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### URL
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## Media
### Floorplan
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### Title
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## Skin
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### Label
Label_72F07F94_2D47_0F01_41B0_38F28AA31C7B_mobile.text = Art Deco Idealism
Label_72F07F94_2D47_0F01_41B0_38F28AA31C7B.text = Art Deco Idealism
Label_6FCB5179_1542_F1E1_419D_F08770830D41.text = Edith's Experience
Label_6FCB5179_1542_F1E1_419D_F08770830D41_mobile.text = Edith's Experience
### Multiline Text
HTMLText_1CD9AC4D_126D_9942_419F_278A8BEAE567.html = Click on the ground to navigate
Click on the ground to navigate
Hold down left mouse button to look around
Hold down left mouse button to look around
Switch between
Art Deco Idealism &
Edith's Experience
Switch between
Art Deco Idealism &
Edith's Experience
A BROKEN STOVE
Want to cook something? Visit the bathroom.
“[…] the bare minimum of gadgets and possessions so as not to spoil the “clean” look…no children, no dogs, extremely meager kitchen facilities—nothing human that might disturb the architect’s composition.”
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 233). Random House Publishing Group.
FANS
Airflow needed
“As would become clear shortly after Edith moved in, certain elementary measures of mechanical engineering had either been overlooked or underemphasized.
The house needed two separate boilers, for the forced-air heating and hot water systems, and a total of three fans to properly distribute warm air in the winter.
Condensation—and worse—collected on the plate glass walls because no warm air flowed upward or downward along their planes in winter.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 148). Random House Publishing Group.
FIREPLACE I
Purely for looks
“Then there was the fireplace.
'Mies wanted the logs to burn directly on the floor itself. But why use the beautiful travertine floor?'
Good question. Mies had backed off this scheme and installed a more conventional firebox and chimney.
'Another thing,' Farnsworth reported, 'I have to watch that my guests don't light the fire when I'm not looking, or we'll have smoke everywhere.'
'This "beautiful" glass cage is so tightly built that you have to open the door in order to get enough air for the draft in the fireplace. In the winter, you let more cold in than you get warm air from the fire.'"
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 236). Random House Publishing Group.
FIREPLACE II
Jacques Herzog's critique
“To me, this is not a fireplace. What does this have to do with fire?
Fire would have been a friend of the person living here, but the way this [hearth] is half open like a lavado or a sink...this is not what I expect for such an iconic building....
Maybe he was just not that interested in that part, the way it disappears here on the side."
[...] "You cannot use this house except as a museum.
It's so expensive to maintain; it's like a patient in the hospital, in the emergency clinic.”
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 277). Random House Publishing Group.
HEATERS I
Poor climate design, even for the 1950s
“You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the "pure" form of their rectangles—no overhanging roofs...the bare minimum of gadgets and possessions so as not to spoil the "clean" look...no children, no dogs, extremely meager kitchen facilities—nothing human that might disturb the architect's composition. ”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 233). Random House Publishing Group.
HEATERS II
Want to cook something? Visit the bathroom.
“In her memoir, Edith recalled her friends 'who were outside the charmed circle' criticizing Mies’s invisible insulation: 'You’ll lose heat through all sides of your glass box!' they insisted.
'He could at least insulate the floors and ceilings.' There was, of course, a layer of insulation in both the floor and the ceiling panels, which didn’t stop Edith from complaining mightily about her heating bills, which were considerable. (She paid $668 from the fall of 1951 until the spring of 1952—more than $6,000 today). Dick Young remembered 'her complaints about the outrageous expense of having to heat the whole Fox River valley.'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 182). Random House Publishing Group.
HIDDEN FURNITURE
The house comes first
“I don’t keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole ‘kitchen’ from the road on the way in here and the can would spoil the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet farther down from the sink.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 237). Random House Publishing Group.
HIDDEN ITEMS
Free space comes at a cost
“Mies talks about his ‘free space’: but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem, because the house is transparent, like an X-ray.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 237). Random House Publishing Group.
HOT PLATE
Over budget, under prepared
“Before the kitchen was fully functional, Farnsworth reported heating a can of soup on a hot plate in the bathroom during one of her visits.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 180). Random House Publishing Group.
