure as steel columns running north to south, with concrete segments between the steel columns running east to west. The house is not so straightforward: both beams and segments lie within the depth of the perimeter C-sections, while the plaster ceiling and travertine floor complete the concealment. The rigidity of the ceiling and floor is obsessive. The plaster is smoothly troweled, and
Farnsworth House site plan (floodplain hatched)
no expansion or control joints are visible. Of course, the travertine is marked with joints and wood trim. Yet where the travertine extends to the porch and deck — and in any other building, from the ridge to the drip edge, this is what happens — it sits on a level surface and drains water into triangular pools concealed within the depth of the C-section. Furthermore, the frame we can see is not entirely convincing. Even a passing glance at the columns calls into question any claim of structural clarity. Mies did not employ the minimal W-sections of the time but insisted on sections with a wider and more pronounced flange. The columns, though immaculate in appearance, do not arouse an emotional response. We cannot say how the columns are secured, because their concrete pad foundations are buried in the ground; nor can we say how the columns hold up the roof and floor, because they slide within the depth of the perimeter C-sections; nor can we fathom why the columns terminate, because they seem to have taken on the task after deliberating over holding up the roof. The C-sections are arranged in a similar fashion: the window mullions obscure the characteristic depth, and identical members support the roof and floor, which bear a greater load. This last piece of structural legerdemain merits further explanation. In a final twist, Mies's assistant, Myron Goldsmith, reinforced the floor's load-bearing capacity by employing the intermediate steel window mullions as tension members connecting the roof and floor. While most glass walls hang outside the building's frame like a curtain, expressing their non-structural role like a curtain, the Farnsworth glass wall is recessed into the structure and the intermediate mullions are welded in, secure in their structural role. We must conclude that this house obeys neither the structural logic of differentiated loads, nor the emotional association of vertical and horizontal, nor even the modernist dictum of separating wall and support. Of course, there is a logic governing this building — we must look at the connections. In conventional steel buildings, ironworkers connect components with bolts or welds, or a combination of the two. Mies initially tested bolted connections at the Farnsworth House but then abandoned them. Welded connections are more resistant to lateral loads, and welding technologies had been perfected in wartime Chicago. Welding also disregarded Mies's injunction against a nostalgic return to handicraft — a nostalgia that visible bolted connections arouse, recalling the physical act of turning a nut until it is secure. Mies preferred welded connections at IIT too; the famous corner detail in the Alumni Memorial Hall displays continuous welding over more than twenty feet. And here another problem must have become apparent. Welding also requires a high degree of skill, and if visible as at IIT, it once again recalls handicraft, though of the industrial variety. In any case, at the Farnsworth House, neither bolts nor welds are exposed. Except that all the visible steel connections at the Farnsworth House are groove welds. Groove welding is a complex process: steel erectors first drill holes in the columns and fit the column connections with bearing seats, then place the perimeter beams on these seats, adjust the beam level, and secure it; then welders fill the empty column holes, fusing the column to the beam; and finally, finishers remove the bearing seats, grinding and smoothing all surfaces. Remarkably, these connections require a sequence of operations demanding a high degree of craftsmanship, yet each act disappears with the next. The mechanical craftsmanship of the bearing seat connection disappears with the industrial craftsmanship of welding; the industrial craftsmanship of welding disappears with the handcraft of grinding; and the handcraft of grinding disappears with its own act. In this astonishing hierarchy, there is no grandeur, just as there are no remains of craftsmanship. To emphasize this, the steelworkers cleaned the steel surface of burrs, and finishers coated the steel with successive layers of smooth white enamel paint. The Farnsworth House does not celebrate the industrial process of producing and fabricating steel; it erases it. The metal frame should not preoccupy us; it is a pursuit of the jewel of fantasy. But we can report what the steel frame does, and what the steel frame does at the Farnsworth House is to approximate the concise grandeur of a drawn line. Specifically, it is the perspective drawing that clears away any distraction from the steady thrust of its vanishing lines, so that the spectacle of house and landscape can be revealed without any impediment.
