The Glass Room

In the late summer of 2021, we took a long weekend trip through the midwestern United States: Milwaukee, over to Iowa and then back east to Chicago. We went on that vacation to get out of town after just being too long IN town for the middle part of 2021. We ended up unexpectedly falling in love with Milwaukee and got rewarded at the end of it by rekindling our love for Chicago with a couple of nights in one of our favorite cities that we probably don't visit often enough.

On the way from Cedar Rapids to Chicago, we stopped at Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, one of two houses that Mies, who is generally acknowledged as one of the best architects of the 20th century, designed in his life. The Farnsworth House property is now open to the public under the guardianship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

That stop in the Illinois countryside was intended to be the first of a two-part series in late 2021. Three months after that, we were supposed to have visited Mies' second (but earlier) house in Brno, Czechia, the incomparable (or so I assumed) Villa Tugendhat designed for the Tugendhat family between the two World Wars and which is also now open to the public for tours. We didn't go in 2021. COVID pushed our plans a year. But last December we did make it to Brno to complete our Mies doubleheader. Sometimes life makes you wait for the good stuff.

In my post about the Farnsworth House that I wrote about 18 months ago, I started with an account of the emotions of visiting a famous building that I'd admired for a long time and then went on to decry Mies' place in the canon of the greats of modern architecture. I'm going to do no such thing this time for two reasons: (1) I've already covered the emotional part and suffice it to say there was no less excitement or anticipation on our approach to the Villa Tugendhat than there was in Plano, IL in 2021; and (2) the Farnsworth House changed my opinion of Mies; I'm still not on board with him being at the very top of any sorts of lists out there but he has my respect.

The Farnsworth House put me in a very different state of mind for my visit to the Villa Tugendhat. I was very much looking forward to this one.

We actually got lucky with our trip to Villa Tugendhat.

When we finalized (before ultimately postponing) our trip to Vienna in 2021, Villa Tugendhat was one of the first agenda items I added to our itinerary even though it was in a completely different country than Vienna and it was historically off limits behind the Iron Curtain, the very real barrier set up by the Soviet Union after World War II to cut off eastern Europe from the rest of the world. The Iron Curtain turned out to be no barrier in 2022, as I suspect it would have been a similar non-barrier a year earlier. Brno is extremely accessible by train at about an hour's ride from Vienna's Hauptbanhof and the public transportation infrastructure within Brno itself was extremely easy and convenient to use.

But we definitely benefitted from the year's postponement in one very significant way. When we were finalizing the schedule for our trip in 2021, I hemmed and hawed so much with the date that when we nailed down our plans to get to Brno, all the English language tour slots of the Villa were sold out for the duration of our time in Vienna. A year later, I planned better and grabbed a slot as soon as tours for the month of December were added to the calendar. If we hadn't had to postpone the trip by a year, we wouldn't have visited the Villa Tugendhat at all.

Details: door handle, light switches, door stop.

When I committed to writing this post about the Villa Tugendhat, I considered consciously NOT writing a comparison piece between the two Mies-designed houses. It turned out to be virtually impossible to approach this post that way. We are dealing with two houses designed by the same world-famous architect for two wealthy patrons. There is no doubt that the average client would struggle to afford these luxury residences that were created deliberately for their owners as non-traditional living spaces.

Beyond that though, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the two buildings were extremely different. One was a weekend house that slept one in the middle of the country in the United States. The other was a primary residence for a family with two kids, a nanny and a houseful of servants in a city that was destined to be invaded and then freed and then kept hostage by its liberators in and around one of the worst events in human history. The design intent and siting and historical context are night and day.

They were also both very different commissions for the architect involved. The Farnsworth House was very much a side project for Mies (and maybe also for Edith Farnsworth) which he dabbled in while hoping he would have ultimate control over every detail (he didn't!). The commission involved a lot of fighting, a lot of dishonesty (particularly about the construction cost) and ultimately at least one lawsuit from both sides.

Not so with the Villa Tugendhat. The house was a wedding gift from Greta Tugendhat's parents who (it appears from walking through the house) spared no expense. Mies operated without restraint on this one, procuring the most luxurious materials from wherever he wanted. Sure, there were some attempts by Fritz Tugendhat to influence the design (notably the full height doors that Mies insisted on) but those objections soon disappeared when Mies threatened to walk. What is with these architects?

