Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation1

Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation1 Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation1 Dr Lynn Churchill, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Abstract: In 1953, two years after the completion of her weekend house, on the isolated banks of the Fox River, Plano, Illinois, Dr. Edith Farnsworth complained “[…] I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert […] the house is […] like an X-ray.”2 Despite these remarks and intriguingly, Farnsworth lived in her house for nearly twenty years, lodging in an awkward denouncement of it that she expressed through litigation, in published interviews and later in her memoirs. Also intriguing and likely a consequence of her belligerent occupation is Farnsworth’s lingering attachment to the Pantheon of modern architecture. Had she abandoned it, perhaps Farnsworth’s connection would have been lost. Clearly, while admirers revere the ‘look’ of this house as a modern icon, Farnsworth’s lived experience was different. Within the austerity of the glass box she was exposed physically and mentally to the forces of nature, to the critical gaze of the exterior world and to her amplified sense of self all of which affected her sensations. She endured loss: physical, psychological, economic and social. She was publicly humiliated, her reputation became one of a difficult and foolish woman with the concurrent court cases of 1951, which Mies won, leaving Farnsworth tarnished. Driven by the question of ‘why’ Farnsworth ‘suffered’ the house for so long, and informed by Georges Bataille’s theory of the General Economy, this paper speculates on ‘what’ it was that Farnsworth, an intelligent, professional, middle aged (in 1945) and single woman gained from her occupation: the relationship between Farnsworth’s body and the house in terms of bodily sacrifice, transformation and glory. Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation To last, a construction […] must be animated, that is, must receive both life and a soul. The ‘transference’ of the soul is possible only by means of a sacrifice; in other words, by a violent death. We may even say that the victim continues its existence after death, no longer in its physical body but in the new body – the construction – which it has ‘animated’ by its immolation; we may even speak of an ‘architectonic body’ substituted for a body of flesh.3 Sacrifice So often, when Dr Edith Farnsworth spoke of her weekend house, she did so in terms of her own physical and mental body. ‘One’s house is almost as personal as one’s skin’4, she admitted in her memoirs. ‘I thought you could animate a predetermined glass form like this with your own presence’5 she confessed to Joseph Barry when he interviewed her for an article in House Beautiful. ‘The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel like a prowling animal, always on the alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax […T]he house is […] like an xray’6, ‘The windows steam up in the winter and drive you crazy. You feel as though you are in a car in the rain with a windscreen wiper that doesn’t work’7, ‘Mies [van der Rohe] wanted the partition closet five feet high for reasons of “art and proportion.” Well, I’m six feet tall. Since my house is all “open space,” I needed something to shield me when I had guests. I wanted to be able to change my clothes without my head looking like it was wandering over the top of the partition without a body. It would be grotesque.‘8 ‘I can’t even put my clothes on a hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from outside.’9 ‘Another thing: [when the fire was to be lit either the only small window or the only door must be open] or we’ll have Proceedings of the Conference held at the Occupation: Negotiations with 1 University of Brighton 2nd to 4th July 2009 Constructed Space Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation1 smoke everywhere. […] In winter you let in more cold air than you get warm air from the fire.’10 ‘In summer the air gets very hot and stuffy. The only ventilation comes from both ends of the house […] We need an air filtering system, but there is no room in the utility core. And when everything in the core is in operation, the noise is enormous.’11 She complained the neighbours knew her as ‘that woman serving the house, slaving away on the glass and steel all week-end’12 and that the ‘great “freedom” Mies’ disciples are always talking about has created nothing but great problems for me. Indeed, there was no thought of me at any time.’13 ‘Perhaps as a man he is not the clairvoyant primitive that I thought he was, but simply colder and more cruel than anybody I have ever known. Perhaps it was never a friend and collaborator, so to speak, that he wanted, but a dupe and a victim.’14 Judging from Farnsworth’s words, her house was never intended as a place of pleasure and comfortable harbour to accommodate her living body. Beyond Farnsworth, a number of commentators have read the house in relation to her body. Franz Schulze, for example, retells the story of an occasion on site during the construction of the house when Mies, standing some distance away called to Farnsworth, inviting her to walk up onto the terrace ‘so that I can have a look at you’15, he said. Obviously flattered, Farnsworth obliged only to hear him add: ‘Good, I just wanted to check the scale’16. Almost anybody reading this would feel the humiliation. Schultz went on to describe Farnsworth as ‘no beauty. […] Six feet tall, ungainly of carriage, and, as witnesses agreed, rather equine in features, she was sensitive about her physical person and may very well have compensated for it by cultivating her considerable mental powers.’17 However, despite Farnsworth’s sensitivity to her physical appearance in particular her height, Mies designed her closet and dressing area such that Farnsworth’s experiences of these aspects of herself were exacerbated within the intimate daily rituals of dressing and undressing. Furthermore, Farnsworth’s position as a professional, middle-aged, single and childless woman at the conclusion of World War II, living in a one-room glass box was in dissonance with the direction in which America was rapidly heading. Alice Friedman observed, ‘The way the house foregrounded Farnsworth’s single life and her middle-aged woman’s body struck at the heart of American anxiety.’18 Her lack of contribution to both family life and to the advancement of capitalism through increased consumerism in domestic life contradicted the post war juggernaut that was America. Beatriz Colomina wrote: ‘War does not go away. Rather it is carried out in the consumption of mass-produced spinoffs of military technology and efficiency. The museum’s [Museum of Modern Art New York] sustained attempt to produce an idealised image of post-war domesticity was, in a way, a military campaign’19. In the climate of the cold war, there was a push towards a new domestic life for the American worker and his family with new expectations and an increasingly competitive environment towards consuming and accommodating more and more material possessions: the car, electrical appliances, cleaning products and equipment for the kitchen and laundry which elevated the standard and speed of production of homemade food, newness, freshness and cleanliness in every aspect of the home. Expectations of domestic life rose steeply, coercing the average suburban American housewife to make beds, shop, sew, cook, chauffeur and generally facilitate her husband and children’s activities, sacrificing her own life. But she lay by her husband at night and silently asked ‘Is this all?’20 The women lay silently because, as Friedan explained in 1962, they ‘were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents.’21 In this context, alongside these ideals for domestic life, Farnsworth’s occupation of her transparent and virtually empty glass box was a perversion. In contrast to Proceedings of the Conference held at the Occupation: Negotiations with 2 University of Brighton 2nd to 4th July 2009 Constructed Space Farnsworth and the Anatomy of Occupation1 the average American housewife, Farnsworth had invested in a house ‘[s]o unconventional […] that every move and every activity in it assumed an aesthetic quality which challenges behaviour patterns formed in different surroundings’22 and this was made possible by her perverted life as a single, professional, independently wealthy, middle-aged woman, who existed outside the enclave of the idealised norm. However, as Farnsworth’s memoirs recall from her time at Chicago University, being an outsider was a familiar feeling: Among the other students there seemed to be a good bit of talent and self-assurance. I had no assurance and was aware of no talents; moreover I was ashamed of my sheltered life and rapidly developed an exaggerated respect for my classmates whom I fancied to be less privileged than I, and longed to have been in the gather which I thought of as the cradle of all that was really authentic. 23 Following her meeting with Farnsworth in 1953 Elizabeth Gordon wrote: ‘I have talked to a highly intelligent, now disillusioned, woman who spent more than $70.000.oo building a 1 - room house that is nothing but a glass cage on stilts’24 almost completely divorced from the ground.

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