The New Yorker, April 30, 2007
"Sex and Real Estate"

by Paul Goldberger


Plays about architects don’t have much of a track record in New York, at least not since Ibsen’s “The Master Builder.” In January, the Times dismissed a new play about Frank Lloyd Wright as a “dreary drama” that focussed too much on Wright’s tirades against contractors, a subject that, however easy it may be for people to identify with, doesn’t make for stirring theatre. But things might turn out differently for “The Glass House,” a new play that explores the story of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, which was completed in 1951, outside Chicago, if only because it is a play about architecture only in the sense that “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a play about public transit. “The Glass House” explores the romantic relationship between a female client and a male architect that merely happens to have, at its center, one of the most famous houses in history. The tensions between Dr. Edith Farnsworth, who dreamed of commissioning a great work of architecture, and Mies van der Rohe, who seduced her into letting him build the house he wanted, represent the stresses of almost every client-architect relationship. “It is the story of people who were together for five years and built this wonderful house, and then they sued each other,” June Finfer, the playwright, said the other day.

“The Glass House” is being produced by two brothers, a director and an architect. Kyle Bergman, the architect, came upon the play first, almost by accident. A couple of years ago, he had contacted Finfer, who is a filmmaker in Chicago, to see if he could use her documentary about Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House, in the Czech Republic, in an architectural film festival that he was planning. “You know, I’ve written a play about Mies, too,” Finfer recalls telling Bergman. She sent him the script, which he passed on to his brother Evan, the director. “When I read it, the characters popped out at me so much that I called June Finfer and told her I wanted to get on a plane to Chicago right away and meet her,” Evan Bergman said.

Finfer and the Bergmans hit it off. She gave them an option on the play, and, together with Evan, who recently directed “Machiavelli” Off Broadway, started refining the script. The Mies van der Rohe-designed Illinois Institute of Technology campus, in Chicago, hosted a reading. Then, the brothers set up a pair of staged readings in New York.

Kyle didn’t want them to feel like backers’ auditions, so he invited everyone he knew from the architecture world. At the first reading, two weeks ago at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre, Hilary Lewis, an architectural historian who has written books about Philip Johnson, showed up. (Johnson is a character in the play.) So did Christy MacLear, who is in charge of Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. They watched Edith Farnsworth fall in love with Mies, hire him to build what would turn out to be a house of sublime beauty, and then become enraged as costs soared and the architect, with the house nearly complete, withdrew from their relationship and returned to his longtime girlfriend, Lora Marx, but not before refusing to allow Farnsworth to bring her own furniture and art into the house, insisting that they would destroy the purity of his design. Farnsworth banned him from the house, whereupon he sued her for unpaid fees, and she countersued, claiming that the building was defective. Mies won the suit, but never again visited the house.

“People say I’m a fool to build this house,” Edith Farnsworth says in the play.

“You said you wanted to advance the art of architecture,” Mies responds.

“I did, but I thought you were building a house for me,” Farnsworth says. “My house is a monument to Mies van der Rohe, and I am paying for it.”

“When you hire a great artist, you are supposed to be thrilled with what you get,” Philip Johnson tells Farnsworth. “Would you tell Picasso what to paint?”.

Chicago Reader, May 4, 2007
"If You Can Make It There"

For her play about Mies van der Rohe to get noticed in Chicago, June Finfer had to take it to New York.

By Deanna Isaacs


CHICAGO WRITER AND documentary producer June Finfer was working on a video about Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in 1999 when she began wondering what was really behind the vitriolic legal battles between its designer and its owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. Finfer has made several documentaries about architecture—collaborating with her husband, architect Paul Finfer—but none that raised such intriguing questions. Mies and his client, a prominent physician and researcher, had embarked on a five-year relationship in the mid-40s that produced the little glass palace on the Fox River in Plano, one of the world’s most revolutionary and beautiful structures—then devolved into fury.

