Which architect designed the glass-and-steel Farnsworth House, completed near Plano, Illinois, in 1951?

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed the glass-and-steel Farnsworth House, completed near Plano, Illinois, in 1951.

Edith Farnsworth commissioned the weekend house from Mies van der Rohe. Built between 1945 and 1951, it consists of a raised steel frame, broad glass walls, and a compact interior organized around a central service core. The house stands in a floodplain beside the Fox River, so its elevated platform was an important practical as well as architectural feature.

The building is associated with Mies’s modernist principle of reducing architecture to clear structure and space. Its open plan and extensive glazing are celebrated, but the house also raised practical issues involving heat, glare, insects, privacy, and flooding. Those tensions make it useful in discussions of modern residential design rather than a simple model of universally comfortable housing.

The Farnsworth House became a historic house museum. It is often confused with Philip Johnson’s Glass House, but the two are separate projects by different architects in different states.