Totally Mdern Mies

摘要

Not everyone could feel snug in the Farnsworth House. The 1951 pavilion by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is basically one big glass room, with two bathrooms tucked into a central utility core. Even the client, a Chicago doctor named Edith Farnsworth, had trouble feeling at home in the Piano, Ill., country house—she complained that her "anti-house" was expensive to heat and difficult to cool, and guests felt the chipmunks were watching them. (She may've been nursing a broken heart, too, or at least a bruised ego, from a liaison with her architect.) The place prompted an attack on Mies from the powerful editor of House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon, who called his architecture "cold" and "barren."