The “Other” Farnsworth House

Abstract

In April 1953, Elizabeth Gordon (1906–2000) launched an attack on elitist architects and the control they claimed over lifestyle and taste.[1] In her editorial for House Beautiful, Gordon condemned modernist aberrations for giving up on comfort and humanity. She saw the American values of common sense, unbound riches, and individual choice under threat. What had Gordon so alarmed was what she called “nothing more but a glass cage on stilts.”[2] Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House epitomized modern architecture (figure 1). A modest barn conversion from the same architect is its unlikely twin (figure 2). The parallel conception by the two related, yet distinctly different, buildings challenges the single-minded narratives of modernism.[3]

1. For further detail, see Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home, 115–128.

2. Gordon, “The Threat to the Next America,” 129.

3. This text relates to ongoing doctoral research under the supervision of Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at Univ