Uncompromising Reasons for Going West: A Story of Sex and Real Estate, Reconsidered

Promiscuity, the act of indiscriminately mingling with many partners, is an appealing proposition from a disciplinary perspective. It brings to mind boundaries that leak and shift, spilling over into uncharted creative territory—architects whose architectural training is applicable to multiple settings and scales, from Charles and Ray Eames’ multidisciplinary practice to Bjarke Ingels’ vision of his work as “bigamy…that you can take multiple desirable elements that might not fit together or even seem mutually exclusive…and merge them together into a new genre…you can literally marry multiple ideas into ‘promiscuous hybrids.’” Within the context of architectural history, however, promiscuity is a barbed word. The client who has a clandestine affair with her architect, as Mamah Borthwick Cheney did with Frank Lloyd Wright, is promiscuous. Promiscuity is even used as an excuse for a client’s complaints: the client who rails against her architect for flaws in a house is making a fuss not because of the house, we are told, but because she is heartbroken—her affair with him came to naught. Thus has the history of the Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951) been written: a “story of sex and real estate” as it is described by William Norwich for the New York Times, this history presumes that a relationship between the client and the architect led to the client’s dissatisfaction with the house. A history that ultimately salvages the house from any architectural criticism while destroying the client’s reputation, this history is built from idle speculation and rumor. And yet, it has replaced any other history of the house. The origins of this speculation lie in Franz Schulze’s Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985) and historians have augmented this story by turning to Farnsworth’s archive, appropriating only very selective and ambiguous fragments from her memoirs, correspondence and photographs in order to build this false history. This paper will trace the origins of the rumor of promiscuity between Dr. Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe and follow its path through subsequent histories, before offering an alternative history of the Farnsworth House, one built from a deeper and more contextual reading of Farnsworth’s memoirs, poetry, and her photographs of the Farnsworth House.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4