Farnsworth House - Integration With Nature

Integration With Nature

Mies stated, “Nature, too, shall live its own life. We must beware not to disrupt it with the color of our houses and interior fittings. Yet we should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity.” With the concept of the weekend house, Mies van der Rohe has deeply marked the architectural culture, not to mention the art of material selection, construction and aesthetic perception. Beyond the functionality of a building, Mies van der Rohe also highlighted the building's most distinguishing aesthetic features. By using proportion and scale, Rohe was able to perceive its innermost order and distinguishing features and to express them in space and form.

The Farnsworth House, built on a vast meadow with a variety of trees along the Fox River, is not a structure that lives up to common societal ideals of inhabitable architecture. What is missing are the “non-essentials”. As Mies quotes, “the essentials for living are floor and roof. Everything else is proportion and nature. Whether the house pleases or not is inconsequential.” The house was created in order to enable its inhabitants to experience the rural silence and the passing of the seasons. It begins unfolding and communicating itself to the outside only with the change of the seasons. Thus, this house, and living in it, involves trust in the environment. The man-made geometric form creates a relationship the extraneous landscape surrounding it to exemplify “dwelling” in its simplest state. Open views from all sides of the building help enlarge the area and aid flow between the living space and its natural surroundings. The views achieved from the architecture reaches through the masses of the trees to other bank of Fox River – the cell of urbanism as a meditative, almost monastic production, The ever-changing play of nature guides the inner life of the inhabitants through sensual space towards self-realization. The basic idea was thus realized.

The house stands independently as a masterpiece. The continuous change in nature is a work of art in and of itself, leaving no need for interior decor or landscaping. Where the interior blends into the exterior, the gentleness of nature flows into the softness of the space, and light creates a subtle modulation within. Both aspects create an aura that solidifies sensibly where the inner and outer worlds meet. The house is in perfect harmony with nature – there is no garden architecture, no pathways, beds or flowers. A large maple tree protects the raised travertine marble terrace. The discrete white of the steel construction and the transparent glass panes make the house almost invisible; it offers its respect to nature.

The development of new technical and aesthetic possibilities helped Mies van der Rohe to create a solid foundation for his architecture. Despite all of the changes that have occurred over the years, these principles still have tremendous influence on modern architectural form. Reflecting upon the weekend house also led Mies to a form of expression that approached the building style of the Far East. However, it is devoid of any imitation, as is demonstrated by the wall as a non-supporting spatial termination, which allows for ground plans that are as open as possible for the extension of the living space into the garden. In the context of the idea of “skin and bones”, the uniform treatment of materials and the concept of “adaptation to nature”, catch the attention of architects who look to the past for inspiration for contemporary architecture.

As Mies stated on his achievement, “If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside. That way more is said about nature—it becomes part of a larger whole.” Farnsworth House is the essence of simplicity in the purest form, displaying the ever-changing play of nature.

One of the many features of the immediate site was a large Black Maple tree, which was integral for the placement and orientation of the house on the site. Incidentally, the same kind of tree, which also is quite abundant in the State Park to the south, was part of the reason for the land in the immediate vicinity of the house to become a State Park in the 1960s. Sadly, due to disease and old age, the tree died in the early 2000s, and the (now deceased) tree was removed, as most of the trunk of the tree remained, and it was being held in place through cables and bracing. The house's close proximity to the tree, some ten feet, led to a feeling of oneness with nature, which was integral to the design aesthetic that Mies was going for in designing the house.