Bathroom (above) and bathroom detail (below).

Edith Farnsworth lived in her Mies van der Rohe-designed weekend house on and off for a little more than 20 years before she sold the place and moved to Italy full time in 1982. The Tugendhats lasted eight years after their house was finished in 1930. They didn't sell. They didn't find a responsible owner to take care of what they had created. They didn't take anything inside the house when they left. They fled. For their lives.

Both Fritz and Greta Tugendhat were Jewish. Admittedly non-practicing but they didn't figure (and they were probably correct) that a detail like that would amount to much in the eyes of the Nazis who took control of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia after the signature of the Munich Agreement in September 1938. They fled to Switzerland and then to Venezuela, abandoning their lives and their property and all connection they had to their pasts. They were probably, all things considered, very lucky they could do that, even as horrific as it might have been to have to leave everything behind and just go. Certainly, Josef and Josefine Eckstein were not as lucky, as we found out when we visited the Beethoven Pasqualithaus museum later in the week.

I think it would be crass to lament the fate of an architectural icon like the Villa Tugendhat following the departure of its owners, particularly considering what the house looks like today, which is very much a fully restored masterpiece. I've certainly been in famous houses that would struggle to live up to the Villa's current condition. So I won't do any lamenting here. But after the Tugendhats left Czechoslovakia, the place did have a bit of a patchwork history.

When the Nazis finally occupied Brno in a semi-permanent way, they moved into the Villa. Later, they turned it over to the Messerschmitt company (the one that made airplanes for the Nazis) where Willy Messerschmitt himself actually lived (Messerschmitt probably saved one of the house's marquee design elements but we'll get to that...). When the Red Army rid Brno of the Nazis, they used the Villa for soldiers' housing. The soldiers quartered there used the Tugendhat's furniture as firewood.

After the war, the house became some things different entirely than the place was intended to be, including a children's physiotherapy center and a dance studio. Ultimately, it survived intact until 1993 when the Friends of the Tugendhat House (which included as a member one Greta Tugendhat) was formed.  They made sure they got involved in preserving the house as a museum, which of course it still is to this date.

Garage (top) and entrance hall with full height rosewood paneling (bottom).

When we got out of our car at the Farnsworth House property in Illinois, we crossed over the Fox River and walked down a wooded path along that same river until the house revealed itself to us. We did no such thing at Villa Tugendhat. Take the bus from central Brno and you are in a neighborhood that looks like it was at one time made up entirely of very similar-looking nineteenth century houses. And most of them, in fact, are still there. Take a right at the end the road and the Villa Tugendhat is obviously there because it is obviously different from all the other houses in the neighborhood. It is clearly non-traditional and in many senses a lot more private that its neighbors. The Villa Tugendhat does not look out over the street it is sited on.

The house itself is upside down. Or maybe not, depending on your perspective. Maybe it's just slid down the hill a bit. You enter on the bedroom level and then go downstairs to the main living floor of the house. Maybe you just enter the house upside down. It's a little odd to go past bedrooms to get to someone's living room, I suppose.

The entrance level of the Villa Tugendhat is interesting but maybe nothing more than that. If there's anything to get excited about here it's the outside terrace that surrounds the bedroom level, with some bedrooms opening directly onto the patio that wraps the house and overlooks the garden and the city of Brno. The view is admittedly spectacular.

I know, I know...I totally just pooh-poohed one half of one of the most lauded Modern architecture residences ever built. It's my blog and that's how I felt.

The Villa Tugendhat master bedroom suite. Two rooms, of course. I mean, why would you sleep with your spouse?

The good stuff is downstairs.

The living level (for lack of a better term here) of the Villa Tugendhat has to be one of the most famous and influential floors of a private residence ever to come out of the 20th century. There are no real rooms on the floor. Space is defined by a series of carefully placed walls and a grid of Mies' famous cruciform columns.

It totally works. 

