Legendary architect Mies van der Rohe was just establishing himself in the U.S. when he took on a private commission to build a glass house in Plano, Illinois, in 1951. It has since become an icon of the International Style of architecture. His client was Dr. Edith Farnsworth, an eminent physician and the subject of a new book. “Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth” is an architectural history in the form of a memoir about author Nora Wendl’s experience researching the history of the Farnsworth House. Wendl is an associate professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico.
NORA WENDL: I had read this article in The New York Times, and the title of it was “Sex and Real Estate,” and it was about the Farnsworth house, glass house. It was in 2003. This was published, and the house was about to be auctioned. And the whole narrative was that Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe had been lovers and like, that was the story that came along with the house. So if you were buying the house, you were also buying this fabulous narrative of the house as a love child. And I remember reading it, thinking, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ And so I got really curious about who this woman was, and a good friend of mine encouraged her family to donate her papers to the Newberry Library, and so I was able to read these memoirs that she left behind that were really about the true story of why she wanted this house in the first place, and included these remarkable poems about living in the house, and led me down the road of finding more about her identity, which was so much richer than I had been led to believe by the sort of typical accounts of the house.
KUNM: Who was she? I’ve heard of Mies van der Rohe, of course, but I’d never heard of her.…