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The muddied
muddled waters of the Midterm season. Paul Krugman had his take
on the state of affairs with his
The Focus Hocus-Pocus
Op-Ed in The New York Times last week. Now James Kloppenberg’s
Reading Obama
is the book of the moment, (Kloppenberg sat down with
Charlie Rose
last night) and we’ve just added his volume to our reading list.
Time will make sense of these times.
Photo: LPCI,
farnsworthhouse.org
And so, we
decided to skirt the entire issue and talk about an entirely
different sort of White House – Mies van der Rohe's
Farnsworth
House,
built in 1951, and which we sometimes think is the most beautiful
house in the world. Some ideal space where a certain
classical yet asymmetric purity meets modernist poetry. Built as
a weekend residential home (Philip Johnson borrowed heavily from
it for his Glass House, and wasn’t quite able to live up to
its example, though he did manage to complete his house first), it
follows on ideas that had been explored so successfully at Mies’s
Pavilion
in Barcelona
in 1929 (the
famous German entry at the Barcelona Exposition, a De Stijl-esque
composition, asymmetrical and rectilinear, of glass, steel, green
Tinian marble, onyx, and travertine with reflecting pools lined in
black glass and a sculpture court. A study in opacity and
transparency with its heavy scarlet drapes and glass walls and the
flowing open plan. It was one of the most beautiful modern
buildings ever built - inside were a few exquisitely perfect
objects - a couple of Barcelona chairs, half a dozen Barcelona
stools and a couple of glass-topped tables.)
Photo: Jon Miller, Hedrich Blessing,
farnsworthhouse.org
The
Farnsworth House is impossibly beautiful for the contrasts it
offers. The cold purity of glass, steel and travertine stone
set amidst the wildness of nature. The asymmetric clarity of
the geometry
of its structure, a study in horizontal planes (terrace, floor,
roof of house; the floor lifted away in case of flooding from the
nearby river) and outside the chaos of trees and leaves and grass.
The detailing is meticulous, the materials sumptuous:
travertine floors, primavera wood, rich shantung silk of curtains.
Also the expression of Mies's ideal of ‘beinahe nichts’ or
almost nothing. What Mies achieves is
both the ideal and its realization: purity in a structural sense,
the liquid flowing space of the open plan, and a transparency that
is both material and the thing wanted.
Visit:
The
Farnsworth House
Watch:
The Charlie
Rose interview with James Kloppenberg
Read:
The New York
Times article on James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama
Read:
The Focus Hocus-Pocus, nytimes.com, Paul
Krugman
Read:
From the
eCognoscente archives: The Barcelona Chair and Pavilion
Tags:
architecture politics
literature
design
museums
geometry
history
books obama
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Photo: Jon Miller, Hedrich Blessing,
farnsworthhouse.org |