There are two main seating areas plus a library area and dining area in the main space of the living level. There is also a winter garden flanking one side of the floor. The winter garden and dining area are defined with fairly traditional methods of dividing space, namely a glazed wall and a curved, wood-clad partition. While they don't necessarily relate to the building structure in a traditional way, they nonetheless define space by imposing a barrier that you cannot walk through. It's straightforward and obvious as to what is going on. 

The main seating areas are defined spatially by the chrome-clad, cruciform-shaped columns and the onyx wall that separates the window side of the space from the non-window side (or the side that is buried beneath the street where the main entrance to the property is). It is odd to think that the tiniest corner formed by these mirrored columns can actually define and confine space in any way but it does. These things actually do define corners on the spaces on either side of the wall, which for its part actually extends beyond the column grid. I'm telling you...it totally works.

You also get a sense of the amount of money poured into this residence. The main floor of the Villa Tugendhat is huge. It's about 2,800 square feet, which is almost 20% larger than the entire three-story townhouse that I live in. That's comparing one level of a house with no bedrooms or kitchen to my entire dwelling. It's enormous. The library shelves, relatively inconsequential in terms of the character of the spaces on the floor, are made from Macassar ebony wood, which is sourced from a single island in Indonesia.

But the costliest piece of the entire house is that onyx wall, which is a beige-yellow color at most times but apparently glows a fiery red-orange when the sunlight hits it just right. It came from closer than Indonesia. Mies found the stone in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. The reported price of the onyx was 250,000 Czech Crowns, which at the time the Villa Tugendhat was built was the cost of about five entire homes. One wall in one room cost five times the amount required to purchase a house in the surrounding area. Crazy, right?

After the Tugendhats left the house in 1938, there was a lot in the house that was pillaged and sold or burned so its transient residents could stay warm in the winter. But the onyx wall, which was worth far more than most men could earn in years of work or maybe even a whole lifetime stayed intact. We might have Willy Messerschmitt to thank for that. Seems Willy covered the wall in wood when he left town so that whoever found the house wouldn't be able to see how spectacular and spectacularly valuable that wall was. Turns out it worked. He may have made machines that destroyed a lot of Europe during World War II, but at least he saved a wall made out of stone in a house in Brno.

The very thin and very expensive onyx wall.

Now as an architect I should have gushed the most about the way space is defined on the Villa Tugendhat's main floor. But I'm not going to. The main takeaway from the Villa Tugendhat for me and by far the best thing about the house is window wall and the view and the way that Mies frames that view from the main room.

So, no, I'm not giving the architect credit for the view. Not really. I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's there and it's pretty obvious that the house should be oriented so that you are looking at the view from pretty much anywhere in the house that it can be seen. But I do think you can still appreciate the way that the view is framed and how much the Villa Tugendhat pushed the limits of materials in the 1930s. 

Check out the first picture below. How large is that pane of glass? I struggle to imagine another building either of this house's vintage or anywhere else for that matter with a piece of glazing that size. The view is framed by the floor, the ceiling and as few columns as possible. It's incredible. All the focus is where it should be. Namely...outside.

I know...that pesky horizontal railing gets in the way. BUT that was a later add-on to the house. Mies' original design didn't have any such rail to obscure (no matter how small a distraction it might have been) that amazing vista. The railing, by the way, was added not to prevent someone from walking into the glass, but to prevent someone out of the house itself if the window is open.

You read that right. That ginormous pane of glass opens. By retracting into the floor. This notion in and of itself seems ludicrous but it's true. Those windows open. Down. We didn't get to see them that way. We had no expectation that we would in mid-December. I don't know if they ever open these things for tours. Given the fragile nature of some of the contents of the Villa Tugendhat, I can't imagine they ever do. But the audacity to pull this off is just impressive.

That window wall and what it frames. Spectacular. 

There are shades integral to the exterior wall system to block the sun also. I'd love to see those in action as much as I'd love to see those windows disappear into the floor.

Before we visited the Farnsworth House, I read Alex Beam's book, Broken Glass, detailing the history of the house and the relationship between Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe. When we decided to visit Vienna in 2020, I bought Simon Mawer's book, The Glass Room, and read that in the month or so before we visited the Villa Tugendhat. The Glass Room is not a book about the design and creation of the Villa Tugendhat. Nor is it about Mies van der Rohe or the Tugendhats. Not really. Although it totally is really. 