As we step away from the house and walk from east to west along its north elevation, a cascade of effects blurs the distinction between building and landscape. Raw silk curtains twist the sunlight. Hard, rigid glass flings yellowish-brown branches, green foliage, and blue sky into glimpses of the wood-veneered core. White steel (which is never white) doubles as it reflects, recording the transient lighting conditions, the more gradual seasonal changes of foliage, and the creeping growth of the thin layer of ground cover and the fading of sunlight. And this is only half the story. The five-foot cantilever of the floor overwhelms the horizon; at this point we are immersed, the floodplain is no longer a remote concept. The belly of the house draws near. Grass and sunlight give way to darkness, damp earth, and mildly unpleasant odors. Emotional resonances abound: a mechanical joist casts a shadow on a large black oak; rust has tattooed the steel skin; concrete planks conceal moisture; and steel columns keep pace with the adjacent maples, raiding the rough bark with a spoonful — a lurking underworld, one of those unstable devotions and strange partnerships. Above the deck to the west, the perspectival thrust and the landscape's evasion dissolve the devotions. The porch frames the oaks and maples along the river together with the converging lines of the glass wall on the left, the columns on the right, and the roof plane overhead. The porch truncates the trunks and treetops, suspending them in midair. The trees fight back, especially when leafed out and subject to a gentle breeze, presenting a field of light and color that rebuffs the steel frame's demand for a vanishing point or even a prominent horizon line. Our field of vision dances among the trembling foliage even as the steel frame dissolves in the cantilever of the roof. Rounding the northwest corner, the house reveals its systematic sequence of enclosure. As we stroll along the south elevation, we encounter an intermediate platform surrounded by the same steel C-section columns, nested in another row of columns that stop just below the upper surface of the platform. It is simple: we climb the stairs and arrive at a kind of floor; we climb another group of stairs and arrive at a kind of floor and roof; we turn left to open a door and pass through a glass wall into the house — each stage drawing us deeper into the spectacle of frame and landscape. With a tremor underfoot at the cantilever of the roof, the first step merely hints at a kind of hesitant sense of arrival, of reaching a mooring. The smooth surfaces of the floor tiles have a
long dimension that runs parallel to the rectangular platform, thus registering perspective with a gentle tracking, a condition that provokes a fusion of perceptions. From the east, the arena breaks trees that press against its far edge, furrowing the hillside. From the west, the horizontal scale of the travertine joins the vertical interval of column and base, blending with the meadow and horizon, lending the landscape a prominent rhythm. The warp of perspective lacks the enclosure of a ceiling and a second wall, however; the open south edge slides while the peripheral visual disturbances alert us to the river's capacity for trespass. The travertine reinforces this instability, offering both the reassuring coherence of its mass and the memory of its liquid origin in the conspicuous veining of the travertine. Lest we overlook this connection, and as we turn back toward the river, we notice that the travertine veining also runs parallel to the current of the river. The platform is both mooring and river. Having climbed the second and more coherent flight of stairs, we stand on the porch. The porch frames the field of vision with the barest means: travertine tiles below, plaster ceiling above, glass with steel frame to the right, and a single column to the left (just enough to arrest lateral movement). Just as the travertine has gathered the various associations of earth, the plaster has compressed the associations of sky and mimicked depth through ambient reflections. The ceiling, set at nine and a half feet, draws the eye level close enough to the center of the frame to harness its exhibitive force while reinforcing a level and direct vantage point. Yet the landscape once again repels the perspectival thrust, trapping it in the folds between the broad lawn and the forested hillside. It is a strange condition: as we ascend to the porch and lose the view of the sky, we do not rise above a dense field of vegetation but descend deeper into it. Even when we turn to other views, the strangeness of the landscape persists — a landscape from which we are at once excluded and, as we survey it from a distance, into which we are cast, immersed. We turn and enter the house. Inside, the house identifies the differences between outside and inside while simultaneously retaining the color spectrum of the outside. The softer material metal of the aluminum door handle is compatible with the hand and registers the slight temperature differences between outside and inside. The travertine tiles respond to the contact and radiant heat from hot water pipes buried in the lower deck. The ceiling, the most imperceptible of all things, has a quieter atmosphere, for it is the glass that transmits most of the daylight, and the plaster also reflects the warmer moods of the wooden core. With this enclosure, the spectacle of frame and landscape intensifies. Three additional elements support this production: the window
Groove weld sequence; connection prepared, beam placed, groove weld, connection completed
frame, the core, and the furniture. Though everyone has reported otherwise, the Farnsworth House does in fact have walls. Steel diaphragms close both sides of the glass, and their narrow sections are revealed by a third steel addition that fits them to the ceiling, columns, and floor. These minimal jambs are familiar to us; they are the encompassing edges of modern painting. We may underestimate their installation, but they are the only visible locks of the house; screws secure the frame. The core, on the other hand, is a device that neutralizes simple oppositions: permitting a spatial continuity while creating functional zones, and the mechanical systems of the house that, though providing the most fundamental bodily needs, present a clearly orthogonal form while slipping unconventionally into the floor tiles, with a veneer of handsome limestone that connects to the substructure by means of the toilet mechanism. Most importantly, the core pushes us to the perimeter of the house and disrupts the possibility of any kind of balanced and framed field of vision, while all along reassuring us about strategic moments with horizontal sight lines. The furniture counters the strange and peculiar behavior of the core and supports the window frames. Given our tendency to tiptoe around the core, the furniture establishes a reassuring sense of scale by providing repose. Mies placed the furniture in his plans with deliberation, and the furniture provides specific fields of vision based on different bodily positions: sitting at the dining table, lounging by the fireplace, standing in the kitchen corridor, lying on the bed. When seated at the dining table, we find a repetition of the porch vista. The eye level is just below the house's horizon line, and the furniture establishes
