Extras Perfect Pads: Farnsworth House

Date Published:

20/06/2008

In the third of our series on his perfect pads, Kevin McCloud makes a trip to Chicago to pay homage to a design legend.

Photo: Peter Cook/View Pictures

The Farnsworth House, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1946 for his client, Dr Edith Farnsworth, is seminal. It asserted America as the pre-eminent home of modernism after the war. It also reduced (for the first time) the idea of a dwelling to its skeletal minimal. Even before it was finished in 1951, it had become the inspiration for a new wave of transparent houses that has rippled through every decade of the 20th century and which is now building to a great wave of 21st-century popular modernism.

Everybody with a home built after the Magna Carta seems to want to destroy half of it in the pursuit of 'light' and 'space' - the two modern (and Modern) lifestyle touchstones. To these I have to add the third of 'white emulsion' and maybe the fourth, which is 'Audi TT parked outside', not least because truly beautiful light, spacious and white homes only ever appear on Audi commercials.

Photos: Peter Cook/View Pictures

The Farnsworth House is essentially one large, glass-walled room, raised from the ground on steel legs. Inside, space is divided by a series of wood-panelled closets and utility rooms. The open-plan, flexible space epitomises Mies van der Rohe's idea of universal, simplified architecture. The furniture, also designed by Mies, has become famous, too.

And all of them are a rip-off of the Farnsworth house. Before it, there had been other great Modernist homes, but Farnsworth was the first minimalist one. Ad-men love it. Mies' design was highly rational, and his client felt highly bullied by it. Edith Farnsworth did freak. She said the house made her feel depressed and paranoid since it had no real walls; she refused to pay her architect and she stayed very glum about the place for the surprising 20 years that she remained living there.