The Farnsworth House Project, 2008

A series of 10 large format photographs. 4"x 5" color negatives scanned and printed on archival pigment paper, 20"x 25".

In the late 1960s, a colleague of mine captured a series of evocative photographs of the Farnsworth House, during which the architectural marvel lay in a state of neglect and abandonment. The haunting imagery of decaying leaves strewn across the external deck and the property overrun with weeds served as the conceptual genesis for an extended scholarly and artistic investigation. This project evolved into an inquiry into the fluidity and temporality of architectural meaning, challenging the conventional understanding of architecture as a static, culturally inscribed phenomenon.

Contrary to the popular perception of architectural structures as immutable and iconic—fixed in both form and cultural significance—this project posits that architecture is, in fact, an ever-changing entity. Its meaning and value are not static but are subject to the shifting cultural, social, and historical contexts in which they are situated. The Farnsworth House, completed in 1951 through the collaborative efforts of Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe, serves as a compelling case study in this regard. This seminal project not only influenced Mies' subsequent works, such as the 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, but also marked a transformative moment in architectural history with the incorporation of then-novel materials and construction techniques like prefabricated components, cantilevered construction, and iron and steel frames.

By revisiting the Farnsworth House through the lens of these neglected photographs, the project aims to interrogate the mutable nature of architectural spaces often erroneously perceived as unchanging within our collective cultural consciousness. It seeks to deconstruct the illusory projections that often surround iconic architectural spaces, thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of how architecture is continuously redefined by its time's evolving cultural values and norms.

Project Research

I arrived in Chicago jet-lagged and weary from a cross continental flight for an interview at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. A colleague on my interview panel queried me at dinner about architecture, the conversation led spontaneously to the Farnsworth house and Mies’ skyscrapers on Lake Shore drive. I still have the note where he scribbled the address on a napkin over dinner.

My colleague gave me some large format 4"x 5" negatives of the house taken nearly forty years earlier (in the fall of 1968) revealing the disrepair and neglect of the property. There is something shockingly inert about the pristine environment of the house in its current state. I began to think about a work I would make that would encompass the disparities of my experience with this place, photographing the garden in such a way that the manicured grounds of Farnsworth made it evident that a change had taken place - new value was added to this once derelict structure.

“Space, in contemporary discourse, as in lived experience, has taken on an almost palpable existence. Its contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic; its hollows and voids are occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle, and are likewise assumed to stand for, and identify, the sites of such struggle... 

Equally, space is assumed to hide, in its darkest recesses and forgotten margins, all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness. Indeed, space as threat, as harbinger of the unseen, operates as medical and psychical metaphor for all the possible erosions of bourgeois bodily and social well-being. The body, indeed, has become its own exterior, as its cell structure has become the object of spatial modeling that maps its own sites of immunological battle and describes the forms of its antibodies. "Outside," even as the spaces of exile, asylum, confinement, and quarantine of.' the early modern period were continuously spilling over into the "normal" space of the city, so the "pathological" spaces of today menace the clearly marked out limits of the social order.”

 - Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny