Farnsworth House
Plano, Illinois. USA
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
Location
The Farnsworth House, located in Plano, Illinois, sits in the flood plain of the Fox River near Chicago. For this reason it is elevated five feet, three inches above the ground.History
The Farnsworth House is a structure which has been subject to a great deal of criticism and praise. It is also the only residential building in the United States by the architecture philosopher Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.Physical Description
Construction materials of the Farnsworth House are limited to steel, concrete and glass, all of which are very visable and self-explanatory in their roles as structural elements. Staying true to his belief that, "God is in the details", Mies has composed a big city retreat with big city materials that is both harmonious within itself and in its natural surroundings. Both the floor and the roof are supported by eight inch steel columns, four on each side of the lengthwise dimension. The floor, ceiling and terrace are all framed with fifteen-inch channels which become the structural girders to support the clear span. The span is twenty-nine feet and is supported by twelve inch steel beams at five feet six inches on center. This steel framework is encased by 1/4 inch clear, polished plate glass, which provides a transparent facade.The overall dimensions of the Farnsworth House are twenty-eight feet eight inches by seventy-seven feet three inches. These dimensions come directly from a two foot by two foot nine inch grid established by the Roman travertine floor slabs. These also e stablish column spacing, window divisions and terrace size.
Additional details of the Farnsworth House include carefully selected and placed furniture of teak wood and leather, curtains which can be drawn wherever privacy is desired and a radiant floor heating system due to the fact that the underside of the floor is exposed to outside air temperatures.
Building Process
Structural Descripton/Aspects
It is easy to understand the basic loading patterns and distribution withstood by the Farnsworth House simply by glancing at it. The structural frame is fully visable and thus becomes both structure and architecture at the same time. Mies' philosophy of "less is more" is evident here as the gentle expression of the simple column and simple beam are all that appear. Although simple in nature, the steel columns and other vertical resisting elements are complex in detail. This point can be most clearly illustrated if we examine a vertical load on the roof of the house. The uppermost structural elements on which the l oad would act are the precast channel planks that span I-beams at every five feet six inches. The load is then carried through the beam that spans a total of twenty-nine feet to a girder to which the beam is welded forming a rigid connection. The girder is a continuous element of seventy-seven feet three inches with no joints or breaks in it whatsoever. The girder is rigidly connected to four columns which take the structural I-beam form as well. These columns appear every twenty-two feet beginning fi ve feet seven and one half inches from either end of the girder, leaving a short cantilever for the girder to support. The vertical load is then taken directly to individual footings under each of the columns. The footings are rather large to distribute the point load of each column over a wider area to ensure the stability of the house in a soil which is most likely subject to poor conditions because of its location on a flood plane.The way in which the structural system deals with the vertical roof loads is similar in nature to the way that the Farnsworth House carries internal vertical loads to the ground. The floor in the house, which is the initial element in the interior vertic al system, has the same beams and girders which carry the load of the floor to the columns and then to the ground, but the concrete slabs are dealt with in different ways. The floor is a built-up system, from the top down, of travertine floor tiles resti ng on top of a one and one half inch mortar bed that then rests on a light weight concrete fill that distributes the load to a structural concrete slab. This concrete slab then transfers the load to the I-beams as described earlier.
The distribution of vertical loads is much easier to visualize than that of lateral loads through this structure. First and foremost, the fact that this building has a welded steel frame accounts for a great deal of its lateral support. All connections within the frame are rigid and therefore have a great deal of resistance to any sort of side to side movements. The structural columns are also very deep into the large concrete footings, which reduces their effective buckling length. In addition to the initial frame resistance, all of the window frames are made of steel with the 1/4 inch plate glass windows mortared into place, adding shear strength in the horizontal plane. Final lateral resisting elements are the precast channel plank roof and floori ng systems. Each member, fitting tightly together, has a form not unlike the I-beams used in the frame, hence, having a high moment of inertia in the horizontal plane.
Conclusions
Again, at a simple glance, the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe is an elegent expression of basic construction which can be understood by anyone. The column, the beam and their interactions take loads to the ground. It is a principle by which all a rchitecture exists. Only when this simple expression is taken a step further, as Mies van der Rohe has done, does it become something to wonder about, to study and to admire.Bibliography
- Lohan, Dirk. Mies van der Rohe. The Farnsworth House. A.D.A. EDITA. Tokyo, 1976. xNA 1088.N65A4 1976.
- Ching, Francis D.K. Building Construction Illustrated (2nd edition). Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York. 1991.
Associated Buildings
Ben McRae and Terry Vance
ARCH 461/561 Spring 1995
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