broken glass
Mar. 15th, 2024 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
portico i saw Broken Glass: Mies Van Der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece (affiliate link) by Alex Beam on a shelf in the MoMA bookstore in fall 2022, but did not pick it up both because i like to order things from my local bookshop, and because lingering overlong in museum gift shops is one of my great vices so i'm sure i was running very behind on my museum visitation schedule. anyway, i got home, ordered it from my bookshop, and it's been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. i took it with me last saturday to my introvert date with my friend/coworker (we sit in a coffee shop together for a few hours, read our own books, and occasionally chat--it's a great time and i highly recommend it), and found it so absorbing that i finished it the next day.
i was previously aware of mies van der rohe, first as a furniture designer (courtesy of chair school--which it's worth noting did not teach me about lilly reich's contributions to mies's design work), and only later as an architect (i used to walk past his MLK Library in DC everyday). i knew nothing about mies as a person, beyond that his first name was actually ludwig--not mies (and it turns out i was wrong about that). as a devotee of house architecture in particular, i knew of the farnsworth house, but did not know about dr. edith farnsworth or the DRAMA that unfolded as the house neared completion.
beam set out to write this book in part because nobody else knew, or seemed to care, about edith farnsworth. she ultimately doesn't come out of this looking terribly good, but every single architect mentioned looks FAR worse.
humans have been building structures for millennia, but the role of architect is very new, and the certification required for architects to practice even newer. there are a lot of people who we consider great architects who lacked schooling in it of any kind (my girl eileen gray is a case in point), but i think mies van der rohe should have had to go to school for architecture. personally. the farnsworth house may be a triumph of the international style and succeed conceptually on a number of levels, but i do think that if you've built a house that costs orders of magnitudes more than an average house and it doesn't even keep the rain out, then you have failed at providing your client with a house. so i'm on edith's side in this.
mies is described over and over as magnetic, and i guess he must have been! certainly as a person he seems like a dud. lacking in morals of any variety, he offered to build for hitler in the 30s and only left germany after it was clear that hitler wasn't a fan of his work (he left his wife and three daughters--whom he was estranged from--behind and never seems to have made any effort to also get them out or bring them to america). when philip johnson (a literal nazi) comes out looking more principled than you (as repugnant as those principles may be), you have fucked up.
beam does a good job of laying out who both mies and edith are before bringing them together and introducing the main character of the book: the house. it, and edith, are both poorly done by mies. a man who was seemingly more enamored with his own ideas than any of the people in his life or his responsibilities as an architect to construct livable structures. the farnsworth house, while visually arresting, was built very close to the fox river in a floodplain (and has experienced the consequences many times in the 90+ years of its existence). it also lacked air conditioning or sufficient windows to create a cross breeze, so at the height of summer it was torturously hot inside. it's astonishing that edith used the house for as long as she did (15 years, specifically as a weekend getaway--she was a doctor who made groundbreaking kidney discoveries during the week).
my one complaint about this book is that beam repeats himself a little. i think this is due in part to the way he chose to tell the story, which involves some going over of the same territory, but was probably also very noticeable to me on account of i read the whole thing in 2 days. the things i liked a great deal were that he never let you forget that philip johnson (who, as the person who arranged the international architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1932, is in a big way responsible for the way americans have thought about "modern" architecture for the past century) was a literal nazi. that's all i ask in any work which discusses him, so i was pleased. he rears his head in the story at times as a relentless promoter of mies, and at times to "borrow" from him (borrow is in quotes because if mies was actually bothered by it it would be plaigiarism). frank lloyd wright plays a similar role, only even more ridiculous. if anything, he's the comic relief. (did you know all the german modern architects actually stole his work? true story. he's got the backdated plans to prove it.)
