formal contrast to its lush surroundings, a Midwestern floodplain. The curtains are drawn in strategic ways that allow us only partial views of the interior. Whether these choices were made to provide Dr. Farnsworth privacy, or to remove her corporeal presence from the history of the house is unclear. What is obvious is that she is nowhere within these images, despite her investment in the design and construction of the house. And the very few photographs that we do see from the interior of the house are staged and strange. In a photograph from within the south-facing living space, we see Farnsworth’s bed on the travertine floor covered by a white chenille blanket and, in the foreground and far background of the photograph, a composition of chairs – six in total, and two small tables. They are artful compositions that lack any logic of domestic inhabitation. Stranger still, no body is here. No body could be here.
It is impossible to occupy architectural history. The ephemera that stands in place of architecture, that serves to tell its history – photographs, texts, correspondence, exhibitions, drawings, paintings, sketches, models and other forms of representation – all belong to a temporal dimension that we cannot occupy. Perhaps for this reason, architectural archives are full of selectively curated historical ephemera that conspire to create an official and narratological history of a particular structure – one that, through its cohesiveness, we can comprehend. When more than one archive on any particular structure can be found, questions arise and the narratological history of architecture begins to chip away. This essay is such a chipping.
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Consider the photograph. Before the photograph comes the subject. In between the human eye and the subject, a lens is placed – the lens of a camera, perhaps, which will focus the scene’s visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the eye sees. Light will enter the lens and fall on a light-sensitive surface within the camera to produce a negative image. This negative image on film will then be placed in an enlarger and reversed – exposed to light- sensitive paper to reveal the scene. The result, the photograph, is a glimpse into a temporal dimension now lost – a time that cannot be re-entered. It is as distant to us as fiction. And yet, photographs – records of light as it fell in a particular place and time, as it fell through the lens of a camera and as it burned away silver halide crystals on the film – are one of our most direct links with history. What is history? And where does it begin? On December 31, 1950, Dr. Edith Farnsworth spent her first evening in the Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951). In her memoirs, she describes the evening as uneasy: the house was not quite finished, spots and strokes of white paint were still visible on the uncurtained expanses of glass that were her exterior walls, and her dinner, a can of soup warmed on a hot plate, was prepared by the light of one 60-watt bulb. This is where architectural history typically ends: with occupation. Indeed, the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Lily Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design in the Museum of Modern Art – the official archive of the American phase of Mies’ career – is a collection of ephemera that strangely denies Farnsworth’s occupation of the glass house. It is a history dedicated to the artefactual presence of the Farnsworth House and the artefactual presence, or occupation, of the architect: we see the architect on the terrace, smoking a cigar, alone or lingering with colleagues, students, visiting architects touring the house under construction. The photographs that fill this archive are, after all, primarily those commissioned by Mies, who hired Chicago-based photographer Hedrich Blessing and his staff to document the house during its construction and just after Farnsworth’s occupation of it. In the photographs taken during the house’s construction, we see Farnsworth clearly only in strange and peripheral roles – tending to her garden, with the steel of the Farnsworth House rising up in the background as if an afterthought. In later photographs, those taken once she had occupied the house, we hover round the building’s exterior – the house is presented in striking and
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I am standing alone in the dark space of a small wood outbuilding at a residency on the western coast of Oregon trying to piece together an architectural history. One by one, I project images onto the cheap scrim I have hung at the back of this shed. The warm summer light filtering under the door illuminates the detritus on the floor: dead leaves, husks of insects, dirt and sand, the ephemera that constitutes the history of this shed. The projector hums in the dark, filling the space with its own, colourless light. Advance slide. I adjust the lens of the projector to see the image as large as possible, a photograph of the interior southwest corner of the house. Here, Farnsworth has placed a set of dark wooden chairs facing each other on a thick ornamental rug. On the terrace, seen beyond the interior of the house, her two Chinese Fu dogs face one another. Roller blinds are curled up at the top of the glass walls. The whole photograph is a confusing play of reflections, as objects that face one another (as if on either side of a mirror) are also actually mirrored in the glass walls of the house. Only the inhabitant of a glass house could have known how to compose such an image in actual space. This is one in a series of photographs held by the Newberry Library in Chicago, a voluminous archive that has confused both the history and discourse of the Farnsworth House. Photographed by Plano, Illinois-based ‘Gorman’s Child Photography’, as the credit stamped on the back of each photograph awkwardly announces, the series of photographs documents the house as Dr. Farnsworth occupied it. These records are, in a sense, doubly wrong . They are an affront to Mies’ drawings of the house, which predicted furniture of his own design. Beyond this, the compositions of the photographs reveal the mercurial nature of a glass house – its tendency to reflect, to mirror and to distort one’s understanding of space. Indeed, these photographs remake the Farnsworth House. 1 They stand against architectural history. A testament to the deviousness of these photographs is that they have never circulated in architectural histories or theorisations of the house – and copyrights surrounding these photographs make their circulation very difficult, unless one finds an unorthodox method of presenting them.
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