“If Dr. Edith Farnsworth hated her glass house so much, how come she stayed in it for so long?!” With this bold interrogation, architect, preservationist, and architectural historian Michelangelo Sabatino articulated a central point of his new book, The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture, while promoting it in the summer of 2024 at the AIA’s Center for Architecture in New York City. Sabatino’s book brings Edith back into the Edith Farnsworth House (1945–51) in Plano, Illinois, the glass-and-steel masterpiece designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). Despite its remarkable transparency, visual weightlessness, and exquisite quality of beinahe nichts (in German, “almost nothing”), as Mies would say, this icon of modern architecture, and its history, is weighted by the infamous rift between architect and client, which has forever clouded the house’s legacy.
Sabatino’s important and engaging book sheds new light on an unmarried woman client, living alone (still...
University of California Press