Patricia Eakins
10/01/2005
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., is an example of how owners, preservationists and the community at large can collaborate to save an architectural marvel from oblivion.
Mies designed the home as a weekend retreat for physician Edith Farnsworth. She later sued him—unsuccessfully—because she hated the completed house when it was unveiled in 1951. After making revisions to Mies’s plan to make it more livable—changes that still make design purists shudder, such as screens to thwart mosquitoes—Farnsworth kept the house. She sold it to Peter Palumbo in 1968. He coddled Farnsworth House, even hiring the firm of Mies’s grandson, Dirk Lohan, to restore the home to its original 1951 appearance.
In 2003, health concerns forced Palumbo to put Farnsworth House on the auction block. Fearing it would go to a private developer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois announced a joint campaign to save the structure. Each put up $1 million in seed money, and some 350 people contributed funds, some as little as a few dollars. This alliance was able to place the winning bid: $7.5 million. Today an organization called Friends of the Farnsworth House, which helped create the endowment, runs the building as a museum.
The small steel-and-glass structure, located along the Fox River west of Chicago, is considered a Modernist masterpiece, but the residence and the land on which is sits devour an annual maintenance fund of approximately 4 percent of its $5 million endowment. The expenses cover the staff, parking lot, insurance and other costs to accommodate 50,000 visitors a year. Admission is $20 per person.
