"Don't ruin it, please?"
She said to me.
At a party, pointing her fingers at me, though kindly.
"I won't, I promise."
I said, a bit concerned that I might, and my mind going at 100 mph thinking, how? how not to ruin it?
At Farnsworth house, again.
It is a rainy Sunday. We are a small group touring the 50+ acres property and the beautiful white elevated glasshouse that Mies Van der Rohe built for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in 1951.
I see it differently this time. It is a female building. All of Mies' buildings are black steel, while this one is white. It is elevated for obvious reasons, yet this creates a feeling of having a skirt on. A skirt that is pulled up with a tease, or a determination that she wants to be running around the meadows and nothing would stop her. The stairs and the porch lay off of the building as if the tail of a Victorian dress.
It is light and fragile, yet strong and built on steel and has endured "biblical floods." It is single, but not alone. It has constant visitors who come to appreciate its elegance, endurance, beauty, poetry, grace, and solitude.
Palumbo, the second owner of the house, before it became a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, breathed and felt the house with every inch of his being. He wrote descriptions of living in it as if a sensual night with a lover. He understood it. The caress of the wind on the steel, the light laying down on the glass. He spent money on house repairs and restoration, like one would on an ailing child.
We take another short tour, the "LumenHaus." The Virginia Tech students' award winning solar house inspired by the Farnsworth house, in 2010. It doesn't move us. The water around it, while recycled and reused, doesn't transcend oceans and rivers. The solar shades a great technology but already done, in shapes of flying birds in another magnificent space, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, by Santiago Calatrava. Nothing is ahead of its time, and nothing marries steel, wood, water, light, and recycled material poetically.
"60 years later, and this is the best we could come up with?"
He says.
When she told me not to "ruin it", she was talking about him. That he has a pure soul and that it is rare. I believed her. She brought a good example of her husband of fifteen years, and I wanted to be her, believing in purity, in the soul, and not ruining it.
At Farnsworth house, seeing what Palumbo did to the house, and how the preservationists and art collectors came up with the money to outbid bidders at the auction house, made me cry. They believed in its purity and didn't want to ruin it. They tried and succeeded to keep the Farnsworth house in her birthplace, where she could continue to hold her skirt up for it not to be ruined by flooding rivers. At the LumenHaus while solar power and recycled water was rightly used, poetry had been lost.
I sit across from him as he also blogs about our shared experience of visiting the Farnsworth house on a rainy Fall Sunday. I raise my head from my laptop and look at the side of his neck over his laptop and I tell myself: remember not to ruin it. Build on it, but "don't ruin it."
I think: that must be the trick and that must be the challenge. Good luck!
his: http://waveland.tumblr.com/post/10390972424/people-who-live-in-glass-houses
my earlier entry on the Farnsworth house:
http://fekrozekr.blogspot.com/2010/11/place-calling.html
more: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3785&page=1
She said to me.
At a party, pointing her fingers at me, though kindly.
"I won't, I promise."
I said, a bit concerned that I might, and my mind going at 100 mph thinking, how? how not to ruin it?
At Farnsworth house, again.
It is a rainy Sunday. We are a small group touring the 50+ acres property and the beautiful white elevated glasshouse that Mies Van der Rohe built for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in 1951.
I see it differently this time. It is a female building. All of Mies' buildings are black steel, while this one is white. It is elevated for obvious reasons, yet this creates a feeling of having a skirt on. A skirt that is pulled up with a tease, or a determination that she wants to be running around the meadows and nothing would stop her. The stairs and the porch lay off of the building as if the tail of a Victorian dress.
It is light and fragile, yet strong and built on steel and has endured "biblical floods." It is single, but not alone. It has constant visitors who come to appreciate its elegance, endurance, beauty, poetry, grace, and solitude.
Palumbo, the second owner of the house, before it became a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, breathed and felt the house with every inch of his being. He wrote descriptions of living in it as if a sensual night with a lover. He understood it. The caress of the wind on the steel, the light laying down on the glass. He spent money on house repairs and restoration, like one would on an ailing child.
We take another short tour, the "LumenHaus." The Virginia Tech students' award winning solar house inspired by the Farnsworth house, in 2010. It doesn't move us. The water around it, while recycled and reused, doesn't transcend oceans and rivers. The solar shades a great technology but already done, in shapes of flying birds in another magnificent space, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, by Santiago Calatrava. Nothing is ahead of its time, and nothing marries steel, wood, water, light, and recycled material poetically.
"60 years later, and this is the best we could come up with?"
He says.
When she told me not to "ruin it", she was talking about him. That he has a pure soul and that it is rare. I believed her. She brought a good example of her husband of fifteen years, and I wanted to be her, believing in purity, in the soul, and not ruining it.
At Farnsworth house, seeing what Palumbo did to the house, and how the preservationists and art collectors came up with the money to outbid bidders at the auction house, made me cry. They believed in its purity and didn't want to ruin it. They tried and succeeded to keep the Farnsworth house in her birthplace, where she could continue to hold her skirt up for it not to be ruined by flooding rivers. At the LumenHaus while solar power and recycled water was rightly used, poetry had been lost.
I sit across from him as he also blogs about our shared experience of visiting the Farnsworth house on a rainy Fall Sunday. I raise my head from my laptop and look at the side of his neck over his laptop and I tell myself: remember not to ruin it. Build on it, but "don't ruin it."
I think: that must be the trick and that must be the challenge. Good luck!
his: http://waveland.tumblr.com/post/10390972424/people-who-live-in-glass-houses
my earlier entry on the Farnsworth house:
http://fekrozekr.blogspot.com/2010/11/place-calling.html
more: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3785&page=1