Problems with Farnsworth House—spiraling costs, leaky roof, a lack of closets and privacy—have become part of the legend. But it’s seemed to many that they don’t really explain such intense bitterness, whereas a love affair might. Finfer’s husband was a student at IIT when Mies was director there, and they were acquainted with others who’d known both Mies and Farnsworth. When the documentary was done, Finfer couldn’t let the story go—she kept on interviewing and plowing through archives. She found no explicit evidence, but she’s convinced from everything she’s heard and read that the two had a full-fledged romance. Eventually she began to write a play about the mysterious Mies, his accomplished and determined client, and two celebrated houses, the other one designed by former Mies student Philip Johnson.

An early version of The Glass House had a reading at the Art Institute in late 2001; since then it’s had a workshop and three staged readings at Raven Theatre, two readings at Farnsworth House, and two at IIT. Finfer, a member of the Chicago Writers’ Bloc, the Illinois Arts Alliance Board, and an alumnus of the Theatre Building’s Musical Theatre Workshop, says she felt the play was ripe for production—Chicago actor John Mohrlein was a wonderful Mies and audience response was good—but “no theater in Chicago was stepping up.” Then, about a year and a half ago, she talked to New York architect Kyle Bergman, who wanted to use another documentary Finfer had made about a Mies building, Tugendhat House, in an architectural film festival he was planning.

“We were chitchatting,” Bergman says, “when she mentioned that she’d written a play about Mies. My brother’s a director and the subject was interesting, so I said, ‘Send me the script.’” Bergman read it, liked it, and passed it along to his brother, Evan (whose most recent show, Machiavelli, played off-Broadway last fall). His brother “called back in a few days and said, ‘This is fucking excellent.’ We optioned the play, and we’ve been working on it for a while with some actors here in New York.” On April 9 and 10 the brothers Bergman staged two readings, one at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theatre and the other at the 59E59 theater complex. They’d invited friends and acquaintances from their respective fields, so the seats were full of architects and theater folk. Finfer noticed a man behind her taking a lot of notes. When she commented on it, he said he might be writing something.

The note taker was architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and his warmly admiring piece, “Sex and Real Estate,” ran in the April 30 New Yorker. Goldberger notes that the last play about an architect that ventured from Chicago to New York—Frank’s Home, written by Richard Nelson and produced last year by the Goodman—got a miserable reception. A hot ticket in Chicago despite its sluggish script and interminable central monologue (suckers that we are for anything Wright-ish), Frank’s Home was panned by New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as “ill-conceived,” a “dreary drama . . . unrelentingly dour and lacking in either thematic or narrative shape.” Its run last February was short. But Goldberger predicts a better future for The Glass House, which he describes as “a play about architecture only in the sense that A Streetcar Named Desire is a play about public transit.” According to Goldberger, Finfer’s play “explores the romantic relationship between a female client and a male architect that merely happens to have, at its center, one of the most famous houses in history.”

Kyle Bergman says the play’s also about the relationship between Mies and his onetime student and colleague Philip Johnson, who was privy to the Farnsworth plans and completed a strikingly similar glass house for himself in Connecticut before Mies could even get construction under way. A drama in two acts with four characters—Mies’s longtime lover, Lora Marx, is the fourth—The Glass House is set in both the Mies and Johnson homes, Bergman says, and has “a really interesting arc.”

Since the reading, Bergman says, they’ve had calls from a number of theaters, including the Goodman: “We’re looking at our options. We’ll probably do a workshop somewhere with a developmental theater company.” It would be “good to do it in Chicago—such a great architecture and theater town,” Bergman says, but the “goal is to be in the right chute to eventually bring it back to New York.” (His film festival is, for the moment, on the back burner.) Finfer says that after the reading she was “absolutely in a daze with the response. They were so positive. That was so nice after being told several times with earlier versions, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

“There’s a line in my play, when Mies comes to teach in Chicago. Philip Johnson offers him an exhibit in New York at the Museum of Modern Art for 1947, just his work, and Mies says, ‘Well, I’m really busy.’ And Johnson says, ‘But it’s on the east coast, where reputations are made.’ That’s kind of ringing true for me. I’m saying this as nicely as I can. It’s very hard until you get noticed. It’s too early to tell what’ll happen—there’s a lot of luck involved in all this. But since this reading and the article, there’s a lot more interest in my play.”

