[Image: Farnsworth House, September 14, 2008, farnsworthhouse.org /Artwork: designslinger]

You probably think this picture was taken in a Texas community ravaged by the wind and rain of
Hurricane Ike. But, this house is not swimming in water near Houston, it's sitting in the flood waters of the Fox River in Plano, Illinois a suburb of Chicago. The house is built on stilts, that support a platform 5 feet above ground level which sits back from the river bank on a knoll, but with 8 inches of rain in two days the river crested 14 feet above normal and inundated the house. It happens to be one of the masterpieces of modern architecture; Mies van der Rohe's, Farnsworth House.

In 1945, a prominent Chicago physician, the cultured, forward thinking Edith Farnsworth, asked
Mies to design a house for her that she wanted as a weekend retreat. By 1946, Mies was laying out the plans of a structure that would be the clearest expression of his design philosophy to date, pushing the boundaries of architecture and its relation to space. Utilizing the latest advances in construction and materials technology, he sought to create an environment as open and free as possible. His theory was criticized for removing all the romance from architecture, as well as it's humanity, with his doctrinaire "Less Is More," dictum, but his goal was to make architecture less constrictive.

[Images: Farnsworth entrance, suttonhoo via flickr; Side view into kitchen, iaacblog.com /Artwork: designslinger]

Farnsworth and Mies had a tough time of it, which seems to be the story of many an envelope
pushing architect. Frank Lloyd Wright is almost as famous for his life's work as he his for his troubled relationships with clients. But, the good doctor lived in the house until 1972, when the state took over a portion of the property to build a bridge over the river and ruined the retreat part of her weekend. Although they fought over money, she never felt the house didn't live upto her expectations: the open plan, the large expanses of glass, the structural columns finished only in a coat of white paint, perched on the raised platform, gave the house the feeling of being wide open to it's site enclosed by a simple frame. A model of the house was exhibited in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, of which curator and architect Philip Johnson commented:

                                    "The Farnsworth house with its continuous glass walls
                              is an even simpler interpretation of an idea. Here the
                              purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel
                              columns from which it is suspended nor the independent
                              floating terrace break the taut skin.”

[Image: Glass House, about.com /Artwork: designslinger]

Johnson, by the way, took the cage and blew it to smithereens with his own country retreat, the
aptly named Glass House. He had been appointed as the Museum of Modern Art's first Department of Architecture director in 1930, and after going back to Harvard to get his architectural degree, he returned to the museum in 1946. He began laying out the schematic plan of his revolutionary home in 1945, and the house was standing by 1949, two years prior to the Farnsworth. Johnson was an early advocate of modernism in art as well as architecture, and he eventually worked with Mies on one of the most revered commercial buildings in the modern lexicon, the Seagram Building in New York. Johnson pushed the limits of the box beyond anything anyone had ever seen, and as he continued to construct a variety of buildings on his property over the years, which looked less and less like the Glass House and encompassed his change in attitude toward an architectural style he once embraced.

We will probably never see Glass House under water, and hopefully not see the Farnsworth in such
a state again. Unfortunately, the 5 foot platform and set back from the river hasn't stopped water from lapping at its doors before, and the house will be closed to the public at least through the rest of the year. Fortunately, both homes are open for tours so if you're ever in the Chicago area, or out in the Connecticut countryside, try to get out to these two houses and see for yourself if the designers were successful in their endeavor to create a dynamic new approach to the architectural box.

design slinger Update:
Here are the final figures of the auction we mentioned in yesterday's post. Artist Damian Hirst's, "Beautiful Inside My Head," at Sotheby's, garnered $199 million in sales. It set the record for an auction of works by a single artist.