This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Long before Edith Farnsworth commissioned the glass house on the Fox River that carries her name, she had already built a career unusual enough on its own terms. She earned her medical degree from Northwestern in 1938, at a moment the school capped its entering class to four women, and became an associate professor of medicine at Chicago's Passavant Hospital. In 1948 she gained real national recognition, not for anything architectural, but for being among the first physicians to use the hormone ACTH to treat nephritis and nephrosis, building on research she had published two years earlier on how the kidneys reabsorb chloride and phosphate. She was, alongside all of this, a classically trained violinist and composer who had studied in Rome in the 1920s. None of that biography is what most people know her for. She met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at a dinner party in 1945 and commissioned him to design a small weekend retreat on land she owned along the Fox River in Plano, Illinois, a glass-walled, one-room house raised on steel piers above the floodplain, built with no written contract between architect and client, an omission that would matter a great deal a few years later. Construction ran from the late 1940s into 1951, with costs climbing well past what the two of them had first discussed. In 1951 Mies sued her for unpaid fees; she countersued, alleging fraud and deceit, and the case went to a six-week trial in Kendall County. The court ultimately sided with Mies, dismissing her countersuit, though she ended up paying considerably less than his side had sought. They reportedly never spoke again. For decades afterward, the popular telling of this story cast Farnsworth as a scorned, embittered woman who had fallen for her architect and sued him out of wounded romantic feeling when the affair, real or imagined, went nowhere; a 1953 House Beautiful article, before the courts had even finished with the case, quoted an anonymous, clearly identifiable Farnsworth describing herself as disillusioned and her own house as nothing but a glass cage on stilts. The architectural historian Nora Wendl has argued, from her own reading of the trial transcript and Farnsworth's surviving correspondence, that this framing is a later, gendered invention with little real support: Farnsworth's own memoirs, Wendl notes, are conspicuously discreet on any romantic question, with pages missing, and what the actual record shows is two strong-willed people with genuinely incompatible ideas about what the house should be and who should pay for the gap between the estimate and the bill. Farnsworth sold the house in 1971 to Lord Peter Palumbo and retired to a villa near Florence, where she became a published translator of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale and wrote extensive memoirs that remain unpublished. She died in Italy in the winter of 1977. The house she fought so hard over is today a National Trust museum that draws visitors from around the world to admire exactly the glass walls she once called a cage.