392 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE Flooded at the Farnsworth House MICHAEL CADWELL The Ohio State University In 1988, nearly twenty years after his mentor’s the means by which this drama unfolded. Duckett’s death, the architect Edward A. Duckett remem- stick and his act of framing recall the central ar- bered an afternoon outing with Mies van der Rohe. chitectural activity of drawing: the stick, now a One time we were out at the Farnsworth House, pencil, describes a frame, now a building, which and Mies and several of us decided to walk down affords a particular view of the world. In this es- to the river’s edge. So we were cutting a path say, I will elaborate on the peculiar intertwining of through the weeds. I was leading and Mies was building, drawing, and nature at the Farnsworth right behind me. Right in front of me I saw a young House; how drawing erases a positivist approach possum. If you take a stick and put it under a young to building technology and how, in turn, a pro- possum’s tail, it will curl its tail around the stick found respect for the natural world deflects and, and you can hold it upside down. So I reached finally, absorbs the unifying thrust of perspective. down, picked up a branch, stuck it under this little possum’s tail and it caught onto it and I turned Approached by Dr. Farnsworth in the winter of around and showed it to Mies. Now, this animal is 1946/7 to design a weekend house, Mies responded thought by many to be one of the world’s ugliest, with uncharacteristic alacrity. Dr. Farnsworth had but I remember Mies looked at it and said, “Isn’t purchased a ten-acre lot outside Plano Illinois, a nature wonderful!” So he studied that possum small farming community sixty miles south of Chi- for some time and commented on how unusual cago. The lot was broader east to west than north it was. How beautiful its fur was, the texture of to south, country roads bounded it along the north it, and so on. (River Road) and west (Millbrook), and the Fox River bounded it to the south. Although farmers Having visited the Farnsworth House and puzzled had cleared the site in the previous century, hand- over its strange qualities, I read Edward Duckett’s some oak and maple trees still lined the river’s reminiscence with a bark of surprise and, then, a edge and second growth deciduous trees shielded sigh of recognition. Mies, I thought, was the quint- the site from both roads while giving way to a clear- essential urban architect: of Berlin and Chicago, ing in the center that, in turn, opened to fields to Neue Nationalgallerie and Seagram Tower, Knize the east. Fortuitously, the unremitting horizontality suits and Havana cigars. Yet here he is, standing of the agrarian plat dropped, steeply at first, to in riverbank reeds and staring at a possum. the Fox River. Granted, Mies does not touch the possum. Duckett holds the possum up at the end of a stick and Mies first concentrated on this slope, much as he frames it for Mies’s contemplation. And notice what did when siting of his European residences. In both attracts Mies’s attention: it is the fur not the form, the Riehl House of 1906 and the Tugendhat House a dense field of coarse hair bristling with brown of 1929-30, Mies crowned the site’s high ground and tan tones. We associate framing with the act with a residential block, developed the near land- of holding the world at arm’s length, but Duckett’s scape as garden extensions of interior spaces, and framing affords the opposite — an immersion into extended to the distant horizon with the perspec- the world’s depths. tival thrust of belvederes. There is a conspicuous thinness to both foregrounded gardens and dis- Duckett’s story, I realized, evoked the Farnsworth tant horizons for they are squeezed into submis- House’s central drama of immersion and suggested sion by the residences’ formal grasp and lack FLOODED AT THE FARNSWORTH HOUSE 393 reinforcing connections – spatial, visual, or haptic All the more significant, therefore, that Mies slides – that would join them in a cohesive thickness. A the Farnsworth House off the hill and leaves it within linking middle ground does exist: the extensive one hundred feet of the Fox River. Mies places the park of Potsdam lies below the Riehl House and house in the missing middle ground of the Riehl the dense cityscape of Brno bustles beneath the and Tugendhat houses; a ground that offers nei- Tugendhat House. Yet, both drop away, overlooked. ther the restorative calm of Potsdam’s municipal Riehl House Tugendhat House 394 THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE/THE SCIENCE OF ARCHITECTURE woods