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/thebusiness/070504/


Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians JSAH/66:1, March 2007
"Mies Media"

"Among the films that concentrate on a single building or ensemble by Mies, the work of filmmaker June Finfer stands out. Since 1999 she has directed three films about individual works by Mies van der Rohe: The Farnsworth House, Lafayette Park in Detroit Creating Community: Lafayette Park, and the Tugendhat House Mies van der Rohe's Czech Masterpiece. Coproduced with her husband Paul Finfer, an architect and urban planner who studied under Ludwig Hilberseimer at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), all three films are convincingly researched and executed...Finfer returned to this question [the central values of modern architecture and their applicability in contemporary America] in her two plays, Edith's Story and The Glass House."

Mies Society special event
March 2, 2006
Presentation of the full play, Glass House, at Crown Hall. For more information call Mies Society, 312-567-5000



Illinois Institute of Technology - IIT magazine - Summer 2005

A Blueprint for Drama
An Adobe Acrobat version of this text can be found here

The year: 1949
The setting: the secluded woods of Plano, Ill.
The protagonists: a prominent Chicago physician and a brilliant German architect
The plot: the building of a modernist house The story: the professional and artistic realization of an architectural masterpiece–and the personal cost of great ambition

When documentary filmmaker and playwright June Finfer began researching Farnsworth House for a film about the famous glass and steel structure built by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the banks of Illinois’ Fox River, she found herself unraveling a tale of ambition, desire, conflict, and revenge. She decided the story behind the house was as compelling as the architecture itself. So she wrote a play.

The Backdrop
In 1945 Edith Farnsworth, a successful Chicago physician and researcher, met Mies at a dinner party in Chicago. By the end of their conversation, Farnsworth had invited Mies to visit her property in rural Piano. During that visit, she commissioned him to build a weekend cottage for her, and over the next five years, the two grew close as they worked together to achieve their artistic vision. However, following the house's completion in 1951, Farnsworth expressed outrage at Mies–claiming exorbitant costs and unlivable conditions. A bitter legal battle ensued.

In her play The Glass House, Finfer explores the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Mies, Farnsworth, and architect Philip Johnson. “I think they all in a sense used each other to achieve their vision,” Finfer says. “Mies couldn't have built his masterpiece without a patron. Edith was a creative person with an aesthetic ambition who wanted to create something meaningful. Philip looked to Mies as a mentor, then ‘scooped’ him by copying his plans and completing his own glass house first. So Edith got her glass house. Mies got his funding. And Philip got inspiration for the early part of his career from a world-famous architect.”

The Conflict
In a seemingly win-win situation between Mies and Edith, why did a rift develop between them after the house had been completed? Why did she claim to hate him? These are some of the questions Finfer’s play addresses as it attempts to reconstruct the professional and personal relationship between these prominent figures.

The Reviews
The Glass House was presented last year at Farnsworth House as a benefit by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, which manages the house as a museum. It was also workshopped at Raven Theater in Chicago. Finfer hopes to remount it in Chicago in the coming year.

The play has elicited positive responses from both architectural neophytes and those who personally knew Mies. “Dirk Lohan, Mies’ grandson, sat in front of me at one of the readings,” Finfer says. “He told me he would leave during the show if he didn't like it.” Apparently he liked it, he not only stayed until the end, but engaged Finfer in a discussion afterwards about some of the incidents from the play.

A Modern(ist) Classic
Preparing to leave on a trip to Greece, Finfer acknowledged that the play does contain certain classic elements of Greek tragedy. “I think they were all victims of their own ambition,” says Finfer, “and ambition costs.”
Indeed, watching or reading Finfer’s ploy, one can almost feel the inevitable hand of fate guiding the lives of its characters. And if Farnsworth House, like many Greek temples, were to bear an inscription, perhaps an appropriate one could be found in Farnsworth’s memoirs. She states in rule number 20 of her personal rules for living, “Get what I want. As to this rule, you must consider also whether you want the consequences or not.”
A second reading of The Glass House is scheduled to take place at Farnsworth House in September 2005. For more information on the reading, call the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois at 312.922.1742 ext. 221. For information on Finfer's documentaries about Mies van der Rohe, go to www.lostandfoundproductions.org.

