Broken Glass

Chapter 1

I give you my Mies van der Rohe.

Mies van der Rohe, who slammed like a gray-suited iceberg, into Edith Farnsworth s life on that chilly Chicago night, had traveled a sinuous and improbable path from Aachen, Germany, to the cozy intimacy of a Gold Coast dinner party.

Maria Ludwig Michael Mies was born in 1886 and attended the Aachen Cathedral school, studying in the shadow of one of Europe s most gorgeous cathedrals, a Carolingian-Gothic masterpiece built on the orders of Charlemagne himself. His father ran a masonry business. Mies spent two years in a trade school, then worked as a bricklayer and, ultimately, as a draftsman, after sending his drawings to a Berlin architectural firm that proved eager to hire him. No matter how far Mies traveled, the family business left its stamp. For all his life Mies admired his brother Ewald, a master stonemason who took over the business from their father, and Mies frequently quoted his father, invoking the stonemason s obsession with detail. Why should we toil and sweat over artistic details at the top of a cathedral spire, one might ask, when literally no one can see the work up there? God can see it was the axiomatic response of the Aachen tradesmen. It was a lesson Mies never forgot. 

Though he would go on to be an academic leader and a successful teacher and mentor to several generations of architects, Mies like Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) never spent a second in an architecture school.

By age twenty-two, after working as an apprentice for the renowned furniture designer and architect Bruno Paul in Berlin, Mies landed a job as a draftsman in the office of Peter Behrens, one of the most progressive architects in Germany. (Both Le Corbusier and Bauhaus co-founder Walter Gropius cycled through the Behrens office during this time. Mies s tenure overlapped with that of Gropius. Le Corbusier later said he ran into [Mies] once in the

Alex Beam has written four nonfiction books, two of them New York Times Notable Books. Publishers Weekly named his most recent work, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, one of the best books of the year.

Beam s thorough and thoughtful account is both a knowing biography of an object the house and of its two principals, the well-documented Mies and the widely overlooked Farnsworth. The New York Times
 
Mies van der Rohe was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century, and Mr. Beam provides an exceptionally perceptive character study of this complex and often impenetrable figure. The Wall Street Journal
 
This engrossing page turner is a portrait of two complex people and a fascinating history of a modern architectural masterpiece. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

It is a compelling book perhaps the best narrative I have ever read about modern architecture. The Spectator

An amazing story, brilliantly told . . . Alex Beam quickens your interest in every detail. His sensitive insights into architecture are matched by his feeling for psychology and for all the hilarious, petty, surprising minutiae of human relationships. Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer Prize winning art critic and author of The Art of Rivalry

Alex Beam begins with a simple foundation a man, a woman, and a house out of which he constructs a nuanced biography of one of the twentieth century s most fascinating architects, a portrait of his brilliant and pioneering patron, and a dramatic tale of the impassioned battle over a work of art that consumed them both. Broken Glass is compelling from the first page as it chronicles, in delicious and sometimes hilarious detail, the mere mortals behind a Modern masterpiece. Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women

Just when we thought everything had been said . . . an impressively comprehensive and moving account of the flawed architect-client relationship (and probably more) that lead to the greatest architectural masterpiece of the twentieth century. Reinier de Graaf, architect and author of Four Walls and a Roof

The Farnsworth House occupies