Edith Farnsworth met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at a dinner party in 1945. She was a Chicago nephrologist, unmarried, a musician and poet on the side, looking for a weekend retreat on a stretch of land she owned along the Fox River in Plano, Illinois. He was already the most admired architect working in the city. She asked him to design her a house, and he agreed to build her almost nothing: a single glazed room, raised on eight white steel columns above the floodplain, its floor and roof slabs cantilevered past the structure so that from a distance the whole thing seems to hover.
It did not go well. Construction costs climbed to roughly double the original estimate. In July 1951 Mies filed suit against Farnsworth for unpaid fees. She countersued that October, alleging fraud and deceit and accusing him of negligent handling of the plans and dishonest accounting. Mies argued, and the court agreed, that Farnsworth had approved the changes that drove the price up; he won the suit, her countersuit was dismissed, and the two of them never spoke again. She kept the house until 1972, when she sold it to the British collector Lord Peter Palumbo and moved permanently to Italy. She was, by her own account, never entirely reconciled to living inside it.
The house itself survived the argument that built it. It passed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2003, and in 2021, on its seventieth anniversary, the Trust renamed the site the Edith Farnsworth House, restoring her name to a building the public had spent seventy years calling only by his. It remains, alongside the Barcelona Pavilion, the clearest built statement of what Mies meant by less: a house reduced to a floor, a roof, eight columns, and glass, with a real and difficult human story sitting inside that reduction rather than outside it.