Chicago writer and documentary producer June Finfer was working on a video about Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in 1999 when she began wondering what was really behind the vitriolic legal battles between its designer and its owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Finfer has made several documentaries about architecture–collaborating with her husband, architect Paul Finfer–but none that raised such intriguing questions. Mies and his client, a prominent physician and researcher, had embarked on a five-year relationship in the mid-40s that produced the little glass palace on the Fox River in Plano, one of the world’s most revolutionary and beautiful structures–then devolved into fury.
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Problems with Farnsworth House–spiraling costs, leaky roof, a lack of closets and privacy–have become part of the legend. But it’s seemed to many that they don’t really explain such intense bitterness, whereas a love affair might. Finfer’s husband was a student at IIT when Mies was director there, and they were acquainted with others who’d known both Mies and Farnsworth. When the documentary was done, Finfer couldn’t let the story go–she kept on interviewing and plowing through archives. She found no explicit evidence, but she’s convinced from everything she’s heard and read that the two had a full-fledged romance. Eventually she began to write a play about the mysterious Mies, his accomplished and determined client, and two celebrated houses, the other one designed by former Mies student Philip Johnson.
The note taker was architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and his warmly admiring piece, “Sex and Real Estate,” ran in the April 30 New Yorker. Goldberger notes that the last play about an architect that ventured from Chicago to New York–Frank’s Home, written by Richard Nelson and produced last year by the Goodman–got a miserable reception. A hot ticket in Chicago despite its sluggish script and interminable central monologue (suckers that we are for anything Wright-ish), Frank’s Home was panned by New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as “ill-conceived,” a “dreary drama . . . unrelentingly dour and lacking in either thematic or narrative shape.” Its run last February was short. But Goldberger predicts a better future for The Glass House, which he describes as “a play about architecture only in the sense that A Streetcar Named Desire is a play about public transit.” According to Goldberger, Finfer’s play “explores the romantic relationship between a female client and a male architect that merely happens to have, at its center, one of the most famous houses in history.”
First Artropolis, Then the World