A Glimpse at the Dialogue
Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe worked together closely throughout the planning process. But passionate temperaments, logistical challenges, soaring building costs, and perhaps even romantic entanglement resulted in a complex, and eventually contentious, relationship. That relationship has been captured in June Finfer's play.

EDITH: People say I’m a fool to build this house.
MIES: What people?
EDITH: My sister and brotherinlaw.
MIES: They do not like me.
EDITH: You were rude when they invited us for dinner. You didn't say a word all evening.
MIES: I do not make the small talk.
EDITH: Richard Neutra came here. With his wife. They wanted to see the house. I told him about some of the problems.
MIES: Maybe you have Neutra to finish your house.
EDITH: Mies!
MIES: Edith, you should go back to your nephritis–and leave me to build your house.



The Beacon News

‘Glass House’ breathes life into architecture
By Linda Girardi
SPECIAL TO THE BEACON NEWS

Aug. 31, 2004
PLANO — If only for a day, Edith Farnsworth and famed architect Mies van der Rohe reunited to relive the tumultuous story behind one of the “great houses of the world.” The Glass House is a 90-minute play based on the true story of how business and personal relationships intersect, resulting in a 20th Century masterpiece of art and architecture overlooking the north banks of the Fox River — The Farnsworth House.

Playwright June Finfer speculates how the relationship between Mies and Edith evolves around the making of the one-room, all glass house and Mies' love interest, sculptor Lora Marx, as well as architect Philip Johnson, then ends in a highly publicized trial over money.

It opens with Mies declaring his affection for Marx — “We are good together,” he tells her.

It is at a dinner party in Chicago, (perhaps arranged by Farnsworth) with the outdoor expansive deck and patio as the stage, and glistening pane glass walls as the backdrop, that Marx leaves the two together and Mies is invited to visit Edith's adored pristine woods in Plano.

Here, in 1949, Mies is commissioned to build a weekend cottage getaway for her.

“It would be a crime to put an ordinary contractor’s cottage here,” says Farnsworth, a highly respected Chicago physician and researcher. The poetry in the play is her original writings.

“We will make a beautiful house here,” Mies replies.

Close relationship
The performance was presented as a benefit by the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, which manages the house as a museum.

“It is the perfect match, with each desiring what the other had,” Finfer explains during the play's reception. In her research, Finfer discovered Mies and Farnsworth have a close relationship for five years. “There was one year that I suspect they were very close,” Finfer says, with reasons revealed in the play. But in the end, she says Farnsworth has very bitter feelings toward Mies. “I researched the law records in Kendall County; it was a very, very bitter legal battle that went on for several months.” Deanna Dunagan and John Mohrlein portray the leads in The Glass House. Andrew Micheli is Philip Johnson. Suzanne Petri portrays Lora Marx.

The play is directed by independent filmmaker and commercial director Ron Lazzeretti.

The play previously had been read and staged in workshops and presented at the Architecture and Design Society of the Art Institute of Chicago and Arts Club of Chicago. Sunday’s performance was the first of its kind at the Farnsworth House.

“The play lends factuality to what was previously rumored,” resident director Christine Hampton said. The play makes it all that much more special because “it is at the very site where it all took place,” she said.

Farnsworth eventually would sell the home to Lord Peter Palumbo, a London real estate developer and collector of architects’ homes. She moved to a 14th century villa on a hilltop near Florence, Italy, and fell in love with an Italian poet.

“In the meantime, she spent 20 years here. She must have enjoyed the house on some level,” Finfer said.

Important to world
Finfer hopes to have a production within a year in Chicago. “We had a run-through prior to the reception when a large tree crashed to the ground. We took it as an applause,” Finfer said.

After Sunday’s performance, guests had the opportunity to tour the home.

Art historian Rolf Achilles, a board member of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, said walking into the glass house is like walking into a perfectly constructed cathedral.

“This is probably the greatest house built in the second half of the 20th century. It's brilliant,” Achilles said.

“This house is important not only for the United States but the whole world, and it is in Plano,” he said.

“People all over the world know about this house; you can go to Germany, Russia and Shanghai, China, and people remark about the Farnsworth House. There are only a handful of houses in the world that have this kind of recognition, and this is one of them.”


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