The book is a work of fiction about a family (the Landauers) living in an avant garde house in Mesto, Czechoslovakia (there is no actual city of Mesto) with their housekeepers and nanny who have to leave behind their house in the face of the advancing Nazi army. While there is an acknowledgment that the house in the book is the Villa Tugendhat (without naming the house itself), the rest of the story is labeled as fiction, right down to the house being used as a dance studio and a children's hospital after the Landauers flee the German army.

It's a great introduction to the house and there are so many parts that mirror the actual history of the house that I found it extremely useful to know so of the history without having checked out how much of the alleged fictional story actually mimicked reality. Simon Mawer does an excellent job in that book and not just with evoking the spirit of that house. There is a lot that is extremely unpleasant in that book to read and I couldn't put down at all. The Villa Tugendhat exceeded my expectations set by the descriptions of the Landauer House, however. It was lighter and brighter and more open than I ever imagined it would be either from reading that book or by learning about the place earlier in my life in architecture school.

My recommendation is if you are anywhere near Brno and you are remotely interested in modern architecture, you should go here.

The Villa Tugendhat winter garden.

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How We Did It

Visiting the Villa Tugendhat likely requires that you make reservations some time ahead of your actual visit via their website. There are two tour options: Basic and Extended. The Basic tour lasts 60 minutes and gets you into the bedroom and living room levels. The Extended tour gets you onto the third level (called the technical floor) which houses some of the back of house spaces including the mechanical spaces and an exhibit about the house. It lasts 30 minutes longer than the Basic. Both tours end up outside in the garden. From there you are on your own and can take as much time as you want looking around the exterior of the Villa. We opted for the Extended Tour (of course we did) which costs as of this writing 400 Czech Crowns per person which is about $18. The Basic tour is 100 Crowns cheaper.

Tours are offered in Czech, English and German and they sell out quickly. If you select the tour you want to take, the website will tell you when that particular date and time is on sale. That's different than how the site operated when we bought our tickets. The current setup seems to allow better planning by indication the exact day and time when tours are on sale.

Photography is not supposed to be permitted on the tour without the purchase of a photography pass which gives you a sticker to wear to indicate you have purchased the right to take pics. I bought one for 300 Crowns but there were plenty of others who didn't buy and still took photographs anyway. Our guide didn't seem interested in enforcing the rule. Call me a sucker for paying when I didn't have to but I'm happy to give the house an additional $14 or so. I'm sure they need it for something. On a sunny day, the house photographs beautifully. I hope that's evident by the pictures on this post.

Getting to the Villa by public transportation is super easy. We walked into the center of Brno from the main train station and then hopped on the Number 9 tram which runs every 10 minutes. It's about a 12 minute ride.

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The Farnsworth House

There is an undeniable and absolutely visceral thrill in visiting a famous work of architecture for the first time. At least there is for me. I'm talking butterflies in the stomach, fanboy type stuff. You turn a city corner or drive down a lane or walk thorough a garden and it's there. That work. Those walls. Those spaces. Those materials. That thing you have looked at in books or magazines or guides and suddenly it's right there in front of you for you to take in. To touch. To feel in your soul. It never gets old. No matter how much or how often or how infrequently I do it. It's exhilarating. 

I've experienced this feeling a lot in my life. I made a promise to myself when I graduated architecture school in early 1994 that I would spend my vacations at least once a year doing this. Seeking out the works of architecture I'd admired most in school and taking everything in. Paris. Finland. Amsterdam. Brussels. All over the United States. Each time, a thrill. A discovery. A confirmation that what I felt looking at pictures in a book was even better in person. Or most times anyway; sometimes (and not often) they disappointed me. But then again sometimes they made me drop to my knees in awe, which is probably a little melodramatic, but it did actually happen once.

I kept this stuff up for a while. I was pretty diligent and committed from 1994 to about 2007. I read guidebooks. I made maps. I lugged a camera all over the place that was way heavier than I would even think about carrying now. I filled eight 3" binders with slides that I rarely look at even though I DO still own a slide projector. Then I ran out of stuff to see. Or got interested in something else. Or maybe a little bit of both. OK, maybe more the latter.

