Mies van der Rohe - Farnsworth house.pdf - architecture and interior design - adzia-kozica

Foreword

Lord Peter Palumbo

silhouette of the leaves in sharp relief upon the curtain. It is a

scene no Japanese print could capture to greater effect.

People ask me how practical Farnsworth is to live in. As a

home for a single person, it performs extremely well. It was

never intended for anything else. The size of its single room,

55 ft by 28 ft, is a guarantee of its limitations. On the other hand,

for short periods of time it is possible to sleep three people in

comfort and privacy. This is a measure of the flexibility of the

space, and indeed it would be odd if this were not so, for

flexibility is a hallmark of Mies's work.

I believe that houses and structures are not simply inanimate

objects, but have a 'soul' of their own, and the Farnsworth

House is no exception. Before owning the house I had always

imagined that steel and glass could not possess this quality -

unlike brick, for example, which is a softer, more porous

material that seems to absorb as well as emanate a particular

atmosphere. But steel and glass are equally responsive to the

mood of the moment. The Farnsworth House is equable by

inclination and nature. It never frowns. It is sometimes sad, but

rarely forlorn. Most often it smiles and chuckles, especially

when it is host to children's laughter and shouts of delight. It

seems to eschew pretension and to welcome informality.

Living in the house I have gradually become aware of a very

special phenomenon: the man-made environment and the

natural environment are here permitted to respond to, and to

interact with, each other. While this may deviate from the

dogma of Rousseau or the writings of Thoreau, the effect is

essentially the same: that of being at one with Nature, in its

broadest sense, and with oneself.

If the start of the day is important, so is the finish. That tone

and quality of light shared with Cannery Row is seldom more

evident than at dusk, with its graduations of yellow, green, pink

and purple. At such times, one can see forever and with

astonishing clarity. Sitting outside on the upper deck one feels

like the lotus flower that floats in the water and never gets wet.

In November, a harvest moon rises slowly behind the tree-line,

as if giving a seal of approval to the day that has just gone by.

Later on, in January, when the winter snows have begun to fall

and the landscape is transformed, cars sweep silently past the

property along frozen roads, and the magical stillness of the

countryside is broken only by the plangent barking of a dog,

perhaps three miles distant.

The Farnsworth House has this in common with Cannery Row

in Monterey, California: it is a poem, a quality of light, atone, a

habit, a nostalgia, a dream. It has about it, also, an aura of high

romance. The die for the romance was cast from the moment

Mies van der Rohe decided to site the house next to the great

black sugar maple - one of the most venerable in the county -

that stands immediately to the south, within a few yards of the

bank of the Fox River. The rhythms created by the juxtaposition

of the natural elements and the man-made object can be seen

at a glance - tree bending over house in a gesture of caress, a

never-ending love affair - and felt - when the leaves of the tree

brush the panes of glass on the southern elevation. In summer,

the dense foliage of the sugar maple shields the house from the

torrid heat and ensures its privacy from the river.

With its glass walls suspended on steel pilot! almost two

metres above the flood plain of the meadow, life inside the

house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of

nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape

creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With

an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the

night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very

core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting

of the snows in spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent

that bursts its banks, the house assumes the character of a

house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to

the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house

is by canoe, which is tied up to the steps of the upper terrace.

The overriding quality of the Farnsworth House is one of

serenity. It is a very quiet house. I think this derives from the

ordered logic and clarity of the whole, from the way in which

the house has been lovingly crafted, and from the sensitive

juxtaposition of fine materials. Anxiety, stress or sheer fatigue

drop away almost overnight, and problems that had seemed

insoluble assume minor proportions after the 'therapy' exerted

by the house has washed over them for a few hours.

The start of the day is very important to me. At Farnsworth,

the dawn can be seen or sensed from the only bed in the

house, which is placed in the northeast corner. The east

elevation of the house tends to be a bit poker-faced - the dawn

greets the house more than the house welcomes the dawn.

Shortly after sunrise the early morning light, filtering through the

branches of the linden tree, first dapples and then etches the

In a low-lying meadow beside the Fox River at Piano, Illinois,

stands a serene pavilion of glass, steel and travertine.

When built it was unlike any known house, and a description

written by the American critic Arthur Drexler soon after its

completion in 1951 captures its essence: The Farnsworth

House consists of three horizontal planes: a terrace, a floor,

and a roof. Welded to the leading edge of each plane are steel

columns which keep them all suspended in mid-air. Because

they do not rest on the columns, but merely touch them in

passing, these horizontal elements seem to be held to their

supports by magnetism. Floor and roof appear as opaque

planes defining the top and bottom of a volume whose sides are

simply large panels of glass. The Farnsworth House is, indeed,

a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof."

In spring the pavilion stands on a carpet of daffodils, in

summer upon a green meadow, in autumn amid the glow of

golden foliage; and when the adjacent river overflows the house

resembles a boat floating on the great expanse of water. It is in

effect a raised stage from which an entranced viewer may not

merely observe ever-changing nature, but almost experience

the sensation of being within it.

