Farnsworth House

 
A Classical Building?

Mies Van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is an icon of modernism but there is a tendency to see it as a stylistic gesture - the creation of a 'look' - rather than an important philosophical statement.

Mies is narrow minded, but only in the dimensions demanded by the zeitgeist. He frees himself as much as humanly possible from suppositions and pares the building down to its bones. Nobody had made buildings like that before nor ever again. He adopts the classical idea of beams and columns and dispenses with walls creating a panel of void. The columns are perfectly perpendicular to the ground. The floor and the roof are suspended at determined levels above the ground. The columns terminate proud of the fascia on a protruding trim. A slim gutter runs the perimeter of the roof. The roof is flat. The structure despite having lost the denominators of scale is at least coherent, belying all its serious defects as a habitat.   >>>>>>