specific fields of vision, and once again the junction of lawn and forest traps the frame's thrust. The foreshortening of the rectangular floor tiles accelerates a field of vision scaffolded by the steel mullion. Just as the chair balances the body, the mullion scaffolding balances the field of vision, particularly at the corners, enabling the eyes to focus on the panorama rather than drifting aimlessly. The single column reinforces this strategy, breaking the horizontal expanse with its level and direct vantage point and dividing the frame into two discernible geometries: a large square frame on the right and a narrower double-square stack on the left (the latter dividing the field of vision between lawn and forest). But the horizon line thus framed no longer extends in breadth and depth, and the landscape is once more released aimlessly. The absence of base and capital, and the sympathetic painting of ceiling and floor, reinforce this aimless drift — the more we focus on the landscape, the more the floor and ceiling seem interchangeable. The lawn with its light and delicate texture resembles the absent sky and seems to swap places with the darker and heavier forest, suggesting that perhaps we have been inverted. With the knowledge that both the logic of perspective and gravity have been subverted, the leaves, trunks, and grass are released into ambiguous depths that shift with the transformations of light, moisture, and wind. The quality of these perceptions, seemingly, flickers as our eyes dart like arrows in search of a stable purchase. And the readiness to sit, to balance the body amid this unsettling experience, is fateful.
This becomes clear when we rise and move toward the fireplace, turning to face the length of the house and the distant porch. Reflections of glass, hard steel, and dark water rush toward us, while our field of vision is trapped in a thicket of trees. The Barcelona chairs, crouching beside the fireplace and in the embrace of the core and the credenza, obstruct a field of vision comparable to that from the dining table. Then one expects the house's harshest field of vision to be summoned when the trees and hillside relinquish their most stable perspectival thrust. In the expansive luxury of the low chair, and close to the floor, which is flung into the vertical embrace of the fireplace, we once more feel the tug of perspective. The junction of travertine and limestone directs our gaze along a horizontal line that the forest once again scatters. Yet a useful measure is also apparent. The flank of the core obstructs its own prescription. The windowsill, the floor tile, and the framing measure distance while simultaneously registering atmospheric effects — even the glass reflections are no longer disturbing. The entrance and the porch, framed twice over, calm the field of vision. Now the forest settles, no longer rushed and threatening, and our eyes too adjust. The house, like a companionable ruler, keeps the forest at a respectful distance. Our eyes move forward, engage, and are checked in a kind of iridescent dance. Finally, our gaze turns to the left, toward the river. Columns and bases obstruct oblique views, slicing the horizontal expanse into discrete vertical sections that widen and slow as we turn and look straight at the river. Here the house recedes, and our field of vision depends on a stack of horizontal landscape bands: a foreground of grass, a middle ground of river, and a background of hill and forest, and a final expanse of sky. There is no longer a single, solitary horizon line — the horizon surrenders to the river, whose power is more daunting. On some days, the shifting depths of foliage affect this compressed landscape — the river appears closer than the meadow. On other days, the river is drawn closer than the meadow and swallows it. Rising from the chair and rounding the core to its north face, we enter the kitchen corridor and a compressed version of the living room's trauma. Here, however, the experience is not threatening. Because the steel, travertine, and limestone measure the space, and the narrow gap of the kitchen keeps us secure. Now the dense vegetation in the east and west of the corridor's field of vision murmurs, yet photographs suggest a different experience; the dense cover of the hillside rise does in fact limit the western field of vision, but the eastern field of vision opens to the cultivated fields, and the distant horizon frames the land and sky. But unlike Mies's European residential houses, the Farnsworth House reports an endless extension into the land and the daily chores of a farm, and closer to the house, the mundane tasks of preparing food and washing dishes. Turning counterclockwise with our backs to the core, the distant horizon abruptly gives way to the gradual rise of the hill and the encroachment of the trees to the north and west — a passage that accelerates, decelerates, and accelerates with the measure of steel. The vista, in a fluid wave, passes from release to immersion. As we walk through the house, gathering different views in different compositions and speeds, one field of vision is conspicuously absent: the horizon view from the north side of the house — the one that leaps across the water to the forested bank and the expanse of sky. The core obstructs this view for much of the house and, for the remainder, strips its ceiling. The river dominates everything, a mass of water whose boundaries are always in doubt and whose current is never diverted. The house offers a broad field of vision of the sky only once. When you are lying on the bed in the sleeping area, if you turn, you can see it there. The view, squeezed flat between the core and the wardrobe, is as if you could walk straight across the river, though this too is close to sleep... a kind of dream.
