a place calling

I am experiencing something new: a place calling me and an urge to visit it. It is not home, it is not a familiar and frequented location, but a place that I have only visited once: the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe in Plano, Illinois.

I keep thinking about it, the serenity and calm that you experience in the building and its setting by the river and in the woods. On a literal level, it may be because it is Fall and the foliage reminds me of that setting and scenery. On a more conceptual level, it may be what the space and its setting inspire; simplicity, transparency, independence, and transcendence.

Historian Maritz Vandenburg says, "Every physical element has been distilled to its irreducible essence. The interior is unprecedentedly transparent to the surrounding site, and also unprecedentedly uncluttered in itself. All of the paraphernalia of traditional living –rooms, walls, doors, interior trim, loose furniture, pictures on walls, even personal possessions – have been virtually abolished in a puritanical vision of simplified, transcendental existence."
 
I am asking myself, is this aspiration to simplicity, transcendance, and letting go of the materials a reflection of what I am experiencing, or what I want to experience?  

 photo by jon miller

photo by tigerhill studio

Farnsworth House: http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/