but the thing i enjoyed the most in this book was the way beam treated edith. from all accounts, she could be a difficult person. she was highly educated, set in her ways, and, i think, profoundly lonely. her relationship with mies grew out of that, and i don't think she was responsible for the way he--and the wider architecture community--ultimately treated her. i don't say she was blameless in how it all played out, but 20th century architecture history has a tendency to treat its protagonists as gods and to hell with everyone else. beam didn't do that to edith, and i appreciated it. all told, a very readable piece of 20th century architecture history.
i was previously aware of mies van der rohe, first as a furniture designer (courtesy of chair school--which it's worth noting did not teach me about lilly reich's contributions to mies's design work), and only later as an architect (i used to walk past his MLK Library in DC everyday). i knew nothing about mies as a person, beyond that his first name was actually ludwig--not mies (and it turns out i was wrong about that). as a devotee of house architecture in particular, i knew of the farnsworth house, but did not know about dr. edith farnsworth or the DRAMA that unfolded as the house neared completion.
beam set out to write this book in part because nobody else knew, or seemed to care, about edith farnsworth. she ultimately doesn't come out of this looking terribly good, but every single architect mentioned looks FAR worse.
humans have been building structures for millennia, but the role of architect is very new, and the certification required for architects to practice even newer. there are a lot of people who we consider great architects who lacked schooling in it of any kind (my girl eileen gray is a case in point), but i think mies van der rohe should have had to go to school for architecture. personally. the farnsworth house may be a triumph of the international style and succeed conceptually on a number of levels, but i do think that if you've built a house that costs orders of magnitudes more than an average house and it doesn't even keep the rain out, then you have failed at providing your client with a house. so i'm on edith's side in this.
mies is described over and over as magnetic, and i guess he must have been! certainly as a person he seems like a dud. lacking in morals of any variety, he offered to build for hitler in the 30s and only left germany after it was clear that hitler wasn't a fan of his work (he left his wife and three daughters--whom he was estranged from--behind and never seems to have made any effort to also get them out or bring them to america). when philip johnson (a literal nazi) comes out looking more principled than you (as repugnant as those principles may be), you have fucked up.
beam does a good job of laying out who both mies and edith are before bringing them together and introducing the main character of the book: the house. it, and edith, are both poorly done by mies. a man who was seemingly more enamored with his own ideas than any of the people in his life or his responsibilities as an architect to construct livable structures. the farnsworth house, while visually arresting, was built very close to the fox river in a floodplain (and has experienced the consequences many times in the 90+ years of its existence). it also lacked air conditioning or sufficient windows to create a cross breeze, so at the height of summer it was torturously hot inside. it's astonishing that edith used the house for as long as she did (15 years, specifically as a weekend getaway--she was a doctor who made groundbreaking kidney discoveries during the week).
my one complaint about this book is that beam repeats himself a little. i think this is due in part to the way he chose to tell the story, which involves some going over of the same territory, but was probably also very noticeable to me on account of i read the whole thing in 2 days. the things i liked a great deal were that he never let you forget that philip johnson (who, as the person who arranged the international architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1932, is in a big way responsible for the way americans have thought about "modern" architecture for the past century) was a literal nazi. that's all i ask in any work which discusses him, so i was pleased. he rears his head in the story at times as a relentless promoter of mies, and at times to "borrow" from him (borrow is in quotes because if mies was actually bothered by it it would be plaigiarism). frank lloyd wright plays a similar role, only even more ridiculous. if anything, he's the comic relief. (did you know all the german modern architects actually stole his work? true story. he's got the backdated plans to prove it.)
but the thing i enjoyed the most in this book was the way beam treated edith. from all accounts, she could be a difficult person. she was highly educated, set in her ways, and, i think, profoundly lonely. her relationship with mies grew out of that, and i don't think she was responsible for the way he--and the wider architecture community--ultimately treated her. i don't say she was blameless in how it all played out, but 20th century architecture history has a tendency to treat its protagonists as gods and to hell with everyone else. beam didn't do that to edith, and i appreciated it. all told, a very readable piece of 20th century architecture history.