{"id":64052,"date":"2025-07-14T05:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T05:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/64052\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T05:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T05:18:10","slug":"the-woman-behind-the-iconic-glass-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/64052\/","title":{"rendered":"The Woman Behind the Iconic Glass House"},"content":{"rendered":"

The history of photography has made it clear that the camera is a subjective tool<\/a>. The glass lens frames the story differently depending on who is doing the looking, and how. So what are we to make of the images of a woman in a glass house, the history of which has been obscured by a patriarchal culture\u2019s short-sighted view?<\/p>\n

In her book Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth<\/a> (2025), essayist, artist, and architect Nora Wendl \u201cexplodes the sex-and-real-estate myth\u201d of the iconic Edith Farnsworth House<\/a>, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the eponymous physician.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s so-called explosion happens in slow motion, page by page, not only through Farnsworth\u2019s archives, papers, and poems but also through Wendl\u2019s writing and photographs, including her own constructed images that are not always distinguishable from the archival ones.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tNora Wendl, \u201cEdith Farnsworth House Terrace\u201d (2006), C-print (image courtesy Nora Wendl)\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Throughout her more than 10 years of research, Wendl repeatedly comes up against the belief that Farnsworth was in love with Mies van der Rohe, and that when their affair was over, she plotted to sue him and ruin his reputation. But, in fact, the story goes like this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Between 1949 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed a glass house for Edith Farnsworth on Fox River in rural Illinois. He sued her for fees they never agreed to, and she countersued him because of the ever-increasing costs of the runaway project. In 1956, a judge ruled that the two must settle. So, Wendl asks us: \u201cWhat makes a woman believable?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tUnidentified woman, likely Swiss-American pianist Jenny Geering, at the Farnsworth House around 1954 (image courtesy Newberry Library and Farnsworth family)<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s voice is piercing, sharpened by her commitment to correct or at least reframe existing accounts of Farnsworth\u2019s life. In the vein of archivist Jenn Shapland\u2019s memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers<\/a> (2020), which illuminates the titular writer\u2019s queerness, Wendl draws attention to gaps and silences that signal the presence of other things, other people, and other ways of being. Tracing Farnsworth\u2019s life, Wendl grants us glimpses into her own as she chronicles her move from Chicago to the deserts of New Mexico, leaves one job for another, and slips between worlds, at times undetected and at others exposed. The parallels between the two women\u2019s lives mirror those of countless others: deflecting the advances and insults of men, defending their own desires and experiences, determining their own identities and fates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I found myself deeply interested in Wendl\u2019s embodied visual interpretations of Farnsworth\u2019s life, artworks in themselves. In her photograph titled \u201cI Listened\u201d (2017), Wendl portrays herself in the glass house, \u201cbreathing in and out death\u201d while lying on a bed that served as a stand-in for Farnsworth\u2019s own (the house had been staged for public tours). The image plays on ambiguity and visibility: blue disposable shoe covers, a conservative 1940s black dress, the mattress conforming to the weight of Wendl\u2019s body that is visible only from the knees down, hands clasped on her belly, the curtains drawn just so, the entire composition viewed through a glass wall.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tEdith Farnsworth (right) with Beth Dunlap (left), her patient and the wife of William Dunlap, who designed the house\u2019s screens and wardrobe, sitting on the steps of the house around 1951 (photograph by William Dunlap)<\/p>\n

Wendl is well aware that philosophers have long written about houses as psychological spaces<\/a>. \u201cResearching a woman who would build a glass house for herself is a particular kind of being alone,\u201d she writes. Her descriptions of the house, informed by Farnsworth\u2019s archives, speak of suffocation and saving one\u2019s own life: \u201cLighting a fire in the hearth in the hermetically sealed house caused interior negative pressure \u2014 the outside air moved in, blowing out the fire. To keep the fire burning, she opened the door.\u201d<\/p>\n

History, like glass, is difficult to see. It is always, slowly, moving and tricking the eye. Wendl\u2019s account of Farnsworth, and of herself, offers an architectural blueprint for women everywhere: \u201cto reject the structures handed to them, to build new ones.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth<\/a> (2025) by Nora Wendl is published by 3 Fields Books and is available online and through independent booksellers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The history of photography has made it clear that the camera is a subjective tool. The glass lens…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[2513,648,1032,1033,171,1322,3092,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-64052","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-architecture","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-featured","14":"tag-photography","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114849900306941161","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}