The Farnsworth House does not provide the distant horizon of a sheltered garden; it challenges us by immersing us. Here a different landscape is framed, one that includes the delightful arousal of a mood that a guest who spent an evening in this house, sleeping in that very bed and waking up, describes: "The feeling is indescribable — the act of waking up and coming to consciousness as the light dawns and gradually grows, illuminating the meadow and trees and river beyond; it commands your entire view. You are in nature, not in it — nature has enveloped you but you are separate from it. All in all, it is unforgettable." But to this end: the light of the American Midwest is usually not brilliant, revealing a clear and colorful periphery, but more often cloudy, damp, obstinate, absorbing us in its density. This too is a reality: if the Farnsworth House divides land and water into two intersecting yet separate fields of vision — fields of vision facing the northern land that block the frame's search for release, and southern water fields of vision that compress themselves into separate horizons — then the fields of vision along the length of the house stumble even closer. Water and land, like eye and leaf, propose an
unbalanced division; they are subject to the Fox River's inclination toward unbridled turmoil — also, in some instances, a flowing order. The house sits in the most turbulent part of its site — not like an ideal pavilion — immersed like a stone boat. Our senses are charged with a liberating alertness to the troubling thickness of nature, but a disturbing sense also warns us of nature's suffocating embrace. The Farnsworth House threatens to cast us into the flood. But we do not drown. The Farnsworth House always frames a field of vision, always constructs it, just as our view of nature is always framed, always constructed. A great part of twentieth-century critical thought has been an obsessive assessment of these frames, and Mies disciplined two of the most insidious culprits: technology and perspective. Mies built with glass and steel because they were consensual — the technological achievement of his era that ought not to be avoided. But for him they held no ideal status. Mies employed perspective, but apparently, like technology, he was anxious about working with it. Above all, Mies sited the Farnsworth House so that nature would disarm both culprits — water churns below, forests press from above, and strange sympathies flicker everywhere — and the house both partners with nature and offers a view of it. In the midst of his flood-like century, a period in which he and many others had already lost a great deal, he suggests that if we are to save anything, further losses are necessary. If we could not erase the frames, we could erase the false certainties, and then perhaps we might fleetingly glimpse something closer to truth. As he said in his later years with a monotone, "If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if you view it from the outside."
A truth has sprung from the Farnsworth House. Mies placed this house above the hundred-year flood line: the ones expected once a century. In 1954, and again in 1996, the river level reached six feet above the centennial mark, shattering the glass and devastating the woodwork. Something neither Mies nor Goldsmith had anticipated. The rise in water levels was due to the development of the greater Chicago area. The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently purchased the Farnsworth House but must consider moving it to higher ground. This is indefensible — to move a house is to destroy it. And yet the alternative is also terrifying: a house that bears witness to our ability to look at nature respectfully is now being swallowed by a nature that has been unleashed by our willful ignorance.
Main corridor view View from the bed
View of the river from the north
* The text that follows this title is a translation of a chapter from Michael Cadwell's beautiful and intricate book Strange Details. The three other chapters are devoted to: Chapter 1: The Querini Stampalia Foundation by Carlo Scarpa, published in Memar 144 (Querini Stampalia Foundation). Chapter 2: The Jacobs House by Frank Lloyd Wright, published in Memar 145
(Jacobs House). Chapter 4: The Yale Center for British Art by Louis Kahn
Of course, Nader Tehrani's insightful foreword to this book deserves its own place. In this age of hollow media rhetoric, reading this book is a blessing. If conditions allow, we hope to publish a translation of this book. Editor, Memar Magazine
The Farnsworth House in pictures