It is Mies van der Rohe's last realized house, built to provide a

cultivated and well-to-do urbanite with a quiet retreat where she

could enjoy nature and recover from the cares of work.

The rural escape for busy city-dwellers has a long history,

either as country villa 2 or, more modestly, as the simple shooting

or fishing lodge. 3 But while its function was fairly well estab-

lished in architectural tradition, the form and appearance of

The Farnsworth House: a pavilion in

a meadow

Gropius and Breuer's Chamberlain

House (1940) and

Rudolph and Twitchell's Healy Guest

House (1948-50), both cabins -on-

stilts designed at roughly the same

time as the Farnsworth House

Mies's first built house, the Riehl

House of 1907

Two contrasting examples of Miesian

design in the 1920s:

The Hermann Lange House of 1927-

30, which is solid and block-like

The Barcelona Pavilion of 1928-9,

which is transparent and pavilion-like

Farnsworth House went to the extremes of modernism, neatly

inverting (as we shall see) most of the architectural devices

developed over the past 2,500 years.

In view of its status as an architectural landmark we should

try to locate this luculent design in two contexts - one personal

(the Farnsworth House as the culmination of the architect's 40-

year sequence of continually-evolving house designs) and the

other much wider (the Farnsworth House as an ultimate icon of

that strand of European modernism that became known as the

International Style) - before going on to more practical matters

such as why the house was built, how it was built, and how it

has performed.

A consummation of Miesian design

At first sight Mies's first and last built houses, the Riehl House of

1907 and the Farnsworth House of 40 years later, could hardly

be more different. Beneath the contrasting appearances,

though, there is a recognizable continuity of design approach.

From first to last there shines through Mies's work a dignified

serenity, a concern for regularity and orderliness, and a

precision of detailing that are just as important as the obvious

differences seen in successive stages of his work.

These differences were not capricious but reflect a continuous

and sustained effort - particularly after about 1920 - to

eliminate what the earnest Mies saw as inessentials and to distil

his buildings to some kind of irreducible architectonic essence

of the age."

While it is always a mistake to impose an unduly neat 'line of

development' on the complex, uncertain and partly accidental

career of any designer, as though each successive work repre-

sented a calculated step towards a clearly foreseen goal,

hindsight does allow us to divide Mies's development into three

recognizable phases. The first was pre-1919, when his designs

were invariably solid, regular and soberly traditional. The

second covered the years 1919-38, when he began to

experiment (though only in some of his designs) with such

entrancing novelties as irregular plans, interiors designed as

continuous flowing fields rather than separate rooms, extreme

horizontal transparency, and floating floor and roof planes. The

third was post-1938, when he returned to the classicism and

sobriety of his earlier years, but expressed now in steel-framed

buildings rather than solid masonry, and incorporating the

transparency and (in some of the pavilions) emphatic horizon-

tality developed in his avant-garde projects of the 1920s.

The first of these formative periods had its roots in Mies's

youth in Aachen where, the son of a master mason, he came to

love the town's historic buildings. He later recalled that 'few of

them were important buildings. They were mostly very simple,

but very clear. I was impressed by the strength of these buildings

because they did not belong to any epoch. They had been there

for over a thousand years and were still impressive, and nothing

could change that. All the great styles passed, but they were

still there ... as good as on the day they were built.' 5

This early affinity with sober clarity was confirmed in 1907

when he visited Italy and was deeply impressed by his first

sight of Roman aqueducts, the heroic ruins of the Basilica of

Constantine, and in particular the bold stonework facade of the

Palazzo Pitti with its cleanly-cut window openings, of which he

said: 'You see with how few means you can make architecture-

and what architecture!' 6

And it crystallized into coherent principle when in 1912, on

a visit to the Netherlands, Mies encountered the work of

Hendrik Petrus Berlage. He was particularly struck by Berlage's

Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1903), an outstanding example of

the 'monolothic' way of building - that is to say one in which the

materials of construction are nakedly displayed (like the marble

components of Greek temples), in contradiction to the layered'

approach where basic materials are covered by more sophis-

ticated claddings (like the walls of Roman architecture). The

Stock Exchange walls are of unplastered brickwork inside and

out, and the roof trusses completely exposed, so that there is

no distinction between what is structure and what is finish,

or between what is structure and what is architecture. 7 Mies

later recollected that it was at that point 'that the idea of a clear

construction came to me as one of the fundamentals we should

accept.' 8 What especially appealed to him was Berlage's 'careful

construction that was honest down to the bone', forming the

basis, as Mies saw it, of 'a spiritual attitude [that] had nothing to

do with classicism, nothing to do with historic styles.' 8

Between these mutually reinforcing experiences in Aachen,

Italy and Amsterdam there was a somewhat different influence

- that of the German neo-classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel,

whose works Mies came to know while working in the Berlin

studio of Peter Behrens between 1908 and 1912. 1 0 Mies did

not particularly admire Schinkel's early work, which to him

represented the end of a past era, but he considered that the

Bauakademie of 1831-5 'introduced a new epoch'. The lessons

he absorbed from Schinkel were concerned less with honest

construction (though the facades of the Kaufhaus project of

1827 and the later Bauakademie did reflect their underlying

structures with notable clarity) than with architectonic

composition. His compositional borrowings from Schinkel

included a tendency to place buildings on raised platforms to

create a sense of noble repose; a stern sobriety of architectural

form; highly regular spacing and careful proportioning of facade

elements; and an exceptional clarity of articulation, with the

separate elements of the building clearly differentiated.' 1

Seminal influences on Mies:

