Broken Glass by Alex Beam

Author:Alex Beam
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Mies and McCormick were likewise hoping to domesticate the glass house design, in their case for suburban tract homes. However, the absence of a basement and air-conditioning meant the McCormick design couldn’t compete with the garden-variety ranch houses springing up around every major American city.

Great architects have always dreamed of making homes for the middle class, most notably Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian adventure, when he tried to build easily constructed versions of his Prairie Style houses for the masses. The smallish Usonian homes were generally elegant, but many ran well over the intended $15,000 or $20,000 budget. Mies, too, entertained Usonian dreams. A couple of years after completing the Farnsworth House, he and Goldsmith embarked on a formal study of mass-producing the Farnsworth in a fully glassed residential project called the 50 × 50 House. The 2,500-square-foot open-plan home was intended for family use, and, theoretically, might have been a less expensive version of the Farnsworth suitable for construction on housing tracts. It shared some design features with Edith’s Plano home, for instance, an asymmetrically placed kitchen/bathroom/services “core” and a broad patio that replicated the suspended travertine terrace in Plano, although this terrace was earthbound. In a 1986 oral interview, Goldsmith explained that Mies had fallen in love with the idea of capacious, open-plan dwelling spaces, and thought American families might come to share his vision:

Mies was very interested in architecture just as background for people, to try to reduce the architecture as much as possible to nothing….One sees the glimmer of this in some of the lofts that are being done now, unified, very high spaces, solving the elements like sleeping and everything at an absolute minimum. This was the idea of the Fifty by Fifty House, of how far you could go in one unified space and how you could live with it.29

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