Farnsworth House, the glass box that ended a friendship in court

Dr. Edith Farnsworth was a Chicago nephrologist who wanted a quiet place to read and play violin on weekends. She met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at a dinner party in 1945 and asked him to design something small on her land beside the Fox River in Plano, Illinois.

What he gave her was eight white steel columns holding two floating planes of concrete, with walls made entirely of glass. The house hovers five feet above the floodplain. There is no attic, no basement, and almost no interior wall. A single core of teak holds the kitchen, the bathrooms and the fireplace, and everything else is one room and the landscape.

Construction dragged. The budget roughly doubled. By 1951 the relationship had collapsed and the two ended up in court, Mies suing for unpaid fees, Farnsworth countersuing over the overruns. He won. She spent the next twenty years telling reporters the house was unlivable, that in summer it cooked, that she could not sit down without feeling watched by the river.

She lived in it for two decades anyway.

Architects made pilgrimages. Students argued about whether a house should be a machine for looking or a place to hide. Philip Johnson looked at photographs and built his own Glass House in Connecticut, then spent years politely insisting he had gotten there first.

The Fox River has flooded the house repeatedly, most brutally in 1996 and 2008, sending water above the floor and warping the teak. Each time it has been dried, cleaned and reopened.

Stand inside on a fall morning and the argument settles itself. The trees do the work of walls. The house is barely there. That, in the end, was the point Edith Farnsworth paid for and never quite forgave.