Farnsworth House

Judged on structure, purpose and site, the subtractive test finds almost nothing to remove: eight columns, two planes, a core, glass, two steps of terrace. Take away the columns and nothing holds the planes. Take away the height and the floor lies in the flood and the meadow comes up to the glass. Take away the core and the services have nowhere to go but the walls, which would end the open room. Take away the lower terrace and the ascent is a ladder. Nothing is applied. What resists: the necessity is the idea’s more than the dwelling’s. Glass on four sides is not required by a weekend in the country and served it badly, and the offset of the terrace is ordered by composition, not compelled by use.

Score: 8.6 / 10

What can be stated, and holds: a dwelling can be reduced to a floor and a roof held in the landscape, with only glass between the inhabitant and the seasons, so that nature becomes the walls of the room and the house a frame for looking. That is a way of dwelling articulated in plan and section, not only a picture. Held below the bar on two counts. Much of what the house gives is a mood, serenity and suspension, which ranks below a meaning. And the claim is an ideal announced rather than a condition found: the one person who lived in it as its client contradicted it in court and in print. That counter-disclosure, the gap between the architect’s dwelling and the dweller’s, is real, but the building did not make it, and it counts lightly.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation here is lightness and clarity, cool and exact. It comes in the white frame seen across the meadow, floating over the grass with no visible base; in the climb, from the ground to the terrace, turning, and up again to the porch under the shade of the roof; inside, in the floor running out to the glass in every direction with nothing between the eye and the trees; at night, when the box becomes a lantern in the dark field; and in the photographs of the floods, the house standing like an ark on brown water. Frequency is high: the seasons renew it, green, autumn colour, snow, each remaking the walls of the room. Height is held lower: a house of this size has no vastness and no dread, and its one register is serenity at a domestic scale.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The archetypes are built into the structure, not applied to it. The first is the temple on its stylobate: a raised platform, columns at the edge carrying a flat entablature, reached by steps, the classical type abstracted to steel and travertine. The second is the primitive hut in its reduced form, posts and a roof and nothing else, shelter at its origin. The third is the raft or ark, the dwelling lifted above the water, which the river has made literal more than once. The ascent from the earth to a floor above it, by a turning approach, is structure too. The particular stays particular: a doctor’s weekends, this river, these trees. What holds the axis below the bar is depth. The temple is quoted by abstraction and houses no cult; the hut is a thesis about building rather than an image of dwelling; the ark was an accident of the site.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is threefold: the American country house of timber or masonry, walled, roofed and set on its ground; the European modern villa, Le Corbusier’s Savoye and Mies’s own Tugendhat House, a free plan inside a walled volume; and Mies’s own path, the free planes of the Barcelona Pavilion, the court-house projects and the glass-walled Resor project. The departure: the house dissolved into one room with no walls, the envelope wholly glass, the structure carried outside it and the planes hung on the faces of the columns, the floor lifted off the earth, the services gathered into one freestanding object. Barcelona had made such a space for a pavilion with no use; this made it a dwelling, and that was the stake. It was paid in the client’s money, comfort and privacy, in a lawsuit, and in the architect’s first American house. Held below the top because the turn runs along Mies’s own line, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, drawn from this design, was built first.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The form changes how the purpose is lived at every step. Arrival is a slow ascent, ground to terrace to porch, turning, so that to enter is to leave the earth. Inside there are no rooms: sleeping, eating, cooking and sitting are places round a core, divided by objects, not walls. The walls are the weather: the same room is a different room in each season and at each hour, and the inhabitant lives the landscape rather than looking out at it. Privacy, enclosure, the hearth and the bath are all held in the one wooden object at the centre. Put a conventional house on the same meadow and nothing this house knows survives. Held from the top because the form failed part of the purpose: the glass made the room hot in summer and wet with condensation in winter, the insects called for screens the form never allowed for, and the dweller was always seen.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence over promise: some seventy-five years of return. The house has yielded to biography and history, in Franz Schulze’s work on Mies and his monograph on the house; to the client’s side, in Alice Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House (1998) and Alex Beam’s Broken Glass (2020), both of which read the house through Edith Farnsworth; to formal analysis of its proportion, its grid and its offset terrace; and to the long quarrel over whether it is a house at all. Its preservation has become a question in itself: how a house built on a flood plain can survive the flood. The questions stay open, temple or dwelling, nature or its image, whose house. Held lower because the thesis, once grasped, is clear and nearly single, and the record is shorter than the older buildings’.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Shown as a model at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947 and standing since 1951, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the house as pure structure and void, the glass pavilion made a dwelling, an open, universal space brought to the scale of a house; a real reorganisation of what a house can be, carried to its limit. Held below the top because much of the reach of Mies’s American work runs through Lake Shore Drive, Crown Hall and the towers rather than through this house, Johnson’s house shares its reach, and the field was moved by a type more than by a single act. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and lasting in the modern house. Johnson’s Glass House at New Canaan (1949) was drawn from the model of 1947; the steel-and-glass houses of the California Case Study programme followed the type; and the glass pavilion house became an international model, answered as late as Sejima and Ito.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, at seventy-five years. The form survives whole: frame, planes, glass, core, terrace and ascent are Mies’s and in place, and the house has outlived its conditions, a single woman’s postwar weekend retreat, as a type copied and answered. The use survives in part: a weekend house for half a century under two owners, then a museum entered by visitors, not lived in. The fabric is charged. The floods the house was raised to stand above have entered it several times, so the siting failed to secure it and the interior has been restored more than once; the steel needs constant care; the client’s screens and furnishings are gone; and the setting has changed, with a road bridge near the site and trees lost. Presence within architecture is wide and beyond it narrower, and it earns nothing here. Use and fabric hold it below the usual figure for its age.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of proportion, detail and making is of the first rank and load-bearing: the planes and their overhangs, so that a heavy steel frame reads as weightless; the columns welded to the faces of the fascia channels, the welds ground away, so that nothing shows how the planes are held; the travertine grid ruling floor and terrace; the primavera core, cabinetmaking at the scale of architecture; the two offset platforms, which make a static box into an approach. The steel was worked to a finish few buildings of the time attempted. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, a frame of eight columns on short spans; the height of the floor misjudged the river; the envelope could neither shed the summer’s heat nor keep the winter’s glass dry; and steel and glass need constant upkeep. Command of the form outran command of the building’s life.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the white steel frame outside the glass, industrial, repeated and open, and the primavera core inside it, warm, solid, enclosed and singular. They obey one law: a freestanding object in an unbounded space between two planes, each part an element placed, none an enclosure built. The terrace obeys it as a second plane offset from the first, the wardrobe as a second object, the steps as planes slipped between planes. The grid rules the stone, the bays rule the frame, and the glass is the condition that lets the law be seen. Nothing contradicts it. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: one room on one meadow is the smallest territory on which a law can be kept, and the law excludes the life it would have had to govern, the screens, the furniture of a dwelling, the climate.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: the natural order, river, meadow, trees, season and flood, which is the house’s subject; individual consciousness, as solitude and contemplation, one person alone in a room open to the world; the body, in the services gathered at the core, the bath, the hearth, the bed; industry and technique, the material of the steel age made into a dwelling; and the sacred as form only, the temple without a god. The section places each, so they are integrated rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the family, labour (there is no service and no servant), the city, the state, history and death. A weekend house for one holds a single life’s leisure in nature, not a world, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.9 / 10