ROOF LEAK I
“I don’t solve mechanical problems.” - Mies
“Inside, however, I found the floor covered with water. The wood veneer of the core showed a high-water mark an inch or two above the floor, and the shantung folds which enclosed the entire house hung, stained and soaked, from their aluminum tracks overhead.
Thunderstruck, I took off my shoes and waded around to check the possibility of a leak in the plumbing, but there was none, and it soon became clear that the water came from above, not below, and not from one point but from the entire periphery of the roof.
When the heating and plumbing man arrived, we set up the ladder and went up onto the roof which I examined then for the first time. It was a flat tarpaper and gravel covering with a slight pitch directed not toward peripheral gutters but to a pipe downspout leading down through the core to the ground below the house.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 206). Random House Publishing Group.
ROOF LEAK II
“I don’t solve mechanical problems.” - Mies
“Around the outer edge the tarpaper had been cut off where it reached the border or ornamental steel and in the absence of flashing, had responded to a half-year of weathering by bubbling and retracting.
We found a defect broad enough to admit a finger, which extended all around the structure and had provided for the destruction of the hundreds of yards of shantung which curtained off the interior.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 206). Random House Publishing Group.
STEAMY WINDOWS
A blurry boundary between inside and outside
“The windows steam up in the winter and drive you crazy. You feel as though you are in a car in the rain with a windshield wiper that doesn't work.
This great 'freedom' Mies's disciples are always talking about has created nothing but great problems for me. Indeed there was no thought of me at any time.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 235). Random House Publishing Group.
UNWELCOME VISITORS I
Free Space goes both ways
“During construction, and during the period of goodwill between Edith and Mies, architects and architectural students routinely visited the construction site, often at Mies's invitation. But even with Mies out of the picture, the Farnsworth House groupies, responding to the rapturous reviews in the professional journals, kept coming.
'They thumbed their way tirelessly aboard my distress and my exposure behind glass walls, to whatever satisfactions they were seeking,' Edith wrote.
'Shirts fluttered from behind trees, cameras clicked, and heads encircled my 'sleeping space' as I woke up in the morning....'
't was hard to bear the insolence, the boorishness, of the hundreds of persons who invaded the solitude of my shore and my home, and I never could see why it should have to be borne. It was maddening and heart-breaking to find the wild flowers and ground covers so laboriously, brought in to hide the scars of building, battered and crushed by the boots beneath the noses pressed against the glass.'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 174). Random House Publishing Group.
UNWELCOME VISITORS II
An argument with Ronald Krueck
"Edith comes out and tells us to go away. She was rather insistent. 'Go away!' she said, 'You don't know what it's like living in a house and having eyes staring back at you.'
'I yelled back at her, and soon we were screaming at one another, from two-hundred feet away. 'You shouldn't build a house like this if that's your concern!'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 175). Random House Publishing Group.
UTILITIES
Noisy mechanics
“In the summer the air gets very hot and stuffy. The only natural ventilation comes from both ends of the house--there is no ventilation from any of the sides, although they are completely glass. We need an air-filtering system, but there is no longer room in the utility core....The noise is enormous. You hear the furnaces kicking on and off, the blower exhaust going, everything at work. The costs of heating is incredible. (Mies doesn't believe in themopane or double glass.)”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 236). Random House Publishing Group.
Edith Farnsworth House
Dissonance: Ideal Visions and Somber Reality
As a paragon of 20th-century Modernism, the Farnsworth House stands as a textbook case study for both designers and 3D artists alike. The simplicity of the scene serves as a classic spatial exercise that has inspired many recreations. Mies van der Rohe’s vision of free space offers a template for designers to build upon, allowing multiple disciplines to interpret the space with a variety of aesthetic approaches.
To this end, we developed an art déco rendition to showcase our own interior design interests while exhibiting Mies’ idealist free space.
Architectural history, however, tends to end with a building’s occupation—and this was especially true for the retelling of this house’s story.
A lesser known aspect of this home is the distaste that its original owner, Edith Farnsworth, had for both its design process and its overwhelming popularity following completion. This was recently acknowledged by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2021, as they officially renamed the “Farnsworth House” to the “Edith Farnsworth House” to highlight her involvement and importance to the project’s legacy.