In the years since 2007, I've traveled way wider and further than I ever had before. And in between safaris and walks to ancient Incan citadels and birdwatching and everything else I've been up to, I've managed to pick up some buildings that I missed between '94 and '07. The Maison de Verre in Paris. All of Antoni Gaudí's work in Barcelona. The Pantheon in Rome. Maybe some others.

Talk about a weak knees moment, by the way. My heart about stopped with joy when I found the Pantheon.

There were still some others out there on a mental list, including a probably pretty impractical house designed by Mies van der Rohe for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Illinois, just about 60 miles or so west of Chicago. 

I've had the Farnsworth House on my list for years. I've also visited Chicago at least four times since I started traveling in a serious way twenty seven years ago. I never went there. It seemed too far. But with the world seemingly off limits for travel for most of this year, this seemed like the ideal time to pick off some of my longstanding domestic sites that I'd just never gotten around to visiting. 2021 had to be the year I made it to the Farnsworth House. There was really no good excuse for passing this up for another year. And now...mission accomplished!

I made my way to the Farnsworth House with some pretty strong preconceived notions and none of them were flattering to either the house or the architect. The story of the house likely started as a chance meeting between Dr. Farnsworth and Mies at a party of some sort in the mid-1940s. Dr. Farnsworth was tired of staying in the city on weekends in the summers and longed for a country house where she could escape Chicago for a few days every week. Mies had the answer, one that turned out to be a glass box with precious few walls along the banks of a river prone to flooding. I told you there was bias.

Who does this? Who goes along with such a seemingly preposterous idea? And one that, by the way, ended up costing about 75% more than the desired price. A glass house for a single woman in rural Illinois. Are you kidding me? What is wrong with these clients who agree to these ideas kicked around by the famous architects they hire. I get it a little bit. Maybe I don't have enough money to get it completely. 

I'll also say this: I'm an architect and I don't get why Mies van der Rohe is so revered. He often pops up on lists of the very best architects of the 20th century (usually alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier) and I don't understand it at all. I see no warmth. I see spaces that don't move me. I see skyscrapers with structural columns glued onto the exterior of buildings in a non-structural way and I don't get it. I don't want to touch Mies' buildings, and architects are famous (or infamous) for touching buildings; it makes us feel good somehow. 

But since I'd never been in one of his residences, I thought I should give it a shot. 

The approach to the Farnsworth House, the thing that builds that anticipation of that first view, is pretty much perfect. From the visitor center (obviously not in place during the time Edith Farnsworth owned the place), it is a gentle, half mile walk along, but separated from, the Fox River. The trees conceal the house until you reach the front patio and the place is revealed. I can't give Mies credit for this. Or Edith Farnsworth. Because the walkway was installed by Lord Peter Palumbo, who bought the house from Farnsworth. But it is pretty much perfect. A complete "oh my God, there it is (finally!)" moment.

Or it would be, if the fence surrounding the patio under reconstruction weren't there like it was when we visited. You can still get the sense that this reveal is correct. It would have been spectacular without that construction fencing. And one day, the fencing will go away again.

Two things on that first impression. First, the house seemed heavier than I thought it would. It didn't seem like a glass house. This is an impression that I would continue to have while walking through the house. The intent of the removal of the barrier between outside and in didn't seem to me like it worked. From either the outside or in. I felt inside when I was inside the house and I didn't feel space flowing into the house when I was on the exterior. I felt that the house was a heavy object when I was outside. It's the thickness of the floor and roof slabs, I think.

Second, it seemed way higher off the ground than I thought it would be. I expected a couple of feet. We were told 5'-3". If there's a rub with me and this house, it's the whole flooding thing. The house is notorious for being underwater when it shouldn't be (which is never). I expected the reason the place would be consumed by the Fox River so much was that it was so close to the water and it was so close to the ground. Mies apparently tried pretty hard to get the floor of the house high enough to avoid flooding. The problem was he really relied on rumor and folklore as his science when determining the first floor elevation.

The Farnsworth House awaits!!!

The patio under construction.