The bold, sharply-incised stone

facade of the Palazzo Pitti in

Florence, 1435

The rude honesty of Berlage:

Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1903

The compositional discipline of

Schinkel: the Altes Museum in Berlin

1822-8

Here, then, were two complementary influences that would

preoccupy Mies for the rest of his life - a Berlage-like affinity

with 'honesty' that led him to theorize that building form should

be determined by the structural problem being solved, and the

materials employed, and not by abstract rules of composition; 1 2

counter-balanced by a Schinkelesque love of classical form

that led him in the converse direction, yearning to develop

architectural forms of abstracted perfection. He was aware of

the conflict, saying in 1966: 'After Berlage I had to fight with

myself to get away from the classicism of Schinkel" 3 - a battle

he seems largely to have lost, with the compositional

sophistication of Schinkel generally prevailing over the rude

honesty of Berlage. 1 4

Had his development stopped at that point, Mies might have

spent the rest of his career as a consummate designer of

somewhat blocky buildings characterized by clarity, regularity

and discipline (derived from Schinkel); making increasing use of

exposed brickwork (inspired by Berlage); and showing also the

powerful forms and glassiness of Peter Behrens" 5 and the open

interiors, powerful outward thrust and emphatic horizontality of

Frank Lloyd Wright. 1 6

It took years of digestion before 'inputs' became 'outputs'

with the gradually-developing Mies; and while some of the

above characteristics are indeed visible in the severe

monumentality of the Bismarck Memorial (1910) and Kroller

House (1912) projects, others were only to appear much later.

One thinks for instance of the fluid interior and outward-

thrusting composition of the Brick Country House project

(1923-4), and of the cubic forms and immaculately-detailed

brickwork of the Wolf (1925-7), Esters (1927-30) and Lange

(1927-30) houses. These designs are especially notable for

their Berlage-like use of weighty, unplastered brickwork walls

at a time when European modernism strove mostly for a

smooth, white, lightweight appearance.

After returning from military service in January 1919, Mies

underwent an astonishing transformation, and began a distinct

second developmental phase. Berlin was then in a ferment of

avant-garde activity, both political and artistic; Mies was

willingly caught up in these movements," and in 1921 he began

to produce a sequence of projects that bore little resemblance

to anything he (or indeed anyone else) had done before. These

designs, manifesto-like in their vivid clarity, helped to change

the face of twentieth-century architecture, and their influence

would be unmistakably visible in the later Farnsworth House.

His experiments from 1919-38 involved progressive trans-

formations of the kind of space that is shaped by architecture,

and of the kind of structure that helps do the shaping.

The Glass Skyscraper project of 1922 (figure 10), with its

open interiors and transparent envelope and its clear distinction

between structure (slim columns and hovering slabs) and

claddings (a diaphonous skin), presents a vivid illustration of

Mies's spatial and structural ideas. 1 8 But this project is an office

building, and the specific antecedents of the Farnsworth House

are more appropriately traced in his house designs, so it is to

those that we must turn.

Looking then at Mies's development in the specific context

of house design, his spatial ideas may be summarized as

follows. First he started to dissolve the interior subdivisions of

the dwelling, moving away from the box-like rooms of traditional

western architecture towards more open interiors - the latter

probably showing the intertwined influences of Frank Lloyd

Wright, the Japanese house" and the De Stijl movement. 2 '

The first hints of this progressive opening-up and thinning-out

of the interior appear in the unrealized Brick Country House

project. Its Berlage-like brick walls, while as solidly-built and

densely-packed as those of the past, are loosely arranged to

suggest rather than enclose a series of doorless spaces that

substituted for rooms. 2 1 The idea is partly realized in the

1928-30 Tugendhat House, whose main floor is opened up to

become a single space within which dining, living and study

areas are lightly suggested by screens of maccassar ebony,

onyx and translucent glass. The final step, via a series of unbuilt

projects, 2 Z is the Farnsworth House which has no full-height

internal subdivisions except for a service core enclosing

separate bathrooms and a utility room.

Parallel to the above process Mies also started to dissolve

the boundary between inside and outside. The plan of the

unbuilt Brick Country House, while clearly influenced by Frank

Lloyd Wright, 2 3 opens out into the site in a way unprecedented

in western architecture. The Glass Room at the Werkbund

Exhibition of 1927 uses glass walls to reduce the distinction

between inside and outside. And finally came the 1928-9

Barcelona Pavilion, an assembly of free-standing partitions

under a floating roof in which it is quite impossible to say at

Mies van der Rohe - Farnsworth house.pdf

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