Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois (Elevation)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
American, born Germany. 1886–1969
1945
A watercolor and graphite elevation by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that presents the Farnsworth House as a slender glass-and-steel pavilion, aiming to communicate the design’s clarity, proportions, and relationship to its site.
The low, delicate pavilion appears to float across the paper—its thin frame and a few colored hints of furniture read as almost weightless against soft, sunlit washes of trees that make the transparent house feel like a framed view of the landscape.
The image crystallizes Mies’s modernist ideal of minimal structure and transparency—an influential articulation of the glass house that shaped postwar architecture’s approach to indoor–outdoor living and refined formal composition.
Medium
Watercolor and graphite on tracing paper
Dimensions
13 x 25" (33 x 63.5 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect
Accession
1002.1965
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
