Life in a Glass House: An Architectural Projection

ABSTRACT

Dr Farnsworth, an important patron of modern American architecture, remade the all-glass Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951) through the production of photographs and poems. Bearing traces of Farnsworth’s body, these works form a transgressive and long overlooked architectural history. In this essay, I rewrite the history of this house through inhabitations of these documents - projecting Farnsworth’s photographs of the house and dwelling within them, using fragments of Farnsworth’s poems to inform my own actions within the scenes. The resulting project - a series of photographs accompanied by fragments of Farnsworth’s poems and her English translations of modern Italian poets - suggests that history is invariably transgressive in that it is informed by the relationship between a researcher’s body and her subject.

Keywords:

• modernism
• transparency
• glass
• poetry
• performance
• inhabitation
• photography

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nora Wendl

Nora Wendl is Assistant Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Operating on a spectrum between the written artefact and the built artefact, she often aligns architecture and its histories with the adjacent fields of fiction, poetry, contemporary art and literature. She is coeditor, with Isabelle Loring Wallace, of Contemporary Art about Architecture: A Strange Utility (Ashgate, 2013). Her research has been featured or is forthcoming in 306090, Journal of Architectural Education, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, On Site: Review and Invisible City, and at various conferences and exhibition venues.