As a team of visual storytellers, we believe that Edith’s story deserves greater recognition.
Drawing from Alex Beam’s book Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece (2020), we created a concurrent tour interpreting Edith Farnsworth’s lived experience with the home and the many problems she encountered.
We hope that this visual narrative exercise may offer a lesson in tempering grand visions with empathy, as it is so often in modern design that a project’s concept can overshadow human considerations.
A BROKEN STOVE
Want to cook something? Visit the bathroom.
“[…] the bare minimum of gadgets and possessions so as not to spoil the “clean” look…no children, no dogs, extremely meager kitchen facilities—nothing human that might disturb the architect’s composition.”
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 233). Random House Publishing Group.
FANS
Airflow needed
“As would become clear shortly after Edith moved in, certain elementary measures of mechanical engineering had either been overlooked or underemphasized.
The house needed two separate boilers, for the forced-air heating and hot water systems, and a total of three fans to properly distribute warm air in the winter.
Condensation—and worse—collected on the plate glass walls because no warm air flowed upward or downward along their planes in winter.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 148). Random House Publishing Group.
FIREPLACE I
Purely for looks
“Then there was the fireplace.
'Mies wanted the logs to burn directly on the floor itself. But why use the beautiful travertine floor?'
Good question. Mies had backed off this scheme and installed a more conventional firebox and chimney.
'Another thing,' Farnsworth reported, 'I have to watch that my guests don't light the fire when I'm not looking, or we'll have smoke everywhere.'
'This "beautiful" glass cage is so tightly built that you have to open the door in order to get enough air for the draft in the fireplace. In the winter, you let more cold in than you get warm air from the fire.'"
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 236). Random House Publishing Group.
FIREPLACE II
Jacques Herzog's critique
“To me, this is not a fireplace. What does this have to do with fire?
Fire would have been a friend of the person living here, but the way this [hearth] is half open like a lavado or a sink...this is not what I expect for such an iconic building....
Maybe he was just not that interested in that part, the way it disappears here on the side."
[...] "You cannot use this house except as a museum.
It's so expensive to maintain; it's like a patient in the hospital, in the emergency clinic.”
- Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 277). Random House Publishing Group.
HEATERS I
Poor climate design, even for the 1950s
“You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the "pure" form of their rectangles—no overhanging roofs...the bare minimum of gadgets and possessions so as not to spoil the "clean" look...no children, no dogs, extremely meager kitchen facilities—nothing human that might disturb the architect's composition. ”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 233). Random House Publishing Group.
HEATERS II
Want to cook something? Visit the bathroom.
“In her memoir, Edith recalled her friends 'who were outside the charmed circle' criticizing Mies’s invisible insulation: 'You’ll lose heat through all sides of your glass box!' they insisted.
'He could at least insulate the floors and ceilings.' There was, of course, a layer of insulation in both the floor and the ceiling panels, which didn’t stop Edith from complaining mightily about her heating bills, which were considerable. (She paid $668 from the fall of 1951 until the spring of 1952—more than $6,000 today). Dick Young remembered 'her complaints about the outrageous expense of having to heat the whole Fox River valley.'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 182). Random House Publishing Group.
HIDDEN FURNITURE
The house comes first
“I don’t keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole ‘kitchen’ from the road on the way in here and the can would spoil the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet farther down from the sink.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 237). Random House Publishing Group.
HIDDEN ITEMS
Free space comes at a cost
“Mies talks about his ‘free space’: but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem, because the house is transparent, like an X-ray.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 237). Random House Publishing Group.
HOT PLATE
Over budget, under prepared
“Before the kitchen was fully functional, Farnsworth reported heating a can of soup on a hot plate in the bathroom during one of her visits.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 180). Random House Publishing Group.
ROOF LEAK I
“I don’t solve mechanical problems.” - Mies
“Inside, however, I found the floor covered with water. The wood veneer of the core showed a high-water mark an inch or two above the floor, and the shantung folds which enclosed the entire house hung, stained and soaked, from their aluminum tracks overhead.
Thunderstruck, I took off my shoes and waded around to check the possibility of a leak in the plumbing, but there was none, and it soon became clear that the water came from above, not below, and not from one point but from the entire periphery of the roof.