The story behind the siting of the Farnsworth House is that Mies really wanted it next a venerable maple tree near the river's edge. The tree would provide shade for the house in summer and protect it from getting too hot. He was advised to site the house further inland on the top of the slope to the street side of the property, but the allure of that maple was too much.

I guess he tried to get it right. He asked around with some local dudes about their memory of how high the river would get. They gave Mies their input: three feet was the answer. Mies erred on the side of caution and made it 5'-3". He missed the mark by about five feet. Yes, the river flooded its banks by about 10 feet one year.

That's FIVE FEET above the floor of the house!!! How do you mess it up that badly? I mean I know the answer to that is in the previous paragraph (he asked the neighbors) but how is checking with some locals the way to get to an answer this critical? The Farnsworth House (to me) is as famous for flooding as it is famous for its design. Major fail!

The irony is that the tree that located the building is gone. Oh well...

The front of the house and the stump of the maple.

Flooding and heaviness. That's what I got. I know my cynicism is showing through right now.

Then I went inside.

First off, let me say that the tour of this house is awesome. You get incredible information. You get a ton of time. And you get to take as many pictures as you want with so few people on the tour that you can really get all the pics you want without any issue. I'm not sure I can say this quite about any other famous house I've visited. I appreciate the access. No shoes and no touching but that's understandable really. This tour is special.

I am astonished to be writing these next words but the interior of this house was one of the best places I have been in years. The flow, the openness, the views, the light. All of that was so impressive. I continue to maintain that the separation between out and in was clearly there (there was no way we were outside when we were inside the Farnsworth House). I saw the glass and the floor elevation as separators from the landscape beyond. It didn't matter. I'm so in love that I would consider buying one of these (without the flooding, of course, and the leaks and the condensation) to hang out in on weekends. If this is supposed to be a weekend house, I buy it. I totally get it.

I can't afford one of these, for the record.

Admittedly, there are some quirks and some mistakes and a little vanity to the place. The porch echoes. It's noticeable when a tour guide is talking to you in there (although he supposed it might be advantageous to Edith Farnsworth's violin playing). The fireplace lacked a hearth originally; the wood just sat on the floor and the ash tended to blow around the place when the door and the two windows in the place were open at the same time (Palumbo fixed that one just like he did the approach to the house). And the kitchen has a custom light fixture designed specifically to show off the world's largest (at the time) stainless steel counter to people on the outside of the house looking in. I mean, why do you need this? why do you need to show off the kitchen counter at night to people looking at the house?

But the scale in the place is right. It seems way smaller on the inside than it does from the outside and this is a good thing. The furniture fits in the place. There's enough space to sit, to read, to relax and to entertain. This seems like a weekend house. Just ignore the flooding.

The kitchen. Check out that countertop.

And the light fixture. To show off the countertop.

It's right...except for the bedroom. I was honestly OK with the whole thing except for the bedroom. It's a weekend house. You have to sleep there. I'm not sure that Mies was really totally accepting of that concept. 

Bedrooms are inherently private. Glass houses are inherently not private. That stainless steel counter lit up to show it off from the outside of the house? About four feet from the location of the bed. And there's no door between the kitchen and bedroom. Or maybe bed area is a better term.

The design of the bed area was a bit of a bone of contention between Mies and Edith Farnsworth, apparently. Mies had this vision of no walls but eventually caved and agreed on a wardrobe that would stop well short of the ceiling to (in a sort of a limited way) cordon off the bed area from the rest of the house. They argued about the height of that wardrobe (Mies insisted on five feet which was not as tall as Dr. Farnsworth) before she worked around him and agreed to the wardrobe but got one of his associates to design it taller. 

I really can't imagine sleeping in the bed area comfortably, and that's coming from a grown man in 2021. I know it was originally a nine acre estate that was later expanded to triple that size and I also know there was not supposed to be anyone outside looking in (despite the whole kitchen light fixture thing), but there is so little keeping that area private. Maybe it's just me.

Private? Not exactly. The bathroom was way bigger than I expected.