nor the familiar pattern of Brno’s urban fab- Looking closer at the house, however, we are hard ric. The final position of the Farnsworth House, as pressed to support this interpretation. Even a cur- Mies knew, is well within the flood plane of the Fox sory glance at the columns dispels a claim to struc- River. Here, we are at the mercy of annual floods tural clarity. Mies did not employ the minimal steel rather than reassured by the methodical plantings W-sections of the time but insisted on sections with of a gardener and the riverbank’s forested rise a broader, more pronounced flange. Though full- blocks our view of the earth meeting the sky. bodied, the columns discourage our empathetic response. We cannot see how the columns attach The broad northern elevation of the Farnsworth to the ground (their concrete foundations are bur- House announces itself amidst riverside trees as ied below) or how the columns support the floor you approach from the east, crossing the clearing and roof (they slip by the perimeter C-sections and at the site’s center. Now a well-kept lawn, the clear- their vertical thrust stops only with the afterthought ing was an unmown field of matted grasses. Even of the roof’s coping.) The C-sections also lack a now, the clearing drains poorly and is often boggy clear structural rationale, for identical members Farnsworth House, north elevation under foot. Two rows of four columns raise the support both the roof and the more heavily loaded house five feet above the flood plane: the rows floor. Myron Goldsmith, Mies’s assistant, supple- run east to west and are thirty feet apart, while mented the floor’s carrying capacity by enlisting the columns twenty-two feet on center. Steel C- the intermediate steel window stanchions as ten- sections clamp concrete planks into taut roof and sile members to connect floor to roof. The wall not floor planes that extend five feet beyond the col- only attaches to the columns but is itself struc- umns to the east and west. The main living vol- tural. The house obeys neither the structural logic ume slides between these planes, its wood core of varying loads, nor an empathetic association of visible behind floor to ceiling glass while minimal vertical and horizontal, nor even the modernist steel window stanchions mark the centers of col- decree for separation of wall and support. There is umn bays and then drift beyond their logic at the a governing logic to this construction, however; corners. Surely, this exquisitely proportioned white we must look to the connections. They are hard to steel frame celebrates the triumph of its manufac- find. ture and assembly against its unstable site. FLOODED AT THE FARNSWORTH HOUSE 395 With one exception, all steel connections at the with rust; concrete planks secrete moisture; and Farnsworth House are plug welds. Plug welding is steel columns step with adjacent maple trees, trad- an elaborate process: steel erectors first drill the ing coarse bark with fluting. A lurking underworld, columns and beams and join them with bolts; they one of shifting allegiances and strange participations. then level and square the frame and secure the nuts; next, they loosen and remove these same Above deck to the west, allegiances collapse with bolted connections one at a time and weld the now the thrust of perspective and the parry of landscape. vacant holes solid (plug); and, finally, finishers sand The porch frames the riverside oaks and maples with the welds smooth. A curious operation. The con- converging lines of glass wall to the left, columns to nections require a high degree of craftsmanship, the right, and roof plane above. The porch shears yet every craft erases the previous craft: the in- the trees of trunks and crowns, leaving them seem dustrial craft of the welded connection erases the suspended in midair. The trees counter. Especially mechanical craft of the bolted connection; the when covered with leaves and in a light breeze, they handcraft of sanding erases the industrial craft of present the eyes with a flickering field of light and the welded connection; and the handcraft of sand- color that waves off the steel frame’s request for a ing erases itself. There is no glorification of tech- vanishing point or even a defining horizon line. Your nology just as there is no remnant of craft. To view dances in shimmering foliage even as the steel underscore this, the steel fabricators brushed the frame fades in cantilever. steel’s surface free of burrs and the erectors painted the steel with successive coats of flat white enamel. Porch from north Mies did not glorify the industrial process; he erased it.