Modern Damage Tour at the Farnsworth House

The National Trust says that Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, which flooded last month, is now open for special tours, with proceeds going into a fund to repair the flood damage.

There's information at Farnsworthhouse.org and at the National Trust site.

The house, which is near the Fox River in Plano, Illinois, has flooded before, most recently in 1996, an event that the National Trust says caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage and took months to repair. This year, the Trust reports:

The Farnsworth House, fell prey to Mother Nature Saturday, September 13, and Sunday, September 14, as more than eight inches of rain fell in two days from Tropical Storm Lowell, immediately followed by the remnants of Hurricane Ike. Fox River waters rose two feet over the top deck, entering the Farnsworth House interior. Built within the flood plain of the Fox River in Plano, Illinois, the house is supported by columns more than five feet above the ground which proved not high enough as record breaking rain amounts brought the river more than fourteen feet above its normal level. -- ta

Farnsworth update

Here are photos and an update that arrived this morning in an email from Caroline Barker, Communications Coordinator, Communications & Marketing Department at the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

Two days after floodwaters inundated Mies van der Rohe’s architectural masterpiece, staff from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois are working feverishly to assess the damage and take initial steps toward cleaning it up. It’s a huge job when any house is flooded, but one that is also a National Historic Landmark carries additional considerations. Before major clean-up work can commence, for example, professional conservators must be consulted to ensure that lasting damage is minimized.

As the accompanying photos make clear, the damage to the house is significant, but the larger problem might be the landscape surrounding the house. The full extent of the damage to the landscape won’t be clear until the water around the house – still about a foot deep in most areas – clears out.

Help from the public is urgently needed. Please visit the web sites of Landmarks Illinois, www.landmarks.org and the National Trust for Historic Preservation www.preservationnation.org to learn how you can help save this iconic Modernist masterpiece. Landmarks Illinois manages Farnsworth House on behalf of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns it. – GF

Mies's Farnsworth House is Underwater

All the flooding in the midwest has inundated Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, near Chicago. Check this out, from the National Trust for Historic Preservation's blog. As of two days ago, the house had a foot of water in it:

... All the furniture was raised but there is nothing further that can be done, and in fact the house is pretty close to being unreachable, as the entire community is underwater and it is a very dire situation. Three bridges between the town and the house are now out. ... The house and tours are closed for the foreseeable future. Access to the house currently is only by boat, and this is not safe.

(In addition to being known around the world as a modernist masterpiece, the Farnsworth House also has the lesser but still interesting distinction of making architect John Black Lee's list of five great houses, here, the other's being the Philip Johnson's Glass House and Boissonnas House (both in New Canaan), Neutra's Kaufman House, in Palm Springs, and a house Lee himself designed in New Canaan.) -- ta

The Farnsworth House and Mies's Inspiration

I wrote the other day about John Black Lee and his discussion, during New Canaan’s recent Modern House Day, of what he considered to be the five great houses in America. What led him to that topic was a digression about the Farnsworth House, in Illinois, designed by Mies Van der Rohe for Edith Farnsworth. Lee said his mother had been a college classmate of Edith Farnsworth and that one of the reasons she was so eager to have Mies design a house for her was that, as John Lee put it, she had the hots for him.

I realize that’s gossipy and maybe not relevant to the design of the Farnsworth House, but it made me at least raise my eyebrows in amusement when I watched a really interesting four-minute video tour of the Farnsworth House on a blog called Mid-Century Modern Interiors. I don’t know who produced it or who the host and narrator is, but it’s well-done and informative. In it, the host refers to the house as being “a difficult and adversarial collaboration between a driven client and unyielding architect.”

An unyielding architect? I inferred from John Black Lee that Edith Farnsworth’s interest in Mies was unrequited. Maybe it had to be for Mies to concentrate on producing what the narrator of the video calls a work of art.

Take a look at the video, here. -- TA