So...overall despite the flooding and the privacy in the bedroom thing, I'm thumbs up on this one. I know..it's crazy. I'm crazy! But I can completely understand why Mies thinks he got this one right. The place is really pretty stunning. I'm actually very impressed. And that was on a visit with the terrace under construction. Not only did that issue affect the entry sequence, it also added the wooden stair shown in the second picture of this post which is decidedly NOT part of the permanent house. I'm on board. I'm shocked.

Now, I wouldn't be an architect if I didn't say a little something about some of the details. So here goes.

One of the more celebrated details of the house is the connection between the vertical columns and the horizontal floor and roof planes. This connection is a welded steel to steel connection and welded connections show. Which of course Mies didn't want. He wanted the column and beam / floor to appear to be magically glued together, so he made the workers grind the welds down until the connection was pretty much invisible. He got his way. It looks the way he wanted.

Detail #2: If we were disappointed by the ongoing reconstruction of the terrace (and we were), at least we got to check out the thickness (or thinness) of the travertine marble slabs laid on the terrace (and throughout the whole house for that matter). They are remarkably thin. We found them stacked on the tennis court. The 70 year old travertine looked way better than the tennis court did.

Finally, there is no picture that I have ever seen of the Farnsworth House that shows how sewage leaves the place. I mean it's more than five feet off the surface of the Earth, right? But sure enough, there's a concrete cylinder below the house that contains all the services in to and out of the house. It has to be there; it's just never shown in pictures, that's all.

Welded connection. Or is it?

Travertine. It's thin, right? I think it is.

Despite my generally positive review of the place (admittedly some of it due to the almost unrestricted access to the property on our tour), the coming together of the Farnsworth House was not a painless process. Design started in 1946 with a promised $40,000 budget (that's about 1/10 of 2021 dollars) and the house wasn't ready for occupation until the absolute last day of 1950 (how cold was that first night?). And with a $70,000 price tag.

Mies eventually sued Edith Farnsworth and she eventually sued him back. She lost. Or more accurately, she ended up having to pay him $1,500. But they probably both really lost. There is an introductory video played at the beginning of the Farnsworth House tour. During that video there is a quote attributed to Dr. Farnsworth that goes "My house is a monument to Mies van der Rohe. And I'm paying for it." 

She's probably mostly right. There are not a lot of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe houses out there (the Tugendhat House in Czechia sticks out as another one but I can't say I can think of any others). He's different from some of his contemporaries in that regard. This one got some things very wrong, but it also got some things really right. And sure, she paid for it, but it's also in some ways a monument to her, not that she likely wanted that. But it took both of them to make this house.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation (which owns the house today) decided that they would (at least for 2021) stage the house as Edith Farnsworth, and not Mies, wanted it. Like most architects, Mies was a control freak, and tended not to tolerate anything about his buildings that was not the way he intended, including the objects and furniture placed within. 

I tend to disagree with the master here and go with the client. We should have furniture in our houses that makes us feel comfortable, not that which looks best in the eyes of the architect. We should also be able to hang whatever we want on the walls. After all, we paid for it. I love the objects in Edith Farnsworth's weekend house. For posterity and as a close to this post, I'm including below the key to the objects on display when we were there. This is some pretty good stuff. Both Mies and Edith Farnsworth should be proud of what they did here. It's too bad that the process was so difficult.

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How We Did It

The Farnsworth House is located in Plano, Illinois about a 55 mile drive west and a bit south from Chicago. The National Trust for Historic Preservation operates a series of different tours, (including in depth, grounds-only, seasonal and nighttime tours) Wednesday through Sunday at various times. Check their website for all the options. We took the "Guided Tour of the EFCH" and it was thoroughly awesome. Photographs are allowed. Or at least they are with an iPhone. I'd suggest a reservation in advance because I always have reservations. It just prevents the off chance of huge disappointment.

Earlier this year, I read Alex Beam's book, Broken Glass, which is an account of the relationship between Dr. Farnsworth and Mies and the story of the design and construction of the house and the ensuing lawsuits. I read it right after the new year and it made me determined to visit. It worked!

Finally, there's a field of soybeans right next to the visitor center parking lot. From afar, they looked like a field of flowers somewhere in some European country. I thought they looked awesome, so I took a pic and made it the cover of this blog post. 

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