This past Saturday, I fired up the 'rolla and took a long, meandering drive through some handsome corn fields out to Plano, Illinois, to see the Farnsworth House by Mies Van der Rohe. One might consider it a sort of pilgrimage -- Virginia Tech's school of architecture was grounded in the Bauhaus tradition, the pioneering German modernists who found a home in Chicago after fleeing Nazi persecution. The modernists in general, and Bauhaus in specific, have been the subject of much criticism and revisionist history. However, for all its faults, the Farnsworth House is a master lesson in the origins of modern design, a building that dragged architecture, kicking and screaming, into the post-war era.
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| Farnsworth panorama. |
Architecture, especially residential architecture, was once dank, dark, low-ceilinged, unsanitary, and uncomfortable. Expensive glass and masonry structural systems kept windows small, fireplaces kept houses cold, and lack of plumbing kept them dirty. The Farnsworth house, admittedly, was extremely expensive (~$581,000 in today's dollars), but the revolutionary use of light steel structure, huge expanses of glazing, and an open floor plan flooded the house with light and air. Each glass window was ground flat and polished, reducing glare and distortion. You can see through the house; from a distance, you can't tell the glass is even there, and the house disappears into pure planes of white. Inside, the spare interior is well-appointed with only the necessities (it was designed as a weekend retreat), and the raised foundation gives you a sense of floating above the earth as you look out over the Fox River.
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| Perspective shot. |
