Different Place, Different Mies

A thanks and horns-up to fellow Longhorn J.H. for e-mailing the text of the article I mentioned below. It's a 2003 WaPo spotlight by architecture critic Benjamin Forgey on the Mies Van der Rohe Farnsworth House ("one of the most important—and beautiful—creations in the history of 20th-century architecture") on the eve of the building's sale at Sotheby's, an auction that might have imperiled its existence. (Had the Farnsworth House been sold to a private buyer, that buyer could have altered the original design to make it more "livable" or even attempted to take down and move the House to a different spot.)

Forgey wrote that "the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages." One might say nearly the opposite about the MLK Memorial Library, the limits of whose public service was never tested, given the library system's gross mismanagement.

Regardless, Forgey suggested that potential buyers consider donating their auction bids to the joint campaign between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the Farnsworth. And those are the organizations who own the building now, exactly as it should be.

Here's hoping that we'll yet see Forgey prognosticate about the fate of the District Mies very soon. Full text of the 2003 article (and a pony!) below the cut.

The Washington Post Saturday, October 25, 2003

SECTION: Style; C01

HEADLINE: Sheer Treasure: Fate of Mies House Is on the Block

BYLINE: Benjamin Forgey, Washington Post Staff Writer

DATELINE: CHICAGO

They were going to show the Farnsworth House this morning, busing folks 60 miles from the Loop into the Illinois countryside for brunch and "a private viewing" of the famously beautiful -- and exquisitely impractical -- weekend retreat.

But the party was canceled this week, say the real estate marketers, because it wasn't private enough. "Once the invitations were received, the response we got was very, very overwhelming," explains Stuart Siegel, president of Sotheby's International Realty. "People told us they didn't want to see it with a group. 'We know the house,' they were saying, 'and we want to see it at our own pace, in privacy.' "

Oops. You will have to give Siegel a call in New York if you'd like your own private tour of the world's best and best-known glass house at its wooded, 60-acre site in the fast-suburbanizing farmland near Plano, Ill. Be sure of your finances before you call, however. The Farnsworth House is being offered for sale at a Sotheby's auction in New York on Dec. 12 with a pre-sale estimate of $4.5 million to $6 million.

Here's a better idea. If you want to save this great treasure, you can do it for less. A donation of $1 million or so, or indeed of any amount, would boost a last-minute campaign by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the house.

In announcing the campaign on Oct. 16, the two organizations pledged $1 million each to seed the fund. "We've had some interest, but we're not there yet," reports National Trust President Richard Moe. "We're trying to identify individuals and institutions in the limited universe of those who are passionate about modern architecture."

The cause is just. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1946 and completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is one of the most important -- and beautiful -- creations in the history of 20th-century architecture. Its cultural worth far outweighs its monetary value or its status as a private residence.

But money is what auctions are all about, so it remains crucial that the two public organizations succeed in their last-minute campaign. They propose not only to preserve the building on its original site, but also to guarantee public access by operating the house as a museum.

Yes, there may be a buyer out there who would treat the house with due respect, but such a result is far from certain. Because there are no restrictions on the Sotheby's sale, a purchaser would be free to alter Mies's masterpiece -- to add a bedroom for the kids, say, or to screen in its airy porch -- and thereby disturb or destroy its subtle harmonies.

Or, a new owner might even decide to take the house apart piece by piece (no simple task given the precision of Mies's detailing) and move it to another location. Moe and David Bahlman, president of the Illinois preservation group, rightly point out in a joint statement that this would be "an architectural disaster of the first order." It also would
be quite loony, but there's no telling what kind of loons might be attracted to Sotheby's in December.

This uneasy situation came about because the State of Illinois, under budgetary and political pressure, reneged on an agreement to buy the house from Lord Peter Palumbo, its owner for the past 31 years. Palumbo, a real estate developer and collector of modern houses -- he also possesses a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and one by Le Corbusier in Paris -- purchased the property in 1972 from Edith Farnsworth, a medical doctor and the original owner.

By all accounts Palumbo has been an ideal custodian, using the house as it was intended to be used -- as an intermittent retreat -- and maintaining it in pristine condition. After a damaging flood of the Fox River in 1996, he hired Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, Mies's grandson, to carry out a $500,000 restoration. On my recent visit the house looked as good as new. The hundreds of lady bugs attracted to its white steel piers did not in the slightest mar the splendid lines.

The Farnsworth House is more about ideas than practicalities. Its everyday deficiencies have been almost legendary from the time they were first enumerated by Farnsworth in an Illinois courthouse in the early 1950s, during a bitter legal dispute with the architect.

For instance, there's the mosquito problem. Mies did not want screens to mar the transparency of his porch or the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, but Farnsworth put them in anyway. One can easily imagine how the screens did indeed taint the beauty, and also how they must have made summer evenings more bearable. (Palumbo, in contrast, has made do without screens and attacked mosquitoes at the source, replacing the prairie grasses they adored with a conventional lawn.)

Then there is the decoration issue -- in Mies's carefully calculated interior, one cannot even move a chair a few inches without altering, and possibly spoiling, the carefully calibrated whole. More fundamentally, there's the contradiction between residential privacy and all-glass walls, made all the worse when the house in question is famous and lacks any interior walls. Farnsworth once was startled coming from her shower by a group of Japanese tourists, busily snapping photographs.

These and other impracticalities, however, pale in comparison to the building's sheer presence in the landscape. And its other transformative qualities. The house is simplicity itself -- a long box measuring 28 feet by 77 feet and constructed of glass and white-painted steel -- yet simple means have been deployed with such definitive precision that the effect is magical and complex.

Supported by eight wide-flange steel columns and raised five feet off the ground, the horizontal box at first view appears to hover amid trees. The slightly asymmetrical placement of a long entry platform contributes to this dynamic effect. Yet, paradoxically, the transparent building stands solidly and authoritatively in the land -- there are
echoes of stone Greek temples in this harmonious box with steel legs.

You see right through it, but it refuses to disappear.

The house has a handmade feel, too, despite its industrial materials. During construction Mies insisted that the steel columns be painstakingly sanded and covered with several coats of thick white paint to eliminate any sign of the welds and bolts that connect the column to the steel roof and floor beams. It's as if the architect wanted his house to be as perfect in its way as the gorgeous old sugar maple that shades it from the south.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of architects have gone to school on the building's nonpareil conjoining of outside with inside, man-made with nature. It is in a sense an observatory more than it is a house, a contemplative pavilion in a glade alongside a river. In fact, the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages.