THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 |C7
Broken Glass
By Alex Beam
Random House, 337 pages, $28BYWITOLDRYBCZYNSKIway that the Parthenon is a distillation
of ancient Greek temple architecture.
As the design evolved, the architect-
client relationship developed into a close
friendship, and most likely a brief ro-
mance. In 1947, a model of the house was
featured in a one-man exhibition of
Mies’s work at the Museum of Modern
Art, although construction did not begin
until two years later. The delay was
partly the result of steel rationing, partly
because Mies’s practice had suddenly
become very busy, and partly because he
was a great procrastinator. But he was
also fastidious. The exposed steel col-
umns of the house were sandblasted and
given four coats of white paint; the win-
dows were the largest sheets of plate
glass then available; the floor was hand-
selected slabs of travertine; the paneling
of the core that contained the bathrooms
(the only enclosed rooms in the house)
was primavera, a tropical hardwood.
The construction took two years. By
then the friendship between Farnsworth
and Mies had cooled. Some of that was
the result of the inevitable strains that
occur when a dream becomes reality and
aesthetic goals come up against the
mundane demands of everyday life. For
example, Mies reluctantly provided a
fireplace, but resisted screening-in the
porch, even though the low-lying site
was mosquito-infested. Farnsworth, who
was 6 feet tall, wanted the free-standing
closet to screen her sleeping area, but
Mies insisted that it be only 5 feet high.
Other strains were financial: the house
had been budgeted at $40,000, but the
total cost was closer to twice that
amount. Farnsworth ponied up, but
finally an unanticipated bill pushed her
over the edge, and she ordered all fur-
ther expenses to cease and held back the
final payment of several thousand dol-
lars (Mies’s office was acting as the gen-
eral contractor). It was at this time that
she refused the delivery of the furniture.
The whole thing ended up in court.
Mies had been convinced by advisers
to sue his client for the outstanding
expenses, and she counter-sued, claim-
ing that he had been incompetent. Mr.
Beam’s lively account of the trial, based
on transcripts, is fascinating. Both sides
shaded the truth. Farnsworth claimed to
have never been shown a plan, but Mies’s
attorney produced a photograph of her
examining drawings. Mies’s witnesses
testified that the house had been prop-
erly built, but years later the notable
architect Myron Goldsmith, who had
been one of Mies’s assistants, recalled
PleaseturntopageC8The Anthropological Lens
By Christopher Morton
Oxford, 226 pages, $40BYADAMKUPERLet the Outside In
Edith Farnsworth abandoned a career as a violinist to study medicine. She was 42,
unmarried and successful when she convinced Mies van der Rohe to build her a house.HOME WORKThe Farnsworth House’s windows were the largest sheets of plate glass then available—but fogged up all too frequently.
CAROL M. HIGHSMITH (2)
E
.E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
was a legendary
ethnographer of colonial
African societies and a
masterly interpreter of
African magic and religion. Between
1926 and 1939 he made a series of
field studies in the Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan. These were his glory years as
an ethnographic explorer. He also
published, between 1937 and 1956,
four of the 20th century’s most
influential ethnographic monographs
and several hundred research reports
and theoretical papers.
Part of Evans-Pritchard’s enduring
appeal is his style. Clifford Geertz, a
leading American anthropologist—
and no mean stylist himself—judged
that “there has been no greater
master” of the “Oxbridge Senior
Common Room” tone, instancing
Evans-
Pritchard’s
laconic
comment on
his deploy-
ment as a
guerrilla
officer in
Sudan during
World War II:
“This was
just what I
wanted and
what I could
do, for I had made researches in the
Southern Sudan for some years and
spoke with ease some of its
languages.” Then there is the mode
that Geertz dubs Akobo realism: “I
started with my force of fifteen Anuak
for the upper Akobo. We got through
the swamps and high grasses with the
utmost difficulty. I received a warm
welcome from the inhabitants of these
upstream villages for they remembered
me well from my earlier visit.”
All this—the fieldwork, the books,
the style—has been subjected to
abundant commentary. In “The
Anthropological Lens: Rethinking E.E.
Evans-Pritchard,” Christopher Morton
introduces a novel perspective. His
source for this book is the archive of
some 2,600 fieldwork photographs that
Evans-Pritchard donated to Oxford
University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, where
Mr. Morton is the curator of photo-
graph and manuscript collections.
Although Evans-Pritchard’s
ethnographic descriptions were, as
Geertz noted, “intensely visual,” Mr.
Morton concedes that he “remained
mediocre as a photographer in both a
technical and compositional sense
throughout his career.” The author
claims, nevertheless, and plausibly
enough, that by attending to this
photographic archive he can come up
with fresh insights into the way Evans-
Pritchard’s studies were shaped “by
the historical contexts of his fieldwork,
its colonial and academic structures,
the agency of his local collaborators.”
To be sure, the images need
interpretation. Mr. Morton explains, for
instance, that the recurrent portraits of
stiff-backed, glassy-eyed men are
throwbacks to an already obsolescent
genre of “racial” studies, in which
Evans-Pritchard himself had no interest.
The author also points out that sitters
or bystanders may subvert the
photographer’s message, but intentions
and meanings are sometimes hard to
pin down. One photograph shows
Evans-Pritchard in full colonial gear,
with pith helmet, short khaki pants,
pipe in mouth, in the middle of a group
of Nuer boys who are saluting, sticks
slung on their shoulders like rifles. Just
innocent fun? No doubt it would all
have seemed very different at the time.
Mr. Morton might perhaps have paid
more attention to the images that
Evans-Pritchard selected to illustrate his
monographs. These were not, on the
whole, his own photographs. And while
many pictures in the archive feature
Africans wearing colonial outfits, the
illustrations in Evans-Pritchard’s books
typically represent Azande dressed in
traditional fabrics and skins, and naked
young Nuer men and women.
An evocative picture of Evans-
Pritchard, discussed only in passing by
Mr. Morton, was published in the
memoirs of the novelist Anthony
Powell. Remembered by Powell as
“grave, withdrawn, and somewhat
exotic in dress,” Evans-Pritchard was
PleaseturntopageC8A revaluation of
a great Oxford
ethnographer
and interpreter
of African
magic and
religion.Gresham’s Law
A life of the
brilliant banker to
Queen Elizabeth I C8READ ONLINE ATWSJ.COM/BOOKSHELFA Dandy
Among
The Azande
BOOKS
Voyage of Mercy
USS Jamestown
and the starving poor
of IrelandC9T
HE MOST CELEBRATED
midcentury modern house
in the United States is the
Farnsworth House outside
Plano, Ill., designed by
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1945. The
steel-and-glass pavilion is now owned by
the National Trust for Historic Preser-
vation, which maintains it and opens it
to the public. The minimalist interior is
furnished with the architect’s famous
furniture—a pair of Tugendhat lounge
chairs, three Brno desk chairs, a Bar-
celona couch—iconic 1930s designs
made out of chromed metal and leather.
There is no clutter to mar the ethereal,
Zen-like space, no bookshelves, no paint-
ings, no knickknacks.
Did someone really live this way? The
truth is they didn’t—the National Trust
tableau is a polite fiction. The originalowner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, furnished
her weekend house with comfortable
Scandinavian chaises longues, wicker
dining chairs, a day bed with throw
cushions, North African rugs and potted
plants; not a stick of chromed metal and
leather in the place. Mies had ordered
several of his own designs for the
house—two MR chairs, two Barcelona
chairs and a matching glass coffee
table—but Farnsworth rejected them all.
“I think the Barcelona chair is very hand-
some but it is fearfully heavy and utterly
unsuitable for a small country house,”
she said, “the place would look like a
Helena Rubinstein salon.” By then, the
doctor and her architect were no longer
on speaking terms.
Alex Beam describes his book on the
Farnsworth House and its two protago-
nists as “the story of their brilliant
friendship, their vitriolic breakup, and
the architectural treasure they created
along the banks of the Fox River.” Mr.Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe
and the author of several nonfiction
books, is not an architecture critic or
historian, but that is all to the good.
“Broken Glass” is an engrossing in-depth
narrative of how the human interaction
between client and architect produced
a famous house. Mies van der Rohe was
one of the most influential architects of
the 20th century, and Mr. Beam provides
an exceptionally perceptive character
study of this complex and often impene-
trable figure.
Farnsworth and Mies met at a dinner
party on Chicago’s North Side in 1945.
It was a momentous encounter. She
casually mentioned that she had just
bought land in the country, and asked
the architect if one of his young employ-
ees might be able to design a weekend
house for her. “I told her I would not
be interested in a normal house, but if
it could be fine and interesting, then I
would do it,” Mies later recalled.
Farnsworth and Mies were formida-
ble individuals. She was 42, unmarried,
from a well-to-do Chicago family. She
had abandoned
a promising ca-
reer as a concert
violinist to study
medicine and be-
came a respect-
ed nephrologist,
teacher and med-
ical researcher
overseeing her
own lab. Mr.
Beam describes
her as a mid-
century anomaly, a professional woman
who had “navigated the world more
or less on her own, and didn’t seem
cowed by the prospect of continuing
that way.” Mies, nearly 60, was a con-
firmed loner who had left his wife and
three children long before emigrating
from Germany seven years earlier. He
was already famous, but had as yet
built little in the United States. The
Farnsworth commission was a chance
to change that.
The nine-acre property in Plano, an
hour from Chicago, included a spectacu-
larly beautiful meadow beside the river.
After one of several companionable
excursions to the site Mies concluded,
“So I think we should build the house of
steel and glass; in that way we’ll let the
outside in.” Farnsworth agreed. The
result was a simple box supported on
eight steel H-beams, with all-glass walls
and an open plan. It was a graphic distil-
lation of modernist ideals, in the sameBOX SET
Mies’s
design
was a
graphic
distillation
of
modernist
ideals.