When the heating and plumbing man arrived, we set up the ladder and went up onto the roof which I examined then for the first time. It was a flat tarpaper and gravel covering with a slight pitch directed not toward peripheral gutters but to a pipe downspout leading down through the core to the ground below the house.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 206). Random House Publishing Group.
ROOF LEAK II
“I don’t solve mechanical problems.” - Mies
“Around the outer edge the tarpaper had been cut off where it reached the border or ornamental steel and in the absence of flashing, had responded to a half-year of weathering by bubbling and retracting.
We found a defect broad enough to admit a finger, which extended all around the structure and had provided for the destruction of the hundreds of yards of shantung which curtained off the interior.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 206). Random House Publishing Group.
STEAMY WINDOWS
A blurry boundary between inside and outside
“The windows steam up in the winter and drive you crazy. You feel as though you are in a car in the rain with a windshield wiper that doesn't work.
This great 'freedom' Mies's disciples are always talking about has created nothing but great problems for me. Indeed there was no thought of me at any time.”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 235). Random House Publishing Group.
UNWELCOME VISITORS I
Free Space goes both ways
“During construction, and during the period of goodwill between Edith and Mies, architects and architectural students routinely visited the construction site, often at Mies's invitation. But even with Mies out of the picture, the Farnsworth House groupies, responding to the rapturous reviews in the professional journals, kept coming.
'They thumbed their way tirelessly aboard my distress and my exposure behind glass walls, to whatever satisfactions they were seeking,' Edith wrote.
'Shirts fluttered from behind trees, cameras clicked, and heads encircled my 'sleeping space' as I woke up in the morning....'
't was hard to bear the insolence, the boorishness, of the hundreds of persons who invaded the solitude of my shore and my home, and I never could see why it should have to be borne. It was maddening and heart-breaking to find the wild flowers and ground covers so laboriously, brought in to hide the scars of building, battered and crushed by the boots beneath the noses pressed against the glass.'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 174). Random House Publishing Group.
UNWELCOME VISITORS II
An argument with Ronald Krueck
"Edith comes out and tells us to go away. She was rather insistent. 'Go away!' she said, 'You don't know what it's like living in a house and having eyes staring back at you.'
'I yelled back at her, and soon we were screaming at one another, from two-hundred feet away. 'You shouldn't build a house like this if that's your concern!'"
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 175). Random House Publishing Group.
UTILITIES
Noisy mechanics
“In the summer the air gets very hot and stuffy. The only natural ventilation comes from both ends of the house--there is no ventilation from any of the sides, although they are completely glass. We need an air-filtering system, but there is no longer room in the utility core....The noise is enormous. You hear the furnaces kicking on and off, the blower exhaust going, everything at work. The costs of heating is incredible. (Mies doesn't believe in themopane or double glass.)”
Beam, Alex. Broken Glass (p. 236). Random House Publishing Group.
Edith Farnsworth House
Dissonance: Ideal Visions and Somber Reality
As a paragon of 20th-century Modernism, the Farnsworth House stands as a textbook case study for both designers and 3D artists alike. The simplicity of the scene serves as a classic spatial exercise that has inspired many recreations. Mies van der Rohe’s vision of free space offers a template for designers to build upon, allowing multiple disciplines to interpret the space with a variety of aesthetic approaches.
To this end, we developed an art déco rendition to showcase our own interior design interests while exhibiting Mies’ idealist free space.
Architectural history, however, tends to end with a building’s occupation—and this was especially true for the retelling of this house’s story.
A lesser known aspect of this home is the distaste that its original owner, Edith Farnsworth, had for both its design process and its overwhelming popularity following completion. This was recently acknowledged by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2021, as they officially renamed the “Farnsworth House” to the “Edith Farnsworth House” to highlight her involvement and importance to the project’s legacy.
As a team of visual storytellers, we believe that Edith’s story deserves greater recognition.
Drawing from Alex Beam’s book Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece (2020), we created a concurrent tour interpreting Edith Farnsworth’s lived experience with the home and the many problems she encountered.
We hope that this visual narrative exercise may offer a lesson in tempering grand visions with empathy, as it is so often in modern design that a project’s concept can overshadow human considerations.