The Edith Farnsworth House

Author Michelangelo Sabatino
Publisher The Monacelli Press
Place of publication New York
Year 2024
Number of pages 272

Opinion

The Edith Farnsworth House

A New Perspective

Luis Fernández-Galiano

01/06/2024

Edith Farnsworth returns home. Mies van der Rohe’s mythical house, which the National Trust for Historic Preservation acquired in 2003, celebrates its twenty years of being open to the public with a tribute to the nephrologist who commissioned the project in 1945. The emphasis on the architect – laconically expressed in the popular ‘All About Mies’ shirt sold at the visitor center – has given way to attention to his client through a 2020 exhibition held in the house that showed the Scandinavian furniture picked by the doctor against Mies’s wishes, the change of name in 2021, and a major 2024 publication whose title is the new name of the Historic Site, with a foreword by its executive director, Scott Mehaffey, and an article which amounts to a declaration of principles: ‘Putting Edith back into